Dating After 40 Plus

I went out with someone 30 years my junior. It may or may not have been a date -- I assumed it was friends meeting for lunch until he insisted on giving me a backrub -- but there was no denying the age difference. When I mentioned this to my elder niece, thirtysomething, she quipped: "Aunt Laurie is such a cougar!" My friend Patrick, 65, ditto, "Cougar!" Good lord, people, a cougar isn't even my favorite cat or for that matter car. Call me a jaguar or a lion, but a cougar? Most of us older ladies who are trying to still date don't fancy ourselves predators, which is what the name cougar implies. And most of us aren't always choosing younger or much younger men. Quite simply, men our age are often happily married and most of us aren't sinking so low as to prey on them (that would be more cougary in my book). So why call us cougar? Is it to just point out how socially unacceptable it still is to date a younger man? My grandmother was seven years' ...

 *This blog was originally an article published on About.com's Dating site, 2005. Bio: Laurie Wiegler is a Milford,CT-based journalist who usually writes about the environment, green living and engineering. She wrote this in 2005. Title: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being 40" Article:       When I was young, I used to ridicule (usually privately) those pathetic middle-aged men hitting on young girls.   What were they trying to relive, anyway?   And why wasn't someone of, say, my mother's age good enough for them?       At 23, I interviewed a gifted concert pianist, age 50.   I was   impressed by his gifts and flattered that he considered me equally gifted   as a writer (ahem).   Following him and his entourage around one night, I   soon got invited to a New Year's Eve bash at his house -- out of   town.   After mulling it over, I decided to bus it out to Bake...