In The News: Dating With An Age Gap or – ‘Cougars’ and ‘Toy-Boys’
By Susanne on Mar 4, 2010 in Dating Advice
Celia Walden’s article this morning in the Telegraph about the book ‘In Praise of Older Women’ (by Stephen Vizinczey) covers the topic of older women who choose to take on ‘toy-boys’ as their partners.
Walden writes about the stigma still attached to women who decide to bridge the age gap and rightly defends a woman’s right to date whoever she pleases.
Reading the article, the term ‘toy-boy’ (which Walden, ironically, uses) sticks out a mile as an old-fashioned and archaic way of referring to a more youthful partner – from a time when people possibly felt they had more right to judge the relationships of others.
Working with single people every day, I know very well that finding the right partner within a similar age group to your own can, for some people, be a close to impossible mission. And often this can be because the seeker expects far too much from their sought-after. Often, a fussy dater will attend a first-meeting with so many ridiculous expectations that they’ve already pretty much edged their date out of the picture, before even sitting down with them.
What I personally encourage is an open mind – and remind people that a date may well have a number of facets to their character that will be out of synch with what they expect of a partner. Equally, they won’t be their date’s idea of perfection. It’s simply the way life works. Yet, despite this, it’s not about lowering expectations – it’s about learning to compromise on what you expect – and that can take work.
If you’ve already decided that you’ll only date within a narrow three-year age range – imagine all the potential dates you’ve ruled out on the basis of an arbitrary figure! Simply by relaxing your views on this, you may well find your perfect match. Of course I’m not encouraging every woman over the age of 40 to suddenly start dating 18 year old boys but on the other hand, should you discredit a person who is a decade or so younger than you simply because of a number?
Ageism is slowly dying out in the real world and for the first time in history, we are living in a time where we can design our lives and relationships in any way we want. If you have reservations based on age, dump the stereotypes, be open minded, take a chance and rule ageism out of your world too – you might be pleasantly surprised! (In the meantime, I’m getting my hands on this book!)
