Dating at 16, you worried if the Clearasil was working. At 50, it is the Rogaine.
At 16, you anguished over meeting her parents. At 50, you worry about meeting her kids.
At 16, you missed hearing that great band because it was past your curfew. At 50, you missed it because it was past your bedtime.
Courtship at any age has its problems. Yet, at least at 50, if it doesn't work out, you don't get stuck buying bad prom pictures.
"Baby Boomers have been around the block," said Laurie Helgoe, clinical psychologist and author of Boomer's Guide to Dating (Again) (Alpha, 2004). "They often have gone through the loss of a relationship, so they don't always have stars in their eyes." "You know who you are. You have a certain level of comfort in the world. You've probably mastered a career or some role in life. Dating isn't completely new. You've been in relationships. You've had sex, hopefully."
Yet there you are, at 45 or 55, tossed by fate, circumstance or choice into a back-to-the-future realm you first encountered in your teens.
Get rid of the notion, Helgoe suggests, that being single at 50 brands one as a midlife shipwreck.
"One of the most damaging myths we carry around is the myth of arrival," said Helgoe," a second-wave boomer (43) who lives and works in Charleston, W.Va. "We think that when we are 50 we are supposed to have everything settled once and for all, which doesn't happen until we are dead."
Being unsettled at feeling unanchored at 45 or 50, she said, can cause us to carry a sense of urgency into re-entry in the dating world that can work against us.
"There is a tendency toward repetition," she said of some newly dating boomers. "As illogical as it may seem, sometimes comfortable is preferable to a potentially better outcome."
Being free to date yet shackled by resistance to new experiences outside old comfort zones is self-defeating.
Helgoe preaches that boomers need to remember what set them apart from other generations in the first place.
"I think the passages we have gone through have their own character," she said. "We broke down many structures and expanded the way the world thinks about many things. Going out and dating is a time when we may need to tear down some of our own structures."
The advice in Helgoe's book is both straightforward and often antithetical to other dating guides:
You don't have to listen to friends who counsel, in the immediate aftermath of divorce, that you need to take some time alone to get to know yourself again before dating. If you've been in a bad marriage, you've probably been alone. "And you may be sexually starved," Helgoe said.
Never say never. Guides that tell you never to date someone you work with or a person you meet in a bar limit your prospects and place arbitrary judgments on such circumstances.
The worst first-date conversation starters are launched with the words, "My ex ..." Ditto for recent surgeries, the pain of childbirth, your rehab experience, abortion, politics, religion and euthanasia.
Coffee shops can be boomerhood's equivalent of the discos they frequented in their salad years. "You are engaged in an activity," Helgoe said, "and yet still available to engage the people around you. And, you don't have to consume alcohol."
Leave the past in the past. "People can be so hypersensitive to a relationship that didn't work," Helgoe said, "that they sabotage a new relationship with old baggage."
Forget the myth of scarcity. According to the 2000 Census, 82 million men and women in the U.S. are unmarried.
"Get involved in the things that your passion is about. Whatever excites you is likely to put you in touch with people to whom you'll have an attraction. It is like the old career advice, 'Do what you love and the money will come,' only in dating it is 'Do what you love and the love will come.'"
Mike Harden is a columnist at the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch.
2004 Scripps Howard News Service. All Rights Reserved.
Source: Relationships & Love
