You and I Are Too Old to Believe in Perfect Partners Without a Crappy Past

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by FORMAT arw on Unsplash

Golden Bachelor is tarnished Fool’s Gold…and we’re surprised? Why?

It was bound to happen. After all that silly swooning over THAT GREAT GUY, someone was bound to spill the beans that the whitewashed, tear-worthy past wasn’t so tear-worthy. If anything, the Golden Bachelor that all those late-in-life lovelies were so eager to have, hold and glom onto for their own wasn’t so golden.

Apparently, he could be quite the heel, if this article is to be believed. The Hollywood Reporter seems to have been able to identify a few feminine folks who have a different tale to tell about our tall handsome boy, and it ain’t pretty.

But then, do we really truly honestly expect such perfection at seventy-plus?

Is there any one of us who has made it to fifty, sixty, seventy without leaving a trail of tears, damage, misdeeds and cringe-worthy behaviors in our past, no matter how distant? My hand is way up here. Of course I did.

So first, shame on any of us for believing that a person gets to this age without their own personal sewage. While it’s fair to say some have more than others, nobody ages without showing up less than perfect.

Second, shame on any of us for wanting to believe it, for that sets us up for terrible disappointment as well as terribly unfair expectations of others.

You and I are Way Too Old to want someone who hasn’t made a slew of mistakes..

…as long as they’ve chosen to learn from them.

Back to Mr. Golden Bachelor.

I’m not feeling gleeful that some reporter found dirty laundry. What is so disappointing is that we can’t embrace the inevitable yin/yang, the shadow side, the parts of us which lead us to better learning.

That of course implies that we can’t accept it in ourselves. Or worse, we want said perfect person to come save us.

Online dating scams continue to be exceedingly successful because some part of us wants to believe that Mr or Ms. Perfect exists. Loneliness is a huge motivator. So is wanting so badly to believe, as we certainly should, that great sex and deep intimacy don’t wither and die at fifty.

Are we silly enough- and the answer is clearly yes- that we are willing to just buy the bullshit wholesale and believe all of it without checking important sources, as The Hollywood Reporter did?

This People article was a good example of the sales pitch.

I was a client as well as a student of online dating for the better part of twenty years. The single most common online scam aimed at me was a contrived profile from a “friend of a handsome lonely man who just lost his wife to colon cancer and was looking over my shoulder and fell in love with your photo, and asked me to contact you for him.”

That reeks of fake, but it sure worked. The gorgeous-handsome-lonely- widower. Mr. Golden is precisely that. While some of it is true, it so closely parallels the scams that it just didn’t sit well with me.

This New York Times article discusses how that’s still working.

Look. You could argue that Mr. Golden Boy’s real background is nobody’s beeswax.

Yeah, it is, the moment you go famous.

The moment you present your Full Monty and expect millions of folks to buy your Mr. Perfect story hook, line and sinker.

These days, all bets are off. We all have dirty underwear somewhere and we’d prefer to keep that out of sight. But decide to be on TV and lifted up as THAT WONDERFUL MAN/WOMAN?

If you’ve been a stinker, and we all have, folks vying to have and hold you for the rest of their lives have a right to know about it. At least those parts which have significant implications for how you treat the people you claim to care about.

Especially when a TV show is putting you out there effectively as Great Goods.

You and I are Way Too Old to believe that Prince or Princess Charming- the sanitized Disney version- exists.

I suspect even the lovely Tom Hanks has had his fair share of asshole sideshows, pecadilloes and miscreant moments. It’s part of life, learning and living in full, making such mistakes. It’s called character-building.

The bigger mistake is being disingenuous about it. Or lying outright.

Here’s another story about how The Golden Bachelor season ended, with the hurt feelings and losses experienced by the other gorgeous older women who had the hots for our Golden Boy.

My TV isn’t even hooked up for cable, so blissfully I missed most of this. But I couldn’t avoid the stories. The NPR program on 1A which featured all kinds of comments from other older women who yearned for Mr. Wonderful. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

Any of us who has dated after fifty, and I dated well into my sixties until I just bloody well gave up the online dating ghost, can attest to the idiotic expectations that so many of us have. Most have no basis in reality.

In

A Retired Hot Girl

Dr. Cary Yazeed discusses what it’s like to have a date who is tall enough to comment on the fact that some of her hair is grey. It wasn’t a compliment.

Swift intake of breath here.

If a few grey hairs are enough to put a guy off, well. Don’t get us started about shiny bald heads, male baby bellies out to here, morning breath and ear and nose hair, okay guys? All the illnesses that guys develop for lack of self-care (us, too, let’s be fair) that they want a new mate to care-take? effectively for free?

Most of us have already raised kids, gents, and we don’t want to inherit more if we are single at this point. Neither do you. So please.

As for looks?

I’ve got one older acquaintance who has an entire outdoor rug growing out of his nostrils and an equally bushy set in each ear. Starlings are nesting in them.

He was brutally critical of my increasingly wrinkly neck.

Really now.

I could go on and on, and won’t, about late-in-life dating, but for a couple of key points.

First, recent research indicated two interesting facts, and I believe they’re relevant:

-That some 85% of us lie on our resumes, usually about something pretty important. Please roll out George Santos as Exhibit #1. Oh, and Trump. Okay, let’s not. Next.

-That some 81% of us lie on our dating profiles. Often about things which are immediately verifiable: height, weight, age, etc. Work history, income, marital status. You name the claim, people fake the facts.

