The Sunday Read: ‘Online Dating After 50 Can Be Miserable. But It’s Also Liberating.’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

When Maggie Jones’s marriage collapsed after 23 years, she was devastated and overwhelmed. She was in her 50s, with two jobs, two teenage daughters and one dog. She didn’t consider dating. She had no time, no emotional energy. But then a year passed. One daughter was off at college, the other increasingly independent. After several more months went by, she started to feel a sliver of curiosity about what kind of men were out there and how it would feel to date again. The last time she dated was 25 years ago, and even then, she fell into relationships mostly with guys from high school, college, parties, work. Now every man she knew was either married, too young, too old or otherwise not a good fit. That meant online dating — the default mode not just for the young but also for people Ms. Jones’s age. Her only exposure had been watching her oldest daughter, home from college one summer, as she sat on her bed rapidly swiping through guy after guy — spending no more than a second or two on each. Ms. Jones tells her story of online dating in later adulthood, and what she learned.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Maggie Jones. I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine.
0:11.0	I've written about the sex lives of many demographics, from teenagers to people
0:16.3	in their 80s. A few years ago I wrote this big article about sex and aging, and that in part led me to report the story
0:24.9	you're going to hear today, this week's Sunday Reed. It's about the pleasures,
0:30.3	frustrations, and freedoms of dating online when you're over 50 and single, a
0:36.7	demographic that I myself am part of. I wanted to tackle the Aegis assumptions I've heard from several people in their teens, 20s and 30s.
0:47.0	These narratives that as we get older, we don't go about dating the same way younger people do.
0:52.9	Or that if you're single past 50, you're letting go of sex
0:56.6	or of falling in love again.
0:58.8	Or that older single women are desperate to remarry. None of that is true. I knew this because I'd already
1:07.3	been talking to a lot of friends and the men who I was dating about their
1:11.2	experiences and I've been on the apps myself, swiping past blurry
1:17.1	outdated selfies, photos of men holding fish that feel like they're on every fifth person's profile, and cliches. that
1:25.0	as a writer gets so tedious to read.
1:29.0	But as I did more formal research,
1:31.0	I found out there were a bunch of interesting studies out there about dating after 50 and about sexuality and aging.
1:38.0	I poured over these studies, talked to probably three dozen people all across the country and of course mind my own
1:45.6	experiences for this article. What I learned is that there are lots of people over
1:51.6	50, women especially, some separated, some divorced,
1:56.2	some widowed, who are using apps to explore their sexuality and dating far more than they ever
2:02.1	did in their 20s.
2:04.0	They're enjoying more expansive sex lives.
	...

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