DATING AFTER 35

(News-Herald, August 31) One of my summer projects was to look at the world of dating for Venangoland residents of A Certain Age.
I talked to some people I know and some people that I did not know. And I crunched some 2000 census statistics.
There are roughly 17,500 Venagolanders between the ages of 35 and 55; that’s roughly 31% of the population. Of the entire 15-and-over population, 4,300 are divorced, and 3,900 had a deceased spouse. It appears the talent pool for the over-35 crowd is shallow here.
I originally expected to separate male and female perspectives, but in fact there was no need—men and women tell pretty much the same story.
Common complaint: there’s no place to meet people. None of the over-35 crowd wanted to wade into the bar scene and “there’s only so much you can do walking around Wal-mart.” Traditional advice like “go to church” or “join a club” didn’t fly because of Venangoland’s slow turnover; “You meet the same people there that you ran into five years ago.” Some found churches less than welcoming to single people.
Hardly anybody had friends or family trying to “fix them up.” That may not mean anything. If they knew someone good at fixing them up, they would have been fixed up already and I wouldn’t have been talking to them. (Though, when you think about it, “fixed up” is an odd choice of phrase, suggesting as it does that the single person is somehow broken and in need of fixing.)
Nobody was very excited about on-line dating services. Results were described as everything from “geographically impaired” to “dirty rotten liars.” And the process struck some as unsatisfactory. It “takes away the initial non-verbal connection.”
People of A Certain Age appear to be somewhat more picky. I heard variations on “I won’t settle” several times. Now, sometimes that pickiness didn’t seem particularly extreme (“I want a man who has a job, no drug habit, and all his own teeth”). But if, for instance, you’re searching for someone with education or professional background, here’s some cheery statistics:
In all of Venangoland there are 5,000 people with a few college credits, 2,200 with associate degrees, and 5,000 who finished a bachelors degree or more (and those numbers include all the married folks).
Another large obstacle is life itself. Many over-35s are full- or part-time single parents. A small child trumps just about everything for some folks (and, really, would you want to date someone who said, “No problem; I’ll just dump the kid and pick you up at 7”?) Many are involved in various activities. Just setting up a simple interview with each of these folks was an adventure; in some cases I’m pretty sure it would be easier to get in to see my dentist. I know there’s a singles group that meets around here, but never at a time I could possibly go see what’s up.
Perhaps it gets easier if you become really dedicated to the process. I have a friend who made up his mind to find Ms. Right and went out with one or two different women a week. Of course, if you could pull off that schedule here, you might well get through every eligible bachelor or bachelorette in a year.
I thought I might collect some good horror stories about local dating. Nobody had any to share. I thought perhaps some patterns might emerge (as in “the problem with men/women around here is…”), but it didn’t happen. Much seems to come down to taste. “Too many women want to be rescued” rather than “These women were just too independent.” Choose “Guys these days are just too wimpy” or “These men were all just too controlling and pushy.”
These folks all shared one thing—the same thing that made writing this column difficult. My interview subjects were all absolutely clear that they did not want to be identifiable in the newspaper.
At first I was puzzled. What exactly did they not want people to know? That they’re single? I’m going to guess that cat is pretty much out of the bag.
Perhaps it’s that they’re looking. If you are single, but you’re not trying, you can still be cool about it (“I could find Ms./Mr. Right if I wanted to, but I’m fully devoted to my macramé now”). Or maybe it’s a matter of not looking too desperate.
So I guess what we’ve got here is a bunch of single folks of A Certain Age hoping to bump into one of the handful of eligible local matches in some sort of non-deliberate-looking manner. Macrame is probably easier, but stranger things have happened.