What it’s like to be ‘out there’ now
Sir John Hurt says playing the field was more fun in the past. Two singles respond
Life (and love), said Sir John Hurt in an interview this week, “was more fun” in the old days, in part because men could make passes at women without being accused of harassment. “I don’t know how you ever make a date,” the actor, who has been married four times, told the
Radio Times. “On the internet? Oh my God, I’d be sunk.”
Was he making a fair point about the difficulty of modern romance in a politically correct cyber age? Or giving voice to an outmoded way of thinking with no place in the 21st century? We asked two older daters – one male, one female – to share their thoughts.
At the age of 66, author and hotelier Roger Bruton has found modern dating an eyebrow-raising enterprise
Like many other men my age, I imagine, I had a wry smile when I read Sir John Hurt’s comments this week. With three marriages behind me, I’ve dated throughout the decades, but returning to the game in my mid-sixties has certainly proved an eye opener. Of course, dating didn’t feel like much of an issue when I was a young man. Back in the Swinging Sixties, you met girls in bars and at dances and they expected you to approach them. In fact, they were offended if you didn’t.
I played the field a bit and, at 20, married a local girl – too young, I now realise, and we divorced 14 years later, leaving me back on the dating scene in the mid-Eighties with my 40th birthday on the horizon.
With the dawn of the internet still a few years away, romances were forged through work or in the pub. Asking a woman for a drink was the normal currency of the time and no one objected to you chancing your arm, as long as you were gentlemanly.
Still, I can’t say my relationships were a roaring success: in fact, I went from one disaster to the next. Such as one air stewardess whose confused body clock often meant I found her drinking vodka at 7am. Or the Scottish girl I lived with for a couple of years, only to find she also had another boyfriend.
I capped it all off with a textbook mid-life crisis union to a woman 18 years my junior, marrying her in a costly Bahamas ceremony at a place which – symbolically, I like to think – was destroyed by a hurricane a year later. Our marriage lasted only another year itself, leaving me single once more at the age of 50.
The internet still hadn’t really happened in earnest, but already the scene had changed: whenever I went to a bar, everyone seemed to be 20 years younger, and as I’d already had my fingers burned on that one it seemed wise to steer well clear. Meanwhile, married friends were forever – and unsuccessfully – trying to pair me off with any remaining singletons they knew.
I despaired of ever finding lasting love. Then, happily, I encountered my beloved third wife, Gillian, 43, by chance when our eyes met across a station platform. She was the end of the rainbow, and when we married in 2001 I expected it to be for ever.
The cruel mistress that is cancer had other plans, and I lost her in 2011. For months I was too grief-stricken to even think about venturing on to the dating scene, but a year later, when I finally plucked up courage, I found it had changed yet again, and this time beyond recognition. These days, I realised, everyone is online, and while I’m no stranger to the internet – I used to work in computers – I found trying to start a relationship on it a most curious affair.
It just seemed horribly cringeworthy – the self-conscious exchange of messages, followed by the tentative plans to meet up, half of which never came to anything. Whenever I did go on a date, the women I met didn’t quite live up to expectations – not least because most of them spent half the time on their smartphones. Still, I expect they were equally unimpressed with me.
In my view, you can’t beat meeting someone in real life first, although even that has its issues these days. Women seem more on their guard, and it’s difficult to talk to them without getting someone’s back up. You find yourself wondering whether it’s OK even to tell them you like their dress.
Thankfully, I have other fish to fry – I’ve travelled the world and written a book about it.
Don’t get me wrong, though: I’m not ready for romantic retirement yet. I’m now dating a French lady I met through an English language forum, who took a shine to me when she subsequently saw me at a party dancing on a bar dressed in a Roman toga. Vive la France!
Jane Gordon, now single following her divorce, says many men over 50 have failed to accept times have changed
Who could doubt that life was “more fun” for Sir John Hurt back in the “old days”, when PC stood for Police Constable, no one worried about the dangers of alcohol, and men were free to make passes at young women without worrying about being slapped round the face – let alone facing sexual harassment charges?
I would wager that Sir John himself was probably “more fun” back in the wild years when he was still Mr Hurt and an actor with the rare talent to make me – and women the world over – fall in love with the Elephant Man.
I still love Sir John and, as I am now single for the first time since I was 21, would probably jump at the chance of becoming his fifth wife – but for the fact that he is so happy with his fourth.
But I have to take issue with his recent lament that political correctness means he doesn’t “know how you even make a date” any longer.
Because the way women were treated in the “old days” had such an impact on me that I avoided dating at the time – marrying my first boyfriend – and why the most terrifying thing about being single these days is the idea of having to date now.
Never mind cyber-flashing, just getting to work as a lowly secretary in the pre-CCTV days of the midSeventies often involved a surprise sighting of naked male genitals. The workplace was worse – take the day I wore a zip-up jump suit (it was the bra-less late Seventies) that my boss unzipped in a crowded office.
Such behaviour for the current generation of men is unthinkable. But sadly, Sir John’s generation and quite a lot of men of 50 and over fail to accept that times have changed.
In my first year of being single quite a few of my married friends have invited me to dinner and seated me next to the only single man they know. The only one of them to ask me on a “date” had been instantly engaging, very funny and with a little dentistry and a diet might have been really attractive – if he hadn’t begun an under-the-table attempt to slip his left hand up my right thigh.
The rest of the men I have been placed next to were clearly as confused about finding themselves single as me – both of us too frightened to start a conversation. I still view online dating as the last resort for the desperate (or predatory), but I did volunteer to go on a “senior singles” holiday for a
Telegraph assignment. What a salutary experience that was – from the 60:40 female to male ratio to the tearful tales of one of the younger women (49) who had spent her entire adult life searching (under rocks, online and in sleazy singles bars) for – but never finding – Mr Right.
Older single men, she told me, are only interested in women at least 15 years their junior. One drunken evening she said she had decided she would just have to “settle for Mr Approximate – I mean a man approximately 20 to 30 years older. But I draw the line at 80.”
I haven’t given up the idea that “one day my prince will come” but I won’t go looking for him, he’s got to come and find me. And so, in one way, Sir John is right: the kind of man I want would be sensitive enough to politely ask, before he made a pass.