50, Single & Not Really Feeling the Mingle: Why Dying Alone Doesn't Sound So Bad

Time was, the thought of being single forever and ever was the saddest thing I could imagine. Could there be anything worse? Not being part of a couple for an extended length of time was the stuff of cold, lonely spinster nightmares.

Turns out, there is something worse, my friends. It's called dating in your fifties.

Also, dating in your late thirties and basically the majority of your forties.

Hey, I know! Some of you have absolutely ROCKED the post-divorce dating thing and are living proof that love truly is sweeter the second (or third) time around. Some of my oldest and bestest friends are happily coupled up after surviving disastrous and not so disastrous splits. They are truly happy, and I am truly happy for them.

Also, kind of envious.

Because it's a jungle out here, folks. And not a fun Lisa Frank jungle full of neon parrots and mellow tigers. No, today's dating jungle is dark and dank and overflowing with ghosting snakes, married cheetahs (lol see what I did there?), dick-pic wielding sloths and commitment-phobic dung beetles.

I was starting to wonder if it was just me and my anxiety-tinged STAY AWAY vibes I seem to give off combined with my problematic and conflagrant dumpster taste in men, but in my little private hausfrau facebook group, we share our tales from the trenches and guess what? It's not just me. It's a lot of us. It's normal, everyday women who are attractive, kind, employed, smart, funny...and so completely over the dating game.

We share our experiences in there, complete with screenshots and we collectively wonder, WHAT THE EVERLOVING F*CK. WTF is wrong with these men? And please, people, don't @ me with the #notallmen. No, that's not "no tall men", it's "not all men" because guess what? It might not be all of them but sister, it's a scary number of them.

When I was first let loose out onto the singles prairie, I did what you're supposed to do. I took some selfies, wrote a poignant yet hilarious profile and began online dating. I dated quite a bit, in the beginning. Yes, almost all of those dates are chronicled here and they are pretty funny in my biased opinion. I met lots of men. Dating? HA. It wasn't so bad! I even met a couple of them organically (lol no, not at Whole Foods) and those were also easy breezy. Girl meets guy, numbers are exchanged, texting/calling happens, then the dating begins. It was simple, really. Because THAT'S HOW DATING SHOULD BE RIGHT?

After a while, I decided to put the search for true love on hold in order to be more present for my kids. This is what worked for me, I'm not advocating it for anyone else nor am I saying that if you choose to jump headlong into the search for love that you aren't an attentive parent. It's quite possible to focus on yourself AND your kids. I just had a few more fires to put out than most and decided my energies were best spent doing that vs getting my freak on. "i can wait. the men can wait. what difference will a few years make anyway?"

Oh Jenny. Oh you sweet summer child/woman.

The difference is insane. I feel like Sleeping Beauty (okay Sleeping "Looks Good for Her Age").

I woke up and learned that not only is Prince Charming NOT so charming, chances are real good that he's deep into playing games, playing the field and playing dumb.

What's that? Don't knock it til ya try it? Honey. I did try. Let me regale you with the brief tale of Blizzard 2018...

It was a dark and stormy night. Actually it was a bright and stormy day. It was December 1st, a Saturday, and a big ol' Minnesota blizzard was descending, fast. I took Walter out for a walk and when we left the house it was unseasonably warm and the skies were clear. An hour or so later, as we rounded the corner towards home, we were both coated in wet snow.

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with midwestern blizzard mentality, it goes something like this: oh man all the weather people are saying it's gonna be a doozy. But they always say that. Let's wait and see. We'd been warned but it was really nice out, ya know?

Once it really sinks in that the meteorologists did indeed nail it, the blizzard panic sets in. Most people's blizzard panic is along the lines of "okay we need bread and milk and coffee" but for me it's always "okay I guess I need wine".

So I set out to get some wine. Blizzard Wine. Listen, I don't even really like wine all that much anymore. It gives me a headache and also, wine-drunk is THE worst kind of drunk there is, at least for me. Wine turns me into a melancholy-tinged Miss Havisham, only instead of wandering around a decaying mansion in a moldering wedding dress, I stumble through our rental home in worn pajama pants and a giant, pilly Netflix sweater.

Of course wine-drunk Jenny is also the one who decides that it's time to start dating THAT VERY SECOND. It's how I "accidentally" signed up for the Gold Membership on Tinder a couple of years ago (guess what you can absolutely cancel the next morning and they won't charge you)(fist-hand knowledge, LOL). It's also how I found myself navigating Bumble on a Saturday night in December, a box of Bota's finest rose' next to me and a snowstorm howling like a banshee outside.

