Older, single and the age difference

(Names have been changed to protect the wrinkly.)

I met Angie for lunch when she visited here recently. She is almost sixty, single, and lives on the west coast of Canada.

Angie wore a bandage that wrapped her forehead, and pressure-sleeves from forearm to armpit. This was her first outing after the latest round of surgery (arm lipo, forehead lift), which she hides from her son and friends by having it far from home, and affords by getting a deal from an old classmate's cosmetic-surgeon husband.

She said, "Men my age want women at least twenty years younger, and I have to compete."

I've been surprised at how many single men around my age are looking for quarter-century age differentials. "Forty looks good, and thirty-five very good", said Rick, sixty-six. My heart sank. I told him, "If I were single, that would make ninety-five year olds and up my dating pool!"

I used to be live-and-let-love about big age differences, and have seen felicitous unions with twenty or more year spreads. Among heterosexual couples I know, men have been the senior partner, but I took exercise classes with a woman who was happily married to a man twenty-eight years younger.

I always said it's the business of the consenting adults, and meant it. So why am I now perturbed by generation-hopping mate-shopping, which I see happening with men I actually know, not Julian Schnabel?

Because of the stats.

As Renee Fisher wrote on HuffPost, 
"At ages 60-64, there are close to 2.3 single women to every single man. By ages 70-74, the ratio is 4 to 1. The last actual sighting of a single man age 75 or above was made in July of 2008, and he was later proven to be an extraterrestrial. Thousands of older women expressed interest in dating him, but, after several unsuccessful dates on Match.com, he fled to his home planet."

I know a number of vibrant, single women over fifty-five who hope for a relationship, whether serious or casual-but-connected. Someone to travel with is the most often-expressed wish, but companionship for more quotidien activities would be fine too. Their yearning is kept on the down low, but if I catch them on a bad day, they are distressed. Some have plain given up.

Should they get something going, they are a bit surprised; a friend said of her new sweetheart, "And he actually wants to be with a woman his age!"

They read the young-men-want-older-women articles with bemusement; some have dated men much younger, but as Angie said, "Been there at forty with the Australian surfer dude, not doing that now." She wants plus/minus five or six years.

Rick met Kirsten, thirty-six, on a dating site. When when she returns from Scotland next month, they will go to a concert; in the meantime, they text. I caught the boast in his voice when he broadcast her age. I said, "And what does she want with you?" That was mean, and I apologized. But when he crowed, I didn't like it.

Men who date women younger than their daughters can encounter a disconnect between two life stages. Louis told me about his buddy, Michel, who is sixty-two: "His girlfriend is thirty-four and makes plans for them to hang with her friends at those restaurants that turn into clubs at 10:00, but by that time, he wants to be home, watching a movie."

I asked Louis, who is in his early sixties and single for twelve years, if he dates much younger women. "Never wanted to", he said. "We'd have so little in common." However, some men leverage their worldliness. Linda's sixty-eight year old ex, Paul, is with a woman thirty-three years younger. She says he "enjoys being a 'Professor Henry Higgins'".

And now I post the sentence I've deleted several times: And a terrific woman around his own age sits home alone. 

My sensible neighbour Lou said, "But aren't our friends better off without immature, superficial guys like that?"  The men I'm thinking of didn't seem that type. I'm wondering what's happened. Do women near their age remind them they're getting on?

Meanwhile, Rick's trying to figure out what Kirsten's texts really mean (irony's a bitch, Ricky), and Angie is waiting to get the stitches out before she flies home.