More on Middle-Aged Dating: Look But Don’t Touch, a Treatise on Hot Chicks After Fifty
Pixie (her on-screen name) and I have been emailing back and forth for a few days. We have struck up that kind of friendship-in-the-ether that girls do when they are sharing laughter at their situations. I’ve sent her articles to read, she comments and tells me that her daughter insisted that she try online dating.
Pixie and I have traded spots every so often in the top three most popular profiles on Fitness.com. Let’s be clear: popular doesn’t translate to dates. It only means how many folks have looked at our photos. It’s our occasional habit to sneak a peek at the competition. Pixie, for example, is a competitive bodybuilder.
DAMN GIRL. She’s 55.
This woman absolutely blows me away. Because I’m also a bodybuilder —not this good, no way— -I know what kind of work ethic she possesses. I’m not too shabby but I can’t compete with that. Nor should I. She’s in her own class, just as I am. Just as you are. We all are.
People like Pixie and I have a particular challenge, even on Fitness.com. That site is supposedly where those of us who are athletes in a broad range of sports can find workout partners and folks of like mind.
That’s the idea, anyway. Functionally it doesn’t tend to happen.
As it turns out, Pixie and I have also both gone onto Zoosk, and we had identical experiences. As Pixie described it, angry, bitter older men who don’t appreciate that she prefers to hang out with athletes lob verbal Molotov cocktails.
I am genuinely sorry that some people have ended up in bad shape. I’ve been there myself. However, that doesn’t make it all right for anyone to fire nasty darts at people who prefer to date other folks who are fit as well. And it’s not necessarily about being out of shape. It’s the bitter, angry part that is unfortunate.
It isn’t a capital crime that we don’t find them sexually attractive. Any more than it’s a capital crime that some men don’t find muscled women sexually attractive.
Let’s be very clear here. Your preferences may be that you like the Santa Clause look. For you, there’s a guy on F-S who dressed up as Santa and that’s his profile photo.
If that’s your thing, have at it. For people like Pixie, she likes fit. At the gym we’re surrounded by it. We respect the work ethic. The value of fitness for life. Despite what people are constantly accusing me of saying, I am not saying that someone has to be model-handsome or an Olympic athlete. It’s about being fit, healthy and fully in life. Because a base of fitness- whatever that may mean to you or me -gives us options.
Fitness for us is not something we do just to get a mate. For Pixie, she’s a competitor. For me, because of the kinds of adventures I do, it has saved my life. I like the results, but it’s not just about the muscles. The fitness has to be functional.
A lot of folks assume that we can find someone at the gym. Folks like us don’t spend hours running our mouths and flirting. We’re there to work. Put the earbuds in and sling iron. For us it’s a job, and we take it seriously. Talking gets in the way of working.
For people like Pixie and me, as well as the other over-forty and over-fifty plus women who bust our butts at the gym, men who have stopped caring for their bodies are simply not attractive as mates. Friends, of course. Not intimate company.
We would of course like the whole package: brains, humor, education, courtesy. The real deal as it were. The guys do, too. Hard to find for anyone at any age. Any gender. But try being 55 or 66. Or 70 or 80.
While there are certainly exceptions, I often find those who work on their overall fitness to also work on other aspects of the self. They understand that health is multifaceted, touching work, home, family, relationships, everything. When one area suffers, they all do. It’s a never ending job until we move on without our bodies. It is NOT, by any means, a lifelong obsessive love affair with the body beautiful. Fitness is whole-body, whole-self fitness. When we allow parts of us to get sloppy, the whole self pays the price.
An Important Aside:
Just for the sake of clarity, I am not saying, nor am I implying that obese/overweight people are sloppy. I am addressing when we let ourselves slide out of lack of attention and self care. Having been obese, I can guarantee you that being fat IS NOT by any means an indication that we don’t care or do all we can to take care of ourselves. We largely care too damned much, as anyone who reads Shannon Ashley can attest. Not everyone can beat the bulge battle. Nor should they be vilified for it, especially by those who have never been obese.
Nor am I saying or implying that you have to be a fitness model to be attractive. That’s not what this article is about, and if you read that into my words that is your interpretation only. I am addressing what particularly fit-after-fifty women are finding on the online dating scene ONLY.