I guess I chose Bumble because it's supposed to be the women-empowering-women app. Women call the shots, we get to decide if and when a conversation is initiated. Of course there are a few things that would not make sense to me even if I wasn't two goblets of wine deep, like if someone "hearts" your profile, and they also had some weird time limit after swiping left (or right my god who can keep all of this straight) which is not all that different from that horrible game where you had to get all those plastic pieces arranged before time ran out.

this is that game and I have a stomach ache just looking at it

Ugh, the Blizzard story is not as brief as I promised.

Anyhoo. Where was I? Ah yes. Snowbound and wine drunk, squinting at the screen on my phone. Super dignified as usual.

Surprise, surprise. It was a shitshow. My profile was so cringey I took a screenshot of it because even in my vino-impaired state I knew it would be the most effective deterrent available if I ever found myself attempting to mate online again. Don't you love when Drunk You looks out for Sober You? Sometimes it's cleaning the kitchen, sometimes it's screenshotting the dumbassery.

Luckily only one poor soul endured the Jenny Experience that night. I mean, it was late and there was a blizzard so it could have been so much worse. The next couple of days, though? Oh honey.

I lasted less than a week on Bumble.

It's all the same. I know, yes, believe me I KNOW. I know there are decent humans out there, even on the apps! But for the love of cheese- there's so much bleah, too. And not new, fresh, somewhat intriguing bleah...nope. It was pics of guys semi-naked in beds, in bathroom mirrors and restaurant booths. It was the ones who stated, in their profiles, that they were married and just looking for quickies (yeah, high fives for being upfront and honest but come on). It was guttural, semi-literate caveman messages followed by either a request for a pic of my boobs or, lucky me, a picture of a penis.

Because this is me, one of the first faces I saw on there was that of the couch-surfing Lothario I'd taken a chance on a few summers ago. Panic set in. oh shit, if I can see him, can he see me?? GAH. Hard pass. Like, James-Franco-in-127 hours hard pass.

I saw a guy who is one of those local NPR kind of quasi-celebrities. Of course I had swiped whichever way means "interested" and so we had a little conversation wherein I told him I'd followed him on twitter for ages. Which was followed by me deleting the ever loving shit out of my twitter profile.

The conversations were stilted and forced and goddammit, men, stop with the pretending, okay? Stop acting like you're interested in getting to know someone when all you really want to do is fuck them, please? Life would be so much easier if we all just put it out there, you know?

Maybe some of us do just want to find someone to screw. In fact, I know some of us women want precisely that kind of deal. That's literally all I've wanted out of "dates" for the past several years.

And I get that things have changed. This is how it is, according to my kids and coworkers who are single and in their twenties. Some of them will gently remind me that there are age-specific sites/apps, for geriatric hopefuls and middle-aged love seekers. I mean, isn't there a dating app for everyone now? Farmers, furries, the adult-onsie crowd? You got it.

But what about those of us who are wedged solidly in between the boomers and the millennials? And even more specifically, those of us who have zero interest in these modern day reindeer games, the ones where it's okay to just stop communicating, boom, in the middle of a text/message conversation? The ones where it's the norm for a 50 year old dude to be casting his net downwards in hopes of snagging a 20 or 30 year old woman but a 50 year old woman is lucky to get a hello from a man her own age?

Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's all of those Meg Ryan movies I absorbed in the 80's and 90's, the movies where a quirky gal who wears turtleneck sweaters and loves to read stumbles across her sweet soulmate while listening to the radio or in an AOL over-30's chat room (this is the point in the post where I for real wonder if I need to translate this shit for the youngsters).

I realize this post is dragging the menfolk a little. In my defense, I have exactly zero experience dating women so for all I know there is a female equivalent to these guys. Do women do this, too? Are there guys out there somewhere, commiserating over beers at happy hour with tales of woe about the ladies who won't respond after coming on strong or who pepper every conversation with stupid lines like "omg u are srsly so handsome i bet you dont get lonly" or "I can be at your front door in under an hour" 😱

Someone in that facebook group posted about a guy she'd encountered on Tinder. He seemed okay, except for the fact that he'd been single for 12 years. Someone commented, "I bet there's a reason he's been single that long" and that froze me.

Because I've been single that long. Yeah yeah, there have been a couple semi-serious relationships and a few not-so-serious, but I have been single since December of 2006. Like, kids who were born then are now in middle school. I have friends who have been divorced, remarried and divorced again in that time and here I sit, repulsed at the thought of submerging myself into the murky dating pool once more but also, content with 99% of my life right now.

It's that 1% that trips me up. That, and the occasional wine-infused blizzard.