FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN:
dating and romance for the over-50s
As a young, single professional living in Melbourne in the 1980s, Leonie Cartan’s was a life rich in adventure and social engagements. Like lots of nurses of her generation, she would work for a year and then travel for a year. “I was really independent,” she says. But when she turned 30, she began to feel a niggling desire for something more. She was introduced to a tall, funny man named David who had a terrific voice and a great sense of humour, and suddenly the busy, career-minded single girl found herself falling rapidly and irretrievably in love. “I knew almost instantaneously it was quite different,” says Leonie, now 61. “He was my soulmate.”
The couple married and had two daughters. Leonie relished her new role as mother and wife, and she and David lived a full life together, raising their family, travelling and sailing. Then tragically, four years ago, Leonie’s soulmate died. She found herself in a position many people find themselves in. She had been part of a loving team, and now she was single.
“I realised afterwards that, in a way, I was prepared for him to die but I wasn’t prepared to live without him,” she says.
Leonie was an active and vivacious 57 year old when she was widowed and cast adrift in a fog of grief. She missed the little things that made up her marriage, like making the bed together. “Taking a walk to Bunnings,” she muses. “Not the big-ticket items, they’re all predictable. It was the small stuff I found really difficult.” She stopped wearing mascara because she could never predict when she might cry.
Four years on, talking about David still brings her to tears. “After your partner dies, it feels a bit like your life was a dream,” she says. “Like, wow, did that all even happen?” Yet, as the years passed, that same niggling feeling she’d had at 30 returned. She thought: “I’m still alive, what am I going to do? What does this look like?”
It’s a common scenario. Census data tells us that more and more women are living alone later in life. From 55 onward, the proportion of
More and more women are living alone later in life.
solo women rises sharply. Approximately one in five Australian women aged in their 60s lives alone and by the time they reach their 80s, it’s more than 40 per cent.
Many of these women want to re-partner, says the CEO of Relationships Australia NSW, Elisabeth Shaw, but they find it daunting and difficult. Economic factors, such as the need for women to bolster their income and superannuation after a long-term partnership, mean that women are generally less free to invest in dating after a divorce. The stereotype that women are generally more engaged in child rearing also holds true. And for a whole host of reasons, men find it easier to meet someone new. One of those, says Elizabeth, is that “men more commonly re-partner with younger women, so they have a broader range of people” to choose from.
Regardless of gender, the expectation that someone who is divorced or widowed in their 50s, 60s or 70s will re-partner is so much stronger than it was in previous generations, Elisabeth says, but it doesn’t get talked about as much as it should. “The discourse about dating is very youth focused, but we don’t realise that the whole idea of getting back into the relationship game, re-partnering, is actually pervasive.” And that silence can make the very idea of re-partnering more daunting.
Elisabeth insists that, whether widowed or divorced, wanting to find a partner is a perfectly natural and healthy impulse at any age. “It’s actually a basic human need so we shouldn’t seem surprised that people at all stages of life would want to consider re-partnering.” Of course, not everybody wants to re-partner.
But for those who do, she encourages them to approach it as an adventure.
Teacher Tracie Axton never expected to be dating again in her 50s, but after she and her husband divorced, she gradually began to forge a new future. As a 53-year-old mother of two adult children, she wasn’t quite sure where to start. “I think I lost my identity,” she says. The divorce was hard on Tracie’s mental health and lacerated her self-esteem. It was a brutal sort of rebirth – freeing but scary. “It was hard but I found I was becoming myself again,” she says.
Speaking to The Weekly at a cafe near her home in Sydney’s north, Tracie is warm and funny, attractive and an engaging conversationalist.
But she has responsibilities and a routine that doesn’t throw her into the path of a wide range of eligible potential partners. In that way, she was the quintessential second-time single woman Elisabeth describes.
“I go to work. I go home. I do have different activities that I do but I don’t have a huge group of friends,” Tracie says. “I’m at the stage in my life where I’d really like to meet someone to have a friendship with, to talk to, go for walks in the mountains.”
A friend suggested Tracie try online dating. She went on a few dates, and continues to meet men that way. Online dating provided her with a
non-threatening way of dipping her toe back in the dating pool, while also helping her to rebuild her confidence, she says. “I find online dating is a bit of security. It’s just something there that you can use … I’ve said to guys, ‘I’m not looking for a husband, I’m not looking for a father, I’m just looking for someone for me.’ It’s really helped my self-esteem.”
Websites that involve a little more investment in the form of surveys or questionnaires, (she mentions eharmony) tend to deliver better results, she says. Tracie would “absolutely” recommend online dating to other newly single people who are eager to test the waters.
Whether pursuing the online path or a more conventional approach, dating again is always daunting, Elisabeth says. “People can feel as nervous as they did the first time around, but for different reasons.
“Initially it’s the great unknown: Am I going to find someone special enough to commit to? The second time it can be: I don’t know how to go about this. For some people who haven’t been single for 10 or even 20 years, it’s amazing how social politics and sexual politics have changed. All that negotiation around wearing condoms, for example …There are people who have avoided all of that. People say to me, ‘I don’t know how to ask about someone’s sexual history, and do I ask them to have blood tests? How far are you meant to go?’ ”
The flip side of the sexual challenges is that dating again offers a chance for reinvention.
