August 25, 2024
And then I have second thoughts about that …
So, the affair is long, long over, I’ll never see this guy again, and it’s time to move on.
However …
At my age, there are a TON of drawbacks to even dating at all. Here, in no particular order:
1.) My weight and physical appearance.
Or, Ugly Women Have A Hard Time Dating.
I am an old fat woman. At age 56, I’m lucky my face is at least somewhat youthful, I don’t have much gray hair, and I’m handy with my hair and makeup and have a nice wardrobe. But I’m over a hundred pounds overweight, and the sad thing is that even sixty pounds ago, when I was on Udate looking for the first guy I ever had sex with, the first thing I always heard was, “You need to lose weight.”
Sadly, males will actually USE fat women as target practice while they wait for someone thinner and prettier. I encountered, yes, some 70-year-old GEEZER while researching on iliasm.org with ED so bad he needs a cocktail of THREE drugs just to get an erection. And it was, “All the women my age are fat.” So, he was just practicing on the fat ones while he tried to find someone thin … WITH the support of other men on the site!!!
These were men who spent miserable years in sexless marriages and were all there to commiserate. So, after years of being treated like shit … whaddya know?? Here they all were … treating other people like shit.
Damn. I never knew I could be treated kindly and in a semi-generous and friendly fashion by someone who secretly thought I was ugly and was just using me to practice seduction skills on while they looked for someone their own age who looks like J. Lo.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK??? I mean, I would be very willing and happy to give some guy who spent decades miserable over not having sex some degree of balm for their woes. I think I was a little straitlaced for my late husband, and I regret that now, but at least I would try. But no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Even after twenty years of celibacy, what matters the most?? LOOKS.
Well, there’s no hope for me there. My body will never be attractive even if I took off weight (which I’ve spent my whole life struggling with, and trust me, I don’t have the motivation nor the hours in the DAY it would take to get this body back to a normal BMI.) At this age, there’s cellulite, old stretch marks, loose, hanging, slack, flabby boobs, and with no fat under it any more, the dimpled, rippled, lumpy skin problem I have would look even, even worse.
Nope, I’ll never have an attractive body EVER … because even when I starved myself down to 117 in high school, people STILL told me my butt and legs were too big and I “looked fat.”
How I could have been any thinner without risking hospitalization, I don’t know.
I certainly wouldn’t have tried it. I was too damned hungry.
At least the ex-affair partner wouldn’t have treated me like that. (I don’t think. One never knows.)
2.) Health concerns.
We live in an age where if older men can still get erections, they have their pick of multitudes of available women. Most men that age want to and can date younger (and I know, because that was how I snagged my late husband, who was 21 years my senior.) Most people aren’t old enough in their fifties to have died yet, so the emotionally healthy ones (and the ones who are emotionally UNhealthy but too scared to leave shitty marriages) are all still with their first wives and enjoying their grandchildren. That, sadly, leaves for us unfortunate widows: The ones too emotionally unhealthy to have made a marriage last or to have ever gotten married in the first place. These guys are now neck-deep in available women and not interested in settling down. They’d rather get as much sex as they can with as many different women as possible … which is why my GYN is cautioning me about the rise of herpes and genital warts in 55+ communities.
I’ve never had a sexually transmitted disease and I don’t want one, thanks. There’s condoms, but those weren’t comfortable before my hysterectomy and now that I’m older and the skin down there doesn’t have the thickness and toughness conferred by the hormones of a woman’s 20’s and 30’s, I don’t know how I’d do having sex with a guy with a condom. It might just take my skin off.
3.) The general boorishness of the human male.
Aside from the general boorishness detailed in item #1, here’s the problem I’ve had with the two males I have, in fact, slept with in my life.
I call it “The Ten-Minute Rule.”
Men seem to believe that The Woman Must Orgasm Withing Ten Minutes Of Beginning Sexual Activity. If she doesn’t, something is wrong, and what’s wrong is always HER.
There is NOTHING WORSE than spending time with a guy who decides there’s something wrong with you because you can’t orgasm when and how he thinks you should.
Now, my late husband got a lot better with this. If he had an orgasm and I didn’t, he would help me out. I appreciated this more than I can ever say, because it really sucks to retire to the bathroom to finish yourself off while the guy you’re with snores. Or, even worse, you lie there masturbating and he goes, “You can’t get there.” (NOT my late husband, thank God. If it were, I don’t think I’d have married him!)
I truly think the female orgasm gets trained. Because after long enough of this “help” from my husband, I went from a woman who really didn’t feel much vaginally at all, to a woman who really, really liked getting pounded, to a woman who sometimes can’t get there without internal as well as external stimulation, to a woman who once orgasmed with coitus ONLY and NO foreplay!!! (I never thought that would EVER happen to me. It was the very last time my husband and I had sex before he died. It was sort of like a last gift, I think.)
