How to find love at any age

Some of the saddest words I hear come from friends and family — people I care for and wish only the best — when they forlornly declare they have lost all hope of finding a loving relationship. It’s not because they are mass murderers; they simply think they are too old or have been single too long.

It’s true that opportunities to meet people may be different from how they were in their 20s — more people their own age are married, socialising takes different forms, there’s a range of other priorities in life apart from chasing a partner — but the factors blocking the chance of meeting that special someone come from within.

I like to think in terms of “leaving yourself open” to love. With age, we tend to close (and sometimes lock!) too many doors to the possibility of a relationship, then wonder why anyone fails to simply walk into our lives.

Excuses, excuses

Perhaps the most firmly “closed doors” I see among people in their 40s and 50s are their own set, unbendable habits. These take the form of daily routines, weekly outings and appointments or monthly and even yearly rituals that serve to keep them grounded and their time filled. Ask them why they have to scour their favourite bookstores every Saturday morning, why they have to ride with a group on Sunday morning without fail, why they cannot possibly go out on Wednesday night when a TV show they watch is on, and the answers often seem more than a little flimsy to the outsider — but not to them.

At worst, this dogged adherence to non-essential activities (those that can be skipped or shifted occasionally) can appear to be the height of selfishness, or at least a lack of concern for other people. The reality is that people, especially as they get older, take solace in these activities. They can provide purpose and a sense of security in a way that regular routine activities give a sense of belonging and value to people in a relationship.

“I can’t afford/don’t have the time” is another common refrain. We all have the same amount of time, whether we’re 25 or 45 or 55. If the same person at each of these ages wants to find love, then he or she will make the same time to find it.

Think of your time as a box, and “stuff” — all the things you find to fill your time — as a gas. No matter how many or how few things you have making up your “stuff”, the gas always seems to dissipate to fill the box. Anyone serious about finding love will have a carefully sealed compartment put aside where they will always have time.

Of course, for many people it’s not about having the time but whether they can be bothered investing it in trying to find a relationship. This is a common feeling we all tend to have towards many things as we get older: a reluctance to invest time in something that may not bear fruit. It could be going to see a show or movie when we’re not sure we’ll like it, or not wanting to meet up with people we don’t know or don’t see any obvious networking opportunity with. Unlike our younger selves, we tend to be less likely to do or try something simply for the experience — whether that turns out to be fun or of value or otherwise.

What’s on your list?

As a sex and relationships columnist, I have interviewed hundreds of women, mainly between the ages of 20 and the early 30s. A common thread among the women at the younger end of this range was what I referred to as “the shopping list” of traits they desired — or outright required — in a partner. These tended to refer to physical characteristics (height, hair, eye colour), attitude, profession or financial status, age and so forth. I put this difference down to the younger women’s lack of experience with a range of men and their consequent adherence to girl-like ideals, and perhaps even a sense of entitlement that comes with the confidence in being, in their perception, at the height of their attractiveness. The curious thing is I now see the “shopping list” recited by friends in their 40s and 50s, who claim they “don’t want to waste any time”. It’s all or nothing for them.

Maybe this comes from a growing sense that time is running out, or regret for how much time we’ve wasted in our lives up to this point. The truth is that dating is, relatively speaking, a high-risk investment of our time and emotional resources. A little loss has to be written off to afford the opportunity to gain a sense of fulfilment and happiness that comes from a great relationship and which money simply cannot buy.

Everything about love is, to a varying extent, a gamble. Often the more you are prepared to give up and leave yourself vulnerable (something that goes against the instincts we have developed through experiences in all other areas of our lives), the bigger the potential reward.

Let the baggage go

By the time we get into our 40s or 50s we’ve had time to accumulate considerable baggage and some of us have been unable to shed the excess weight dragging us down. There’s the physical baggage — children, ex-spouses, houses, pets, businesses — but it’s more the emotional baggage that convinces people they’ve left it too late for love.

We are all products of our past experiences — whether that’s mistrust, disappointment, misjudgement, loss — but we don’t have to let that build a wall between us and our future. Yet this is exactly what happens. Too often we judge others or relate their actions to people and situations that led to hurt, anger and regret in our past. While it’s true that you need to analyse and understand your history to recognise your own destructive tendencies and the warning signs from others that may lead to unfulfilling (or worse) experiences, you need to be wary of blocking out an individual and a real, current experience because of an experience with someone from your past.

The flipside of this is when your friends of a certain age fret to you about how prospective dates “could never understand me”. As they convince themselves that they only have freak value and a very niche market, the dating pool apparently dries up until they only seek to bond with people whose defences and negative characteristics match — and reinforce — their own. Obviously, this is usually an unhealthy situation, emotionally, mentally and even physically (or in some combination). While this may not seem as bad as, say, a woman with poor self-esteem being with a man who puts her down about her body, it still colours her perception of the world.

