Learning to Date at 48: Inner Journey

I’ve debated with myself about whether or not to share my dating exploits in this blog. My original intention was to do so but then I started to have second thoughts for two reasons. First, this is the area of my life that I’ve historically felt the least confident in. Do I really want to air my vulnerabilities in this public forum? Secondly, I wouldn’t be sharing things about just myself, I’d be sharing them about others as well.

But I’ve decided that yes, I will start sharing my experiences (and the names of other parties will be changed and details left intentionally vague). I’m really passionate about helping others and this is such a big area in everyone’s life. And if I can share any learnings from my own journey maybe I can shine the light on the path for others dealing with the same issues and make their journey a bit lighter.

So, a bit of background for those that don’t know me. I was terribly shy in high school and my Freshman year in college (shocking I know to those that know me now) and barely talked to boys / men. I dated one boy from the age of 13 - 15 1/2 and had a bit of a long distance thing as well for a year in our early 20‘s (actually I almost married him). I’ve never fallen out of love with him but am very clear that we could never be together. We’re two different people.

I cured my shyness when I joined the Air National Guard in 1985 and went through basic training. Even so, since then I’ve spent most of my adult life alone with the exception of an 18 month relationship with one man in my early 30’s and a 5 month relationship with another a couple years later.

I “dated” others but nothing serious until I was 37.

I never wanted kids so never had the urge to settle down. But at 37 I decided it was time to start focusing on my social life and take the attention off of my work life.

As an aside, I’m working with a number of clients now in their late 30’s and it’s amazing to me that that seems to be the time that the focus in our lives start to shift. Either from career to personal or from kids to ourselves. But it’s certainly a time of transition.

But I digress. Within 2 months of making this decision I met my ex-husband. He’s a wonderful man and a great companion. But we only had one life goal in common, and that was to move to New Zealand. Once we did that I began to realise that we wanted very very different things out of life. We were also never madly, passionately in love. Either one of use. And I realised that I had compromised on what I really wanted in this area of my life.

So, after and 18 months of talking to him and looking for resolutions I decided to leave. We’ve not had a cross word in the 2 plus years we’ve been apart and have remained very good friends. He’s going on 2 years with another woman and seems quite happy, and I’m happy for him.

And me? I’ve started to date. Really date for the first time in my life.

Now, I’ve had a couple of internal obstacles on my dating journey. First, I believed that men were intimidated by me and second, I believed that men didn’t find me physically attractive. So, you can imagine what life was like with those two limiting beliefs.

I’ve always had this notion that I intimidate men. And it’s always been supported by my girlfriends. That’s what girls tell each other to comfort each other. But, at the risk of blowing my own horn, I’m very smart, successful and driven. Someone told me last night that I do more in a day than he does in a month. That’s not the first time I’ve heard that.

So I believed that men don’t want smart women, successful women because we intimidate their fragile male egos. But I’m realising that that’s not true at all. And I’ve realised this by going out on at least 40 first dates in the last 8 months and talking to smart, successful men.

The truth is that smart men love smart, feminine women. Masculine men love feminine women. Masculine men are repelled by women wearing masculine masks (and many women do to succeed in business). It’s like a magnet. Remember playing with magnets in school? Opposite polarities attract, same polarities repel. A woman in her masculine repels the masculinity in a man. It’s as simple as that. Bio physics at work.

And we get all tied up in knots as women wondering what we’re doing wrong.

Conversely, women wearing masculine masks often attract men wearing feminine ones. And many men do wear feminine masks...again society is training them to do so...look at the whole “metrosexual” movement. And then when she starts to relax into the relationship and into her own femininity she feels unsatisfied (as does he I imagine). The polarities shift and, unless he can move into his masculine, they start to repel each other again. All of this can get very confusing.

So part of my journey has been to reclaim my femininity. Not an easy thing to do, but way fun!

In my case, and I just realised this about a month ago, not only was I putting on masculine masks to succeed in business and wearing them all of the time (hence attracting men wearing feminine masks), I didn’t actually know how to be a feminine woman. You see I was basically raised by my Dad. And while I loved and adored my Dad and I’ll forever be thankful for everything he taught me, he couldn’t teach me to be a woman. He tried though, in his own way. I remember him really encouraging me to enter a beauty contest when I was 13 or 14. I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I’d heard at the time. Me? Now I realise that on some level he knew this was the one area that he couldn’t teach me and he was searching for an alternative. God bless Dad!

So about 3 1/2 years ago I really started to explore this area of my life. It’s been frustrating and confusing and a lot of fun! And my journey is not over, but I’ve come a long way!