Take a Lover, Look for a Partner, or Fly Solo, Explore All the Options
You can have all three
I told a younger man recently, “You can be my boy toy or my relationship. Your choice.”
Sound cold? It wasn’t. It was frustration with a person I’d spent too much time with trying to figure out what he wanted from me, and what I ultimately wanted from him. Three years to be exact. In some ways, this is the story of my dating life.
I really enjoy sex. It’s not an earth-shattering announcement, but not all people do enjoy sex. Not all women. Certainly not all older women, although many more than you think.
I was also taught not to have sex outside of a committed relationship. My first sexual partner at age eighteen became my husband by age twenty. I didn’t have sex with anyone else until I was twenty-six after he left me for another woman.
After we divorced was my first experience of sex for sex's sake. Being thrust into the free-for-all that was dating then was a culture shock, and wildly exciting at the same time. I made up for lost time.
A year or so after that, I began looking for another partner. So, yes, there was some cognitive dissonance. Enjoying the sexual freedom. Looking for love while having my heart ripped and torn by random guys. On top of the original broken heart.
In response to having my heart fractured a few times, my therapist encouraged me to wait, both to have sex and look for love.
I was twenty-six. My hormones didn’t rage like they did when I was a teen, or as they did later in my mid to late-thirties. But honey, they were still not ready to take a couple of years’ long nap. I’d grown accustomed to a regular sex life while married, and I wasn’t ready to give it up.
None of this was easy. I craved attention and sex because I was twenty-six and because my husband left me for someone else. While therapy saved my sanity, it didn’t really help me with the existential question of the Universe: Sex, marriage, partnership, solo, all of the above or none of the above. Well, except solo, of course. That’s pretty much a given.
After three years of short-term relationships, the longest-lasting fifteen months, and a lot of encounters ranging from several weeks or weekends long assignations, I met a guy who I thought might make a good partner. My therapist thought so, too. Problem was, it took three years to convince him, and another year to make it official.
In between, we took a couple of breaks to see other people. Although my boss at the time described that by saying, “Elliot and Carol are seeing other people, only the other people don’t know it yet.”
I hung in there because the chemistry was astounding, the sex was varied and fulfilling, and because I have this thing for emotionally unavailable men. My therapist and I were a little too focused on his good qualities to adequately address that particular issue of mine.
Umpteen years later, after marriage to him, divorce, having my son by another man I didn’t marry, son growing up and leaving home, I’m right back where I started after that first heartbreak and divorce. I hope wiser. Definitely stronger. Happy alone. Still enjoying sex. Wondering if regular sex is worth chancing another broken heart. There have now been too many to count. Sigh.
There are more ways to meet people than there were during my first rodeo. There are also more accepted ways of being in a relationship than then.
There’s polyamory, where you are empowered to choose more than one person to love at a time. Had that been an achievable thing in my time and place, I might have been able to sustain one or more of my marriages. On the other hand, I suck at living with other women. Ask any of my past female roommates.
Open marriage is an option. However, to be real about it, I’ve never known it to work. I’m sure some of you have, and I would love to hear your stories.
One couple I know did manage it for decades. Until she fell in love with a woman. She didn’t want to share the female partner with her husband, even though that’s what they had done before. It seems their marriage was more polyamorous than open, at least until she no longer wanted to share because the heart isn’t logical. She and her husband have gotten back together in their golden years.
There is group marriage, but I only know about that from Robert Heinlein novels. Still, it seems like the best option for everyone. With an equal number of partners, nobody sleeps alone, nor needs to share a bed with two others unless they want to. Therefore reducing the possibility for jealousy. There are at least four people to raise children and contribute financially to the family support, and there can be more. It seems ideal.
On the flip side, marriage to one person is complicated enough. In a group marriage, there are all those personalities to consider. Chores to divide. Conversation topics to mediate. I’m tired just thinking about it.
Asexuality is another option. Except you pretty much have to be born that way. Sadly, or maybe happily, asexuality doesn’t come naturally to me. I was most definitely not born that way.
There’s also good old monogamy. I’m surprisingly good at that for seven-plus years at a time. Hard to say after that, as the most I’ve managed is ten years in one stretch. That is if you don’t count the two consensual threesomes my husband arranged with close male friends.
However, even though humanity isn’t actually built for monogamy, I’m pretty sure at my age, and with open communication and commitment to meet each other’s desires and needs as best as possible, I could now do it until “death do us part.” That’s about twenty good years at most. I’d just need to double the eleven years I’ve managed. And I’d eventually be in my eighties, which in our youth culture is throwaway. Still, I plan to continue having sex until the very end.
On the opposite end of monogamy, there’s the thirty-nine percent of us worldwide who are single. The percentage is higher in the United States, where forty-two percent of the population is single.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2019, “The youngest and oldest Americans are the most likely to be single — 41% of those ages 18 to 29 and 36% of those 65 and older say they are single, compared with 23% of those 30 to 49 and 28% of those 50 to 64.”
Which, without giving out my age any more than the hints I’ve already included, reduces my chances of finding long-term, true love in any form to lower than 39% worldwide and 42% in the U.S. What’s an older, single, fully functioning sexual human female to do? Or any single human of any age or gender, non-binary and trans included, of course, who desires sexual connection, relationship, or even just a zipless fuck?
If you figure it out, let me know. Meanwhile, I’ll do what I’ve done whenever I feel the urge to seek sex, or love when I’m feeling particularly brave. I’ll meet people IRL, which has worked out better for me than online. Maybe I’ll even meet someone here on this platform. That would be a good combination of online and real life.
If we click, then I’ll start the deeper discussions of how, when, where, and why of a relationship. Even if the relationship is going to only be a sexual one. Sorry if that’s too heavy for the “just sex” crowd. I want to have those discussions before either of us decides whether you’ll be my boy toy or my real lover who may want to expand that role. And I don’t want it to take years.