If I had a plug nickel for every man who clearly lied on his profile I’d be rich as Croesus.

Worse, they assumed that I had lied on mine. As if that makes it all okey-dokey.

Really now.

It hadn’t. If anything, that made things worse. All the photos were accurate, all the stories were accurate, the photos weren’t photo-shopped and everything I claimed could easily be verified.

Remarkably, but for one person, that got me in worse trouble. When the gents-in-question found out that yes, indeedy, I was an adventure athlete in my sixties and yes, indeedy, the words “athletic and toned” were not tongue-in-cheek, that was the end of that.

Once again:

It’s called character. Proof of life.

And no woman anywhere any time EVER owes a man her “number.” (In case you missed that one, it’s the number of men she’s slept with.) I’ve been single my entire adult life but for four years. Been sexually active since seventeen. Other than when it was forced on me, I like men and I heartily enjoy sex.

You do the damned numbers.

It’s utterly and completely out of integrity for anyone to ask anyone else such a thing. Especially past fifty.

It’s only in a ridiculously anal, patriarchal and Puritan society that we would even ask such a ridiculous thing.

How we treated people, what we learned from our mistakes, how committed we are to growing as we age, all that makes us damned interesting. The wad of bad news that is part of all of our fiber is part and parcel of emotional maturity.

That’s the price we pay to grow up, develop empathy, compassion, a strong backbone and learn to be present and fully accountable in a difficult world.

Who we become as a result of the mistakes, wounds, scars, losses and human idiocy is precisely what makes us good company, again, as long as we are committed to growing from all of those experiences.

Being dishonest about who we are sets everything up to fail.

Integrity. Explore it here.

Integrity matters. If integrity doesn’t matter for the guy, then I’m not interested.

Integrity seems to be in very low supply lately. Mr. Golden Bachelor, and all the folks who did the carefully-selected vetting and editing of his background to make him look perfect, are also out of integrity.

I’m sure all the women were subjected to the same careful editing.

Put it this way: if we are going to believe that late-in-life love is available, and it most certainly is, then making a fake fairy tale out of a guy who most definitely isn’t Mr. Perfect (nobody is, please) sets us all up for inevitable failure.

Those of us nursed on the Disney teat will continue to expect the impossible, and grey divorce rates will continue to skyrocket. For the sake of discussion, here’s what gets my goat.

Part of what troubled me about the program were the comments that everyday viewers shared about the female contestants. They were furious that the expectation was that they had to look like a well-aged Linda Evans, ever in a glittery gown, soft-focused and perfectly-proportioned, beautiful and svelte beyond reason even around seventy.

Frankly, that just underscores a lot of messaging about what women have to do to get the prize, rather than be the prize.

You could say precisely the same thing about the men. Gary the Golden Guy was handsome, slim, pretty much in shape and in all ways, what most guys his age probably aren’t.

But his resume wasn’t in order.

For a great many of us of all shapes, sizes, gender preferences and the like, I’ll bet we’d trade an uber-handsome, well-off cad for a slightly pudgier version of someone we could trust. Someone who was fearless about a mastectomy scar, or had no qualms about a muffin top or any of the other inevitabilities of a long life and well-used body.

I’ll bet we would also trade off a number of otherwise perfect features for trust, authenticity and the grace of someone who has also seen the worst of life. Someone who has the heart, kindness and innate wisdom to appreciate character, humor, resilience and the kind of warmth that comes from loss, failure and life’s flops.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but my guess is that while Mr. Golden Gary was fun to watch, whatever happens next might not be. He and his catch are in a hurry to marry, which is a mistake for any kind of coupling, no matter how old we are.

I suspect the lucky bride-to-be was just as careful about editing her life as was Mr GB so that she could win the competition. Because make no bones about it, this was a zero-sum game.

What happens if it comes out the one of them has herpes? Or that there are undisclosed secrets that could shatter a marriage like a seriously toxic fart?

We cannot force love or authenticity or much of anything without increasing the likelihood of failure if not outright disaster.

Maturity allows us the courage to disclose what needs saying. If the potential partner can’t handle it, they aren’t the right partner.

For what it’s worth, part of the great grace of getting older is getting wiser. Age conveys age, wisdom is earned. I didn’t get the impression that the program The Golden Bachelor was particularly wise.

Instead the program preyed on too many hopes and dreams which, for those of the rest of us who have learned a thing or two, are best viewed through slightly more thoughtful, and often thicker, lenses.

There’s always a chance for late-in-life love. I no longer believe in online dating but I most definitely believe that I might discover terrific company while hiking, biking, walking, riding, all the things I love to do.

The digital age of dating is slowly dying out.

Good bloody riddance.

Let’s stop swiping left while looking for what doesn’t exist: Mr. or Ms. Perfect.

Doing so swipes our chance to meet someone who really is great company at a time when we really do need it.

Here’s to the casual meet-cute (maybe) or meet-clumsy (me, probably) that leads to a more realistic and lasting connection devoid of patently unfair and disastrous expectations.

In other words, Mr. or Ms. Perfect for us, right now, as we really and truly are.

Let’s play.

Photo by Marisa Howenstine on Unsplash

Thanks for spending time with me today, time none of us gets back, and time which I sincerely hope was thoughtful and thought-provoking. If this serves you please kindly consider

And if someone you know is moaning about being alone, let’s encourge getting out there and getting involved. If this article might add value to others please also consider

Either way, be joyful and grateful.