Lady/Lady
A strange thing has been happening since I became a single woman again in 2014. It’s not sooo strange now because it’s happened SO OFTEN but it still freaks me out when it comes around again.
What is it, you ask?
Well…I’ll tell you…
Getting hit on and attracting guys in their twenties.
OK…so maybe this isn’t the earth-shattering news you were expecting and maybe you don’t care at all about this (I hear it…’girl please…that happens to me aaallll the time! get over it…’) but the last time I was single, this was not the lay of the land. And, for the record, if that DOES happen to you all the time, feel free to leave your story in the comments (LOL…grabs popcorn and drags chair forward).
BALANDRA, LA PAZ, MEXICO
By the time my husband, Jermaine, suddenly passed away in 2014, I had been a very happily married woman for 8 ½ years. To say that dating in 2006 and earlier had been an absolute train wreck for me would be an understatement. I hated it so much that I once wrote a blurb comparing it to the only other thing I hated equally as much around that time: shoe shopping!
Don’t get mad or throw a shoe at me. It’s not that I don’t like shoes…it’s that the only ones I like are always the most exclusive, expensive and usually not-my-size ones in the store. Huge eye roll…hence the crisis.
I was dating guys in their 30s and 40s back then and the 20somethings couldn’t give a damn about me. I’d run into some winter/spring alliances sometimes when I would hit the jazz clubs around L.A. (I’m a music baby; raised by musicians) and there was that weird time in the late 90s when my twin 21-year-old male cousins each had 40something year old girlfriends, but it seemed more of an anomaly than a full-fledged thing. By 2014, however, I’d learn that it was a full-fledged thing. Thanks, JLo.
Whenever I get approached by younger guys, it’s always so freaking hysterical in retrospect that I’ve started calling it the ‘7 Stages of Shannon’. It goes something like this:
THE 7 STAGES OF SHANNON
1. SHOCKED
Like when somebody quietly comes up beside/behind you and whispers your name.
(“Yikes!!”)
2. UNNERVED
Like when you realize somebody you thought was kidding, wasn’t.
(“Umm…WTH?”)
3. SEARED
Like when somebody opens an oven you thought was on 250 and it’s really on BROIL.
(“Is this my imagination? WHY is it so hot in here all of a sudden??”)
4. EMBARRASSED
Like when you go to your family reunion and find out the person you’ve been vibing on all day is your cousin.
(“This is wrong. Just wrong… Right?” 👀)
5. FLATTERED
Like when you take off all your makeup and everyone tells you you look better.
(“Aww! Thank you for that. Thank you very much!”)
6. INTRIGUED
Like when it’s past ‘the moment’ for someone who’s not really into you to leave and they’re still there.
(“OK…what is it you really want?”)
7. WINNING
Like when you check all the angles in the mirror and everything is where it should be.
(“Huh! So this is what this feel-good feels like. I’m here for it!!”)
Winning… Great place to land. But winning what? The often-alluded-to, barely-concealed (seriously should be a fictional) battle between older women and younger women for – you guessed it! – THE championship title of ‘Most Desirable & Valuable of 20xx’, of course. Duh…lol!
“Old…young…somewhere in between…all us girls are in this together. And, if we truly saw that correctly, that fictional battle would, indeed, be fictional... ”
Side note: old…young…somewhere in between…all us girls are in this together. And, if we truly saw that correctly, that fictional battle would, indeed, be fictional. But that’s another topic for another post so I’ll just leave that there for now.
Last year, a song came out called ‘Old Age’ by Masego & SIR and it was an instant hit for me. I’m a sucker for a killer bass line and that one had me hooked from go. It also didn’t hurt that it was hitting on the younger man’s side of an exchange I was still periodically scratching my head to figure out. I’d had several encounters myself by this time but I was still wondering WHY?? What was the sudden appeal?
The song is worth a listen and the lyrics are definitely worth a read (hilarious!) but here’s the hook:
I need me a sugar momma
Old lady
Foxy mama
Sophisticated
Sugar mama
Old lady
Foxy mama
Sophisticated
Old age don't mean nothing to me
Wise man said age ain't nothing but a number…
Interesting…
Traditionally, we’ve seen older men with younger women depicted as far back as we can remember. It was the “right” way of things and no one really disputed it. It’s the reason my *first* was nearly a decade my senior and the reason I started dating ahead of my age bracket from then on. Older guy with a younger girl…teach her the ropes and break her in so that she fits the mold he’d envisioned. Textbook.
