Karen, 53, explains why she’s using online dating apps to seek out hunky younger men
53-year-old writer Karen Krizanovich found a bevy of young, eligible men wanted to date her when she dipped her toe into the modern world of dating apps like Tinder and Bumble
AFTER two divorces Karen Krizanovich decided at the age of 53 to try her luck on dating apps . . . and soon discovered a keen audience of young men wanting to bed her. Here the London-based writer tells her story.
THE number of divorces was highest last year among men and women aged 45 to 49.
If current trends continue, newly divorced people will be getting back in the dating game in their fifties.
So, for all those who can remember actually dialling a phone number, where’s best to find love?
My friends advised using the app Bumble. It’s like Tinder if Tinder had brushed its teeth.
Tinder is weird and random.
The first time on Tinder, I was matched by some chap who, within minutes, asked me to beat him up.
I stopped in the street to unmatch him only to have my phone stolen by a thief on a moped. And so I was saved.
God works in mysterious ways.
Tinder was not quite a nest of psychos but it came very close.
Even more amazing was that friends told me they’d found really nice men on sites with absolutely the worst names. Yet who am I, a 53-year-old woman, to deny happiness found at such places as toyboywarehouse.com — which is, I guess, a site aimed at younger men who like older women.
Why date an older woman? I struggled to come up with any good reasons, outside of the fact that many of us have our own money, don’t want children, don’t want marriage, aren’t afraid of nudity, can drive, cook, drink and scold.
We don’t suffer fools. We are educated, or experienced at least. In accomplishments, many of us are the man we hoped to marry.
We may not always triumph over our younger, marriage-desiring, more volatile, extremely fertile and higher-pitched rivals, but it’s not a competition, is it?
Research done by Dr Hayley Wright from Coventry University confirms that sex remains as appealing and important to us across a lifetime, just as the idea older people doing it seems nasty and repugnant to those who think they will stay young forever.
This is why what is sexy must shift to include the older demographic. You will be elderly too if you’re lucky.
Your skin will sag. Your plastic surgery will be bad. And yet you’ll still want love and sex.
According to Dr Wright: “People don’t like to think that older people have sex, but we need to challenge this conception at a societal level.”
A study by Trinity College Dublin showed that nearly 60 per cent of over 50s are having regular sex, some more than twice a week. If that makes you sick, stop thinking about it.
There is also anecdotal evidence, according to therapist and author of the book Couples Therapy, Barbara Bloomfield, that sex lives of those in their 40s and 50s are actually better than younger years. Yes, better.
This scientific encouragement should be enough to shove confident women towards apps like Bumble which have someone for everyone. Unlike Tinder, some blokes on Bumble have finished secondary school and actually know the difference between you’re and your.
You set the distance, age and gender range. If there’s a match, women must make the first move. Designed like a game, the players only have to upload some photos and write an optional sentence about themselves.
Then they can swipe left or right on profiles, left for “I feel sorry for you” or right which means, “How fast can you get here?” My friends don’t swipe right unless the chap’s photos are perfect. This is rare.
Oddly, a recent survey by The App Developers, an app agency, discovered that men are five times more likely to download a dating app than women.
This implies that millions of men download a dating app and put up the wrong photos with the wrong settings.
They then give up and have a few pints with their mates.
Don’t get me wrong. I did try to date age appropriately but older men were careful, cautious, as if they’d been bitten too many times before.
And men, for the love of God, up your game. Stop saying that you went to the University of Life: Everyone has.
One bio I remember read: “Not interested in ONS.” He was 65 and not a sleek, fit, smart 65 either. He’d be lucky to get a one-night stand with his own species.
The saddest profiles wouldn’t have current photos but young photos, some of which I’m sure were Polaroids.
Other chaps posted pics of celebrities they thought they looked like. Don’t put up a photo of a celeb unless you are that celebrity. That’s a tiny dating tip from me.
With older blokes showing no interest in me, I figured my time was up.
So imagine my surprise to find younger men seemed to like me.
On the app, I toyed with my profile bio to make it accurate yet funny for their age group.
At first I wrote: “Your mum told me to swipe right.” The millennials got the joke. I was aware that I was chatting with someone who, in another possible world, could have been my son.
But that was impossible as I had forgotten to have children.
My friends made jokes about the age gaps until I said: “Hey, I’m swiping right on your son tonight, but don’t worry, we won’t marry.”
Despite being of higher mileage, I was often accused of being a catfish — that is, someone whose photos were too good to be real.
My pics were genuine, recent and not particularly sexy. Maybe I looked fake because I didn’t paint on my eyebrows? I have no idea. I did get the occasional nasty boy. They’d hit at my age because it was an easy target. “Why are your age settings so low?” one snapped at me. “Why are your settings so high?” I replied.
We all have a fixed idea about what kind of person we’d like to meet, but beyond that, I treated the apps as a social experiment in the wide variety of people dating in the UK.
If the chap texted in an articulate manner and wasn’t a jerk, I chatted. I matched once with an army veteran who had two prosthetic limbs: I didn’t notice until a friend pointed them out. Should I have?
For those who find themselves back on the market, apps can be a real alternative to waiting for some toothless male to talk to you at a pub.
Finding someone to love is hard, of course, but apps can make the whole endeavour enjoyable, faster and easier — and less complicated than sites which ask you a million questions about what you’re looking for.
The important thing is to realise that dating hasn’t really changed since when you first did it.
Everyone gets rejected and the sooner you get used to that, the better.
If you put your pride aside, you’ll find an amazing number of quality single people out there.
MOST READ IN REAL LIFE
According to dating site eharmony’s research, the next decade’s daters are going to be mainly in the 55-64 age range. Stats show a 30 per cent rise in single older potential mates.
And that’s great if you’re looking for someone in that range.
I’m not. I’m off the market and happy. And no, I didn’t meet him on an app.