Hi there, welcome back to late night women's hour.

If you caught last week's edition, you'll know I've been talking to Anna Maychin, Viv Groscop and Zing Singh about upskirting, abortion, self-care and why Viv sometimes feels

she needs to channel Rod Little and Pear's Morgan. If you've not heard it, have a listen. Meanwhile,

here's the second part of that conversation. This is the BBC. Anna, you wanted to talk about

post-menopausal dating. could we be catering better to this

growing market? Yeah, so one of my areas of research is looking at dating behavior and the

science behind dating. And obviously, a lot of our focus in this area in the last five years

has been on Tinder and young people and millennials and how they date. But I do a lot of public talks about dating.

At the end of every single talk, I get at least two or three post-50s women coming up and saying,

well, that's all well and good, but what about us?

And I started looking into it.

And first of all, there's so little research on how women after menopause date, which is shocking, but in a way not surprising because it's very youth-centric research. But also just the fact that it's not catered for and it's not something we've really thought about. But actually, it's a really recent phenomenon. So like 100 years ago, the lifespan of a woman was about 52 and

evolutionally, um, menopause is evolutionary stable at about 50 years. So basically, you had all your

children without contraception, constantly pregnant, da-da-da-da-da, got to 50, two possible child

three years, then you die. Wow. I know. Whereas now, you know, you get to that and you get to post-50 and you could have a good 30 years of post-menopausal life. And there's been this massive leap in post-50s divorcing women. And one year it's shot up 15%. And I think it's because, yeah, 15%. So you think it's because, you know, you get the children out of the nest, they go and you look at your husband. And obviously you picked your husband based on, you know, breeding material.

And then you suddenly look at him and think, oh my God, we've got another 30 years.

What the hell are we going to do?

Is this a personal view or is this the science?

This obviously the science.

Well, no, I think it's probably quite personal.

But I just find it...

Whoa, that's interesting. Let's say more about that. Only joking.

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