But it’s 2019 now. Times have changed and something else is afoot.
I was talking with a friend a few months back and we slipped onto this topic. We had been discussing her recent date with a guy she met on Match, OK Cupid, Plenty of Fish, EHarmony and all the rest of the apps. The online dating gods kept pairing her with him so she finally took a leap.
She, too, had grown up single and dating with the traditional attitudes I’d been fostered in, had tasted the fruit of the seemingly-forbidden younger vine, and sling-shotted back to the familiar in the form of a late 50something-year-old guy.
She’d gone out with this man several times and, try as she might, she couldn’t bring herself to get into him. On paper, he was great. And she knew it. So did he. But she was a vibrant woman still ascending into her prime (btw…those old beliefs that a woman HITS her prime in her mid-30s are horribly misleading. if truth be told, sliding into the midpoint of your third decade signals the START of hitting your prime, ladies, and, from what I hear, it goes on and on and on from there... You’re welcome 😉) and he…well he was a guy who knew he looked good on paper.
Here’s some excerpts from our conversation:
“…old men are REALLY OLD!!!”
“Who’s left?!?”
“Who doesn’t have Bluetooth??!!!”
“He’s perplexed as to why I don’t have Facebook.”
“’Didn’t you pre-plan for this date?’ No because he doesn’t have an IPhone. That’s pretty much a deal-breaker.”
After I picked myself up off the floor from laughing at her, I asked her to talk to her mom for us. What had women done in their time when this had happened? My own mother, who had passed away in 2016 at 66, had long told me stories of younger men hitting on her thinking she was 15-20 years younger than she was and younger women being jealous for the same reasons.
I hadn’t paid too much attention – caught up as I was in the world revolving around me as I navigated my twenties – and now I didn’t have the advantage of sitting down for more details. But my friend’s mom was close enough and, I thought, could be a great resource for understanding how to handle this going forward. Her next words stopped me cold:
“I can’t ask my mom about that! She has NO idea. This didn’t happen when she was my age. This is a cultural shift and we’re the first women in our society to deal with this on this scale.
We are the first generation of women to have enough money to make our own decisions and not have to depend on men for survival. There’s no blueprint for this.”
Well damn… So what was the solution?
One of the important, cornerstone truths of acknowledging and focusing on your spirit and the concept that we are spiritual beings having a human experience is that more and more external considerations start fading into the background while internal ones start making their way to the forefront. The elements that make us who we are and see on the outside begin melting away in the heat of increased vision and understanding.
All of a sudden, someone’s hair or eye color doesn’t matter as much as, say, their ability to tell the truth or be compassionate or whether they have the same values or beliefs as you. This is true for all the ‘ism’s’ as well – sexism, racism, ageism… They’re all based on external observations (gender, skin color, length of time on the planet) that have nothing to do with who or what that person is on the inside.
If it is, indeed, true that we are spiritual beings having a human experience (and I’ve been convinced that it is), then quantifying the eligibility or worth of a person – nee a potential love interest or partner – on the basis of age is as foolish as quantifying it on, say, how nice their clothes or cars are or how many followers they have or whatever. It’s just gotta go deeper than that.
For my part, I’m neither advocating for nor endorsing nor trashing this societal wave we’re seeing. Everyone’s doing their thing, which is their right, and that’s a good thing. But when I have searched my own spirit about this and talked to God about it for my own life, understanding and sanity, I always hear the same thing:
‘All things are available to you to do, try, taste, etc. All things may not be good to do, try, taste… But some things are.’
⚠️ the key ingredient here, as with all things, is WISDOM. Get some. Apply liberally.
In the meantime, all said, it can be a tricky dance. But if you can get past the stuff that doesn’t matter and look for real treasure hidden in unlikely places, you won’t care how old or young your candidate is. The only thing you’ll care about is the only thing I think is worth caring about. What’s inside.
Have fun out there!
Go find your GLOW!