Well, that was dispiriting

Other and I spent Memorial Day weekend in the Berkshires with a dear old friend who lost his wife, another dear old friend, about a year ago. On our way from the train station, we stopped by the cemetery to see her gravestone, and when we arrived at the house, we walked over to the little memorial garden he had created on their property. 

But it rained all weekend, so after that we mostly sat in the house eating and drinking too much. We had seen him only rarely and briefly during the pandemic, so there was lots to catch up on. After a year of mourning, he has just begun to date, using Match.com. Since Other and I have been together nearly 50 years, we were curious about what our friend had posted about himself and the kind of woman he was seeking. He’s short (5 ft. 7) so he put that in, and widowed, so he put that in—not just because it’s true but also because it’s less off-putting than identifying himself as divorced or even merely single—and he described his work. All good. 

But then we asked him what specifications he posted for women. He said he filtered out all women age 60 and older. He’s 71. Why wouldn’t you want to date someone your own age? I asked. “Women don’t age as well as men do,” he said matter-of-factly. “And you have to understand, when a man meets a woman, he thinks first about having sex with her, and after they’ve had sex he thinks about whether he wants to actually date her. It’s the reverse for women. A woman thinks first about whether she wants to date a guy, and then after she’s begun dating him about whether she wants to have sex with him.”

Our friend loved his wife, who was his age, and he misses her terribly.  He’s a sweet, smart, thoughtful guy. He probably thinks of himself as a feminist. So if this is the way he feels about women in general and older women in particular, well, it’s just depressing.


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