“There are plenty of women who have had mediocre sexual experiences and have just gone along with that,” Elisabeth says. “You’re now an experienced person. This is an opportunity to boldly say, how do I want to engage in a new experience and get more out of it?”
Research has found that women often become more permissive and more open to sexual ideas later in life, as well as less body-conscious. “It’s clear that everybody’s ageing and there’s not a lot you can do about that. For some people that can be liberating,” says Elisabeth.
Author Kerri Sackville, 50, has made a career out of navigating the dating jungle the second time around, and distilled her hard-won wisdom into a book, Out There: A Survival Guide for Dating in Midlife. “There is a huge amount of luck involved in finding love,” she writes.
“Married people will tell you it’s a numbers game. They say, you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs. It’s actually not,” she tells The Weekly. “There’s no point in going out with people who you don’t feel you’re really interested in meeting.”
Following her divorce and the realisation that “a man isn’t going to just fall through the ceiling,” she downloaded Tinder. “Initially it looks like this huge smorgasbord, but you realise it’s not,” she says. The first man she met was “extremely good-looking … He had no bio. I wouldn’t match with someone with no bio now but I guess it was just beginner’s luck,” she says. “Within a few messages, he said, ‘Do you want to have a drink’? … A few days later, I met him for a drink. I walked in and he looked just as good as his photos.”
They saw each other a few times, but ultimately decided to remain friends. “It was a fantastic first experience because it showed me that you can meet interesting, fun and attractive people online,” Kerri says.
She tries to approach dating with an open attitude but has also learnt to be more selective when it comes to who she lets into her life. “Along the way I’ve had way more bad experiences than good experiences, but I’ve had some terrific experiences. I’ve met some great people. I think the only rules are that you be yourself and you look after yourself.”
Lower your expectations, but not your standards, she advises. “Keep dates brief so you don’t lock into a date. Anyone can handle a 45-minute coffee. You don’t want to be a stuck with someone having an awful time over a long meal. My greatest
Dating again offers a chance for reinvention and liberation.
takeaway from this is that it’s far, far, far better being alone than in the wrong relationship, and being alone is far less scary than I thought it would be.”
Another piece of advice Kerri has for women marching into single life is to cultivate female friendships. “When I was first separated I had one single friend,” she says. “She and I had very different lifestyles and I had no single friends that I felt I could go out with to a movie or just to talk to about what I was going through.”
Elisabeth says this is the first piece of advice she gives to women who are reentering the dating world. “The first thing is not necessarily finding someone to be romantically related to – it’s setting up a social life for success. You need girlfriends who can go to places that are a bit different. It’s not necessarily that you want to go to bars, but you might. There’s nothing like a bunch of good women around you who are going through what you’re going through.”
Leonie knows lightning may not strike twice, but she is also the type of woman who firmly believes in making her own luck. As she tentatively filled out her online dating profile, she realised that a lot of the things she listed as her interests – such as sailing – were actually things David had liked, and not things she was naturally drawn to. “That was a real ah-ha moment,” Leonie says. “Maybe that isn’t who you are without him. There is something different when you’re without that other half.”
A few men messaged her online and she cautiously wrote back. “It was pleasant enough,” she says. “The object of the exercise was to see how I’d feel.” Her first meeting was with a divorced man who took her out to lunch. Afterwards she had a big meltdown, confronted by the idea that whoever she met was not going to be David. “It’s never going to be David,” she says. “I was really mad and sad that I even had to do it. That’s a common thread with women going through the process … For widows whose husbands have died, the notion of going back there and doing it again can be just horrific.”
Feeling upset and alone, she reached out to her online widows’ support group. She wrote a long post about not being ready and took herself to bed. When she awoke she had dozens of responses from all over the world. “It has nothing to do with being ready,” they told her. “It’s not a matter of time. The first time is always going to be like that, regardless.”
Leonie felt reassured, but allowed herself some time to recover from this first confronting experience. During the holidays, she ventured back into the dating realm again. Holidays are tough, she says. You feel like the rest of the world is doing something and you’re not. “I don’t like being sad,” she says. “I need to be proactive. I’m a planner and a doer. So I had another look at it. I know how much better life can be with someone. Meeting David was so totally unexpected and so totally great, why would I not think maybe it’s worth a look?”
Ultimately, Leonie has found that looking for love the second time around is easier because she doesn’t need the validation that’s often tied up with finding your life partner for the first time. She is looking forward to the idea of finding a different type of partnership. As a young woman, Leonie loved being a traditional wife and mother who worked part time, but now that she’s had some time on her own, she’s looking for something more shared.
“That’s the magic of being open to finding love again,” Elisabeth says. “It’s a chance to build something completely new.”
Leonie admits she doesn’t quite feel ready, and may never feel ready, but for now, it’s enough to know the possibility is there. “If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t matter and I consider myself really lucky to have known such a wonderful love,” she adds with a smile. “The fact that I had such a wonderful relationship makes it worth looking again.”