Somewhere around my forty-ninth birthday, something strange happened on the dating apps.
The men my age stopped swiping right on me. I noticed it because I had been having reasonable traction, and then it just — stopped. The fifty-five-year-old divorced guys with boats, the fifty-seven-year-old widowers, the fifty-two-year-old professionals in good shape — they stopped. Gone.
What replaced them was a demographic I will call The Confident Thirty-Two-Year-Old Finance Guy. He slides into my DMs. He has a face you could put on a recruiting brochure. He is extremely straightforward. He wants to take me to dinner. He wants to take me to his place. He wants to know, point-blank, what my schedule looks like next Thursday.
I have not seen this level of male confidence directed at me since I was thirty-four years old.
I have a theory about this. It has nothing to do with me being "a catch," which I am, but so are a lot of 49-year-old women who are getting the same silent treatment from their age peers. The theory is this:
Men my age are not looking for women their age. They are looking for the women the age they were when they were last hot. The fifty-five-year-old divorced guy is looking for a thirty-two-year-old. The sixty-two-year-old is looking for a forty-year-old. Every man on the app is dating in the reverse direction of his own mortality. This is not news.
What's news is the thirty-two-year-olds.
They are extremely interested. I initially assumed it was a fetish thing — and fine, a grown man is allowed a preference, I'm not a prude — but after about eight of these conversations I realized it isn't that. They are not treating me like a MILF kink. They are treating me like a person they would like to date.
Here's what I think is happening.
The thirty-two-year-old man has been in the trenches of the thirty-two-year-old dating market for ten years. He has dated women his age who are building businesses, women his age who are unclear about whether they want children, women his age who have read four books about attachment theory and need him to know which attachment style he has. He is tired. He is well-educated. He has done the work, or read enough of the marketing for the work, and he is exhausted.
Then he sees a forty-nine-year-old woman. Who knows who she is. Who doesn't need to be fixed. Who doesn't want to blend households. Who has her own hot tub. Who has already been through the hard part and is now running a second draft of life. Who is, frankly, not going to ask him where this is going at month five.
He is not attracted to me because I am younger than he thinks I am. He is attracted to me because I am older than his peers are ever going to be.
I don't know what to do with this information. I am mostly not dating the thirty-two-year-olds, if only because I keep thinking I was pregnant when they were being born, and it rewires the plumbing of my brain. But I will say this: there is something clarifying about being swiped left by a fifty-five-year-old in the same week a thirty-two-year-old with a PhD asks to buy me dinner. It tells you everything you need to know about who was telling the truth on their bio.