When I started this blog, I was in my 20s — a woman who came of age watching “Sex and the City”, trying to decide if she was a Carrie or a Miranda (or maybe a Samantha, but definitely not entirely a Charlotte) and whose actual generation had yet to be defined by “Girls.” It was the era of “Gray’s Anatomy,” and not yet “50 Shades of Gray.” Tinder and Bumble had yet to hit the online dating market, meanwhile the bottom had just fallen out of the stock market.
All my friends and I were dating. The longest term relationships anyone had been in had been ones that started in college, when life was easy and a twin bed was good enough. Now, my friends are partnered-up, maybe toddler-totting, and likely mortgage paying.
So, in case you didn’t get where I was going, when I started “They Told Me a Rich Husband,” it was a different time. And I was living through a different life decade.
Putting aside that I’m now more likely to be matched with someone by my thumb than by a friend, I realized that dating in your 30s is different. It’s different not because the dating pool is smaller (to be honest, I’m not sure it’s any smaller… it’s just shallower, and access to the deep end is more frequently denied… and when you are let in, you don’t trust that there will be a lifeguard on duty to throw you one of those red floaty rescue things if you need one.)
By the time you’ve reached your 30s, you’re either frantic for a partner, or accepted that you’ve been single most of your life, are happy and can handle being on your own for the rest of your life… or you vacillate somewhere between the two. Dating in your 30s is different because more often than not, you or someone you’re dating is just getting out of that relationship that was supposed to last forever… but didn’t. No one walks around wearing a sign that says “emotionally damaged, handle with care,” and yet more often than I can count since crossing the decade line, I have found myself trying to date someone who was only fresh to market and suffering broken engagement PTSD.
That was me at 27. I get it. And we often don’t give men enough credit for having feelings, or broken hearts, or for loving deeply.
” Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death,” says Captain Wentworth in Jane Austen’s final masterpiece Persuasion, a story of a rare second chance at love. “…there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating.”
In one of my online dating profiles (because now I, like, have them all) I close by saying: “We’ve both done this before. It can’t hurt any worse than it did that last time. Let’s give this a go?”
They Told Me to Find a Rich Husband 