It’s said that misery loves company, and so does inertia. Yet age does not mean you have to merely accept companionship and the status quo: an illusion of fusion in which two people accept safety and familiarity. Even as you grow older, you should not be afraid to seek out people who will help you grow and expand and challenge the way you see the world.

Those who give the excuse “no one can understand me” have, in a sense, done a full circle of the fear of judgement. Teenagers may experience new physical and emotional developments and convince themselves that their feelings and experiences are so unique that no one should have the right to judge them and no one could possibly understand them. In our 20s, we tend to grow out of this as we realise the full spectrum of experiences and personalities among individuals and we place less value on other people understanding or judging us. As we get older, some of us begin to question the sum of our experiences and what it has all added up to, and the concern about judgement and being understood takes priority again.

While such self-analysis can be perfectly natural, projecting it on others is a waste of time and self-limiting. No one lives — or can ever live — in your past as much as you do, so it’s much more inconsequential to others than you probably give it credit for.

Of course, after years of negative experiences or watching and feeling the hurt of bad relationship experiences among friends or family, it is difficult not to go into dating without all this affecting your outlook on relationships in general. This is precisely a reason to consciously spend time with friends and family whose relationships set a positive example of what the future may hold. Often we see older singles — especially those who have been single for a long time — actively avoid these situations for fear of feeling awkward or being a “third wheel”.

Even worse is when an older single has a whole peanut gallery of critical inner voices in their head that nullify every potential scenario that may lead to a relationship. If you say all potential partners are “insensitive losers”, then that will always be the starting position from which they have to prove themselves — an almost impossible task. If you say you have no appeal or that all the good men are taken (my frequent and least favourite dating question from women: “So why aren’t you taken?”), then the first and most telling step towards a relationship is overturning that decision — no progress can be made before this. So why make things so hard?

Do you have a type?

Those with a longer history of relationships might reflect on their partners and categorise them into groups and question why they tend to choose certain “types”. In some cases, there is a kind of safety in knowing what you will get with a certain type, much like ordering the same dish at every different restaurant you try. The danger in this is it makes the dating pool pretty shallow.

Another factor is that sticking to type can make it all too easy to make direct comparisons to previous partners. Then there is this: your previous relationships with people of this type all came to an end. Why was that? However, after seeking the same sort of partner for years, it can be difficult to tell if we are attracted to someone for the right or wrong reasons.

In other instances, you can see people whose breakout strategy is to go totally against type. The problem with this is that, if they have had several relationships, there may have been a good reason they never ended up with this polar opposite of their type. Equally, this is a strategy that could work perfectly well — it opens up your choices, enlightens you to new experiences and scenarios and reinforces the belief that you don’t actually have one type of person you can have a fulfilling relationship with. We talk about “chemistry” in a relationship. That is, it is more than just the sum of elements in its composition; it is about what is produced when they combine.

One helpful approach is to enlist the help of a small network of solid, long-time friends. Call on them to give you an honest assessment of how you have grown or changed over the years, and relate this to the type of person who would best complement the person you are now.

Living separate lives

The search for compatibility in a relationship can be complicated further for older people by well-entrenched lifestyle habits and a strong sense of having separate lives. One or both parties may have families they still commit to and a greater career responsibility than they have ever had in their lives. These factors alone can make the task of slotting into a formal time schedule of two people in a relationship seem impossible.

The truth is that when you have one or two people in a relationship who are older, then the traditional concept of a couple doing all their socialising, activities, family visits and hanging out together, which is usually associated with younger people (and their own previous relationships), may have to go by the wayside. As mature people, trust that your potential partner will have respect and patience, and acknowledge that you are both autonomous individuals who can become close while maintaining your separate identities.

Go find it!

While it may feel like there is greater pressure and less opportunity to find a relationship as you get older, almost the reverse is true. The societal pressures of finding a partner are not there. Despite anything you may feel, the significance of any judgement from family, friends or workmates will have less consequence. Expectations to have children or provide financial support are often not there. Potential partners of a similar age will usually be more forgiving of the time you need for your existing responsibilities and commitments, and more forgiving of your lifestyle habits. Media such as the internet open up a whole new realm of potential mates. So don’t hold yourself back — your best relationship yet could well be ahead of you.

Dominic Cadden is a freelance writer who specialises in health, wellbeing and relationships. He is also a sports/fitness coach and presenter for Writeninja Total Fitness, an international athlete and editor of Athlete2.0.com. E: writeninja@tpg.com.au