Personals Work!
AARP
the Magazine November - December 2003
Excerpts from Seeking Love
by Sarah Mahoney Photographs by Phillipe Chang
About
three years after my marriage ended, friends started nudging me.
"It's time," they said. "You need to get back out
there." Dating sounded about as appealing as being air-dropped into
Antarctica. And once I began, that's pretty much how it felt. The
dating game was hard enough when I was in my 20s-now I not only had a demanding
career, a mortgage, and stretch marks, I also had two young critics.
("You're wearing that?" my daughter commented as I left the house for
one of my first outings. "He seems nice," my son said after
meeting my date. "What is he-about 100?")
But being the lone single at dinner parties of my friends was getting to be tedious.
So I took the leap. I place a personal ad in an outdoorsy magazine, started with a few coffee dates, and attempted to rebuild my faith in the whole tortured process. Before long, one thing became clear: I realized that if I were patient, sooner or later I would get that chance at second love.
I also learned that the grown-up dating game has never been so interesting. There are more players than ever before: Higher divorce rates, longer life spans, and greater tendency to never marry are churning out more single Americans than at any other time in the country's history. Of the 97 million Americans who are 45 or older, almost 40 percent-36.2 million- are on the loose, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
We have more creative ways of finding each other, too. While the go-get-'em spirit of baby boomers had already created a bumper crop of dating services, personal-ad vehicles, and Club Med-inspired singles vacations by the mid-1980's, the more recent Internet explosion has made looking for love as routine as shopping for cheap airfares.
Being single later in life is becoming the norm. "The stigma of looking for someone is vanishing," says Susan Fox, founder of Personals Work, a Boston-based service that helps people create effective personal ads. "You get over your embarrassment when you look around and see how common it is."
People today are often as open about their adventures in dating as they are about buying books on Amazon.com. CEOs seem to have no qualms posting a picture of themselves in Bermuda shorts in an Internet personal ad-shareholders be damned. The New York Times regularly details dating success stories in its wedding announcements....