I have also discovered that depression completely saps one’s ability to feel sexual pleasure or desire at all, and that I had to retrain my body to have an orgasm.
And once that happened, all bets were off. I think this is some weird function of being over fifty, but these days I don’t know WHAT my body is going to do. I have had times where I didn’t feel like sex for months, to times where I couldn’t have an orgasm at all, to times where I had one within three minutes (which NEVER happened when I was younger) to times when I needed fingers, to times when I needed a vibrator, to times when I needed internal stimulation, to times when I needed external stimulation, to times when it took both. This is a HUGE change from Before The Hysterectomy when my orgasm was as reliable as clockwork, I knew exactly what would do it, and the problem was that males didn’t want to do it. Now? All bets are off, and I don’t have a male I can blame for this.
So … with the erratic sexual response I have now, I can only imagine the kind of reaction I’d get from your typical male, that is if he didn’t think I was too ugly to have sex with in the first place.
Fact is, I don’t trust anyone not to act, sorry for the pun, like a dick. It is what it is and at least I’m willing to try. I also understand that men need sex and why and I’m willing to give it my best shot.
But, no, for many men, that’s not enough. If you don’t look and fuck like a porn star … something is wrong with you.
(And I’m very sorry to say that means something is wrong with EVERYONE, because the sex you see in pr0n films is NOT REAL. Hello??)
One reason I liked the ex-affair partner is I was FAIRLY sure I could trust him NOT to act like this. He was a sweet and thoughtful enough person.
Oh, well.
The only way to find another one is to try one out, and sad to say you can get very badly burned doing that. (Witness the behavior I’ve already seen.)
4.) Occupational Hazards.
Once you have sex with someone, the oxytocin starts flowing, and the next thing you know … you’re in love with them.
I ought to know, that’s how I fell in love with the first guy I ever had sex with. I was 32 and tired of being a virgin, so, with the support of friends, I went online for the purpose of recruiting someone to have sex with. I didn’t intend to fall for the guy. (Now, the husband and the ex-AP?? THOSE guys were ADORABLE. I knew I was going to fall for them.)
When you start falling for a guy you recruited just to have sex with, there’s all kinds of trouble. My first boyfriend was pretty clear I wasn’t relationship material. At sixty pounds lower than I am now, I was too fat, plus I didn’t want kids and a house. (He was divorced and had three kids already, one of which was a little shoplifting twerp.)
You really, really don’t want to fall in love with a guy you recruited just for sex. You just don’t. You’ll get used every way from Sunday and then left and treated like shit.
Been there, done that. No thanks.
5.) Stage of Life Considerations.
At this age, even if you do find someone who thinks you’re acceptable and the two of you fall in love and they actually do treat you decently … look how old we are.
This is NOT the age you buy and feather a nest. This is the age you sell the nest you already feathered because you’re old and slowing down and it’s time for a 55 and older community. This is the age of cancer and heart attacks and strokes and dementia. And I’ve already done that road with three other people now.
We women live longer, therefore I would expect anyone I was with to predecease me. And, the thing is …
I’ve already done family caregiving for three, count ‘em, T-H-R-E-E old, sick, dying people as it is. I don’t want to go through it again. There will be no one to do it for me, especially since at our age, his adult children will hate me because I’m not their mother. (Done THAT, too.)
I’d really, really, really, really have to love someone to go through all that again. It was hard enough in my forties. I don’t have that kind of energy now and it would be even harder now. Plus, it would be the second time through of: This person is older, so they already gave all their time, all their money, all their youth and strength and the best years of their life to some other woman and some other family. I’d be there to mop up the mess and get all the poverty, resentment from adult kids, and work at the end, and oh, yeah … the bereavement. AGAIN.
That’s an awful, awful, AWFUL lot to go through the work of establishing a new relationship for only for this misery and letdown at the end, which will come a lot sooner at age 56 than it would have at even 46.
I mean, think about it. You establish a relationship with someone. There’s the two-year Is-It-Gonna-Last dance. Then there’s the moving in of the things and the negotiation of the space. All the negotiation of the sexual styles and difficulties I just wrote about. The how-are-we-going-to-do-the-finances, the rearrangement wars, the housework wars, the holidays, and all of that stuff. People don’t think of establishing a new relationship as work, but this shit is work.
Then, no sooner do you get that squared away, and … someone gets sick. The relationship gets sick. You break up. Or someone DIES. A lot sooner than it would have happened were you younger, because in your late fifties, ‘til death do us part ain’t very long. And a lot of that time is sick time.
Now you have to undo all of it again, go through the painful giving up of yet ANOTHER attachment, and get used to being alone ALL OVER AGAIN.
And it took me ten years the first time!!!
Why, oh why, oh WHY would I EVER do this again??? Is all this worth hooking up with some guy on the net to have sex with and having to deal with all this again??
Especially when …
I have always had easier and more trouble-free orgasms alone and with a vibrator than with a man anyway!