I might argue rather strenuously that those of us who have walked, still walk the path of carrying a lot of extra weight have done one hell of a lot more ruminating about the self, our value- or lack thereof based on societal judgment- than the average Jill or Joe. It comes with the territory.
But I digress.
There are, of course, gym rats whose entire life is staring at their muscles. Male and female. Thanks, but no. Your muscles don’t make you a nice person, fun to be with, interesting, engaging. You can just as easily be a muscled asshole. I’ve met plenty.
Someone on Medium just lobbed one of those angry darts at me about this article because he took umbrage at it. I won’t quote him here because he’s not worth it. What’s sad is that people take this so personally. It’s not about you, never was about you and never will be about you.
It’s just a comment about women who have worked very hard to be fit late in life and are finding a partner of like mind a touch hard to find. What Pixie, and people like her — and me- find so disheartening is people’s need to be vicious. Fitness isn’t just at the gym. The mental and emotional and spiritual gymnastics are just as important.
Men want the same thing on these sites. I regularly read that a guy wants a fit woman, a partner who can keep up. Why is it perfectly all right for a man to say it but an aging female athlete in superb shape can’t?
As for the men on F-S, part of what is so confusing is the lack of understanding of what we women would like to see. As in — an entire face. Someone smiling, not scowling or flipping the bird at the camera. Or a man pretending to f**k a statue of a deer from behind. I’m not making this up. These are first impressions. They matter, in precisely the same way that men size up our photos in milliseconds.
Guys post the oddest photos. Like, a nose hair ECU.
Many of the folks on Fitness.com post shots of themselves doing all kinds of epic sports, but no head shots. Or, their faces are obscured by big ski goggles, hats and mufflers. Or, the shots are so gauzy there’s no way to see the merchandise, if you will.
Like this guy. Common photos are of some obscure person with dog and backpack. Can’t see the face. Can’t see anything. Am I dating a mountain? His lab? What are these guys thinking? Women like to see faces. Eyes. Expressions. We respond to the look on a face. That helps us feel safer.
My commenter got very nasty about this in particular. You don’t think that’s important? You haven’t been raped. Or sexually assaulted. You haven’t had your head bashed in by a Match.com liar claiming to be a preacher (happened to an old high school friend). These are dangerous times and sometimes ugly waters.
I realize that people want to put up brag shots. Lookit me ski. Lookit me skydive. Lookit me climb this wall. Look, I have those shots too, but plenty of others which are recent, up-to-date portraits. WYSIWYG.
Most of us- maybe not all but likely most- would like to see what the man’s face looks like.
Why? Because this: “Within 30 milliseconds of looking at a face, you can figure out the age, the sex, whether you know the person or not, whether the person is trustworthy, whether they’re competent, attractive, warm, caring — we can make categorizations on faces that fast,” she said. While both sexes are just as good at this kind of assessment, it’s been my experience and observation that men’s eyes tend to not linger on the face so much as the, shall we say, other merchandise.
We study the faces because we are looking for something we can trust. All too often, and let’s call it what it is, too many men are simply looking for someone to fuck. Not all. But many. Those are the ones who can’t be bothered to offer up personal information.
We’d like to read some kind of information about who the guy is, what he wants, what’s important to him. Family, kids, holidays, joy, adventure. Doesn’t matter. An obscure photo and “email me to find out more” indicate a lack of interest in putting in any effort to draw someone in. It looks lazy. The way women respond is that this is probably how the guy is going to treat them. Benign neglect. My nose hair shot should have been plenty enough.
Then I get emails regularly demanding more photos from people who have posted none at all. Let’s be fair, the scams work both ways. A lonely person makes an easy target for a scammer.
The other piece as that people famously make all kinds of overheated claims about their physical prowess. Guys that I’ve agreed to meet who claim to be fellow gym freaks clearly aren’t. They haven’t seen the gear shift in thirty years, at best. I hear men complain all the time that his happens to them. Dishonesty is rife.
As Pixie put it the other day, these guys “cannot possibly keep up with her.” Same things the guys say. Yet, we can’t?
People often cannot keep up because fit folks tend to be Energizer Bunnies. My BF last year, who was an athlete, complained about this constantly. But then he also gormed enormous amounts of sugar, which led to constant fatigue and irritation. Sugar will do that even if you are an athlete.
Note. I said fit. Not thin.
As a result, when I wanted to head out for this or that activity, he wanted to sleep or play on the computer. That really limits what you can do together. This is the hard part: if you are fit together, then you can play together far longer in life, navigate the rough spots that are guaranteed, and better manage whatever injuries or illnesses come your way. Or you can melt into the couch, and in all too many cases, end up seriously infirm way too soon.
We would love to have someone around for whom fitness is a fundamental life value. That partnership helps us stay well for life.
If you’re not, that’s not necessarily someone else’s fault (unless someone, for example, T-boned you while drunk). Sometimes it’s genetics. Although, my cousin Tommy, who is my age, was born with a very wicked soft bone disease which meant that he broke anything that barely grazed a table edge. Today he hits the gym with his wife six days a week. He chose not to let that stop him. He was supposed to be dead years ago. Tell him that while he slings iron at 66.
In many situations, it’s not our fault either. Whether the genetic lottery shat on our head, or something went terribly wrong along the way, the shape we end up in is just where we are. The last thing we need is to have someone launch shit bombs at us when we’re already dealing with a nasty hand.
What’s unfortunate is that anyone takes offense at a women’s (or anyone else’s) right to own her geography. Her achievements, no matter what they are. The question I would have to pose is precisely what is it about an accomplished, in-shape older woman that threatens someone so deeply he has to throw a verbal axe in her general direction, especially on line, where he can hide in obscurity? A true manly thing to do. (I got the same kind of attention when I was fat, so my guess is that these are equal opportunity shitheels)
Or, we just get weird:
One young man in Texas wrote me that he was “a vergen (sp), and would I please fix that for him?” He was in his late twenties. Another photo showed a very large bedridden man with an oxygen tube to his nose.
They are on a fitness site. And angry about being rejected.
Others post ECUs of their body parts, no faces. Or, they’re really attractive, a good catch….but they are of course already “caught”, and cheating on their wives. For which I hope fervently that they do get caught.
There’s a reality check when we date during middle age. Our bodies have changed. Some for the better, some for the worse. Not being able to acknowledge the latter and expecting a potential prospect to be attracted to you as though you were still in your twenties is a fool’s errand. Lots of folks do it. Then they get rejected, and turn ugly.
I’ve gotten way out of shape myself. Been obese. I know how frustrating, how heartbreaking that journey can be. But I did the work. That was 31 years ago. Not everybody can do that.
Two years ago in Spokane, I was in what was then the Muv gym. While I was doing some yoga on the big floor mat, a very large man came by me, on the floor, pushing a heavy sled. As he passed, sweating profusely, I realized he had no legs. This guy was amazing. An Army vet, he had been a physical therapist. Got out, got obese, got diabetes, lost his legs. Now, he was punching iron and putting his heart into getting his weight down, and getting strong. He was already working with other disabled vets who had lost limbs. Doing motivational work. That is MY kind of man. No legs or two legs or one leg. He has balls.
Just like my female veteran peeps who come back from the Middle East missing a limb, or two, or three. They hit the gym. They get strong. Because they understand that fitness of the body bleeds over to all the other aspects of who we are. They’ve got balls.
And there are baby-men who hate them for it. Who would mock them for being damaged goods after they had given up huge parts of themselves protecting those assholes’ freedom. Just as they mock obese people, people of color, other cultures, oh I could go on.
My whole point.
So a guy that I sent a flirt to the other day replied that I was too old. That’s his perfect right. If I want to be insulted, then that’s my problem, not his. I get rejected all the time. The way I see it, it’s like sales. It’s a numbers game. The right guy, if there is one in my future, will show up.
There is no call for me to call him a shitheel because he’s not interested. That makes me a shitheel.
Whether you work on your body, your mind, your emotions, your intellect, any combination of same or all of the above, it makes no difference. You’re going to rise. And in doing so, the numbers thin out the higher you go.
And as I found out the hardest possible way last year, hanging out with something pretty who is threatened by your other values ain’t worth it. Hold out for the real thing. In the meantime hang out with yourself, and keep up the good work.
