The mating game

I started online dating at age 35, hoping to meet a few suitors in my new city. But all I met were frantic older men who were more concerned with the state of my womb than with wooing me.

By Elline Lipkin

Read more: Fertility, Relationships, Dating, Life

Feb. 26, 2007 | It started in Houston. I was 35, in flight from corporate America and the maze of gray-walled office cubes that had begun to leach the color from my soul, when I decided to transform myself into a graduate student in Texas. I was also in flight from a particular stereotype that I'd sworn never to become: the overanxious, time's a-tickin', neurotic single woman over 35 living in New York. By moving halfway across the country I thought I could save myself from that fate. I'll be that woman elsewhere, I said to myself, but I won't be her in Manhattan. So I found myself in Texas, cruising a football-field-size supermarket whose aisles all seemed to lead to a troughlike freezer that ran the length of the store, packed with enormous piles of shrink-wrapped meat.

I'd spot a woman halfway down the aisle and notice the flash of a diamond on her left hand as she stacked cereal boxes around the kids playing in her cart. She must be around my age, I'd think, but then as she drew closer, I'd realize, no, she's not, she's younger. And she was not, as I initially guessed, a year or two younger. She was more like seven or eight, or even 10, years younger. During my first week in Texas, when a barely post-pubescent-looking clerk checked out my videocassette, I found myself staring at the huge gold circle engulfing his thin finger. "Are you married?" I blurted out. "You look so young!" He took it in stride. "I am young," he said. I mentioned that I had recently moved from New York City, where getting married under age 30 was the equivalent of being a child bride. "Why didn't you just decide to live together?" I asked naively. He smiled. "You're in the Bible Belt now; we don't do that down here." I sighed. In time, I grew used to hearing the female undergraduates I taught gleefully refer to newly changing their names and find excuses to say "my husband" to one another. These were girls, who when I referred to them as "women" in class, seemed to not know whom I was talking about.

The year before, a long-distance relationship I had been in for five years had finally cratered and sunk. Besides the graduate students in my program, a motley group of all ages, everyone I met in Houston in his mid-30s was already married, or divorced with two kids and didn't want more. So I did what most stranded people do. I turned to the Internet and logged on. I'd heard the range of stories: Everyone either knew someone who married a person they met online or had a story of meeting a person who seemed to be a distant cousin to the image posted, hailing from 10 years past and 15 pounds back. I was cautious, but curious enough to give it a try.

I found the best picture I had and put my creative writing skills to use and wrote ad copy for myself. Since I knew I was just in Texas temporarily for school, I decided to canvas the country and see what I found. Soon enough, my in box was flooded. I was thrilled. Quickly, however, a pattern emerged. For every hit from men within my age range came many more from men seven to 15 years older. "Finally ready to settle down," wrote a 45-year-old in Miami. "Worked too hard for too long and now eager to do the wife and kids thing," said a 47-year-old in New Mexico. "This should be a no-brainer," insisted a 52-year-old academic in Utah, who claimed I was the only woman in the pool he'd found who had studied beyond a master's degree. "Except that I'm looking for a peer," I wrote back, "someone around my own age and at a similar place in his life. I think a 17-year age difference would be too much." His reply was chilly. Apparently, it had never crossed his mind that I might perceive us to be mismatched.

At first I attributed my dates' decade-plus age gap to male swagger and the desire for a midlife ego boost. But after asking a 42-year-old man directly why he listed only women up to age 35 as within his "desired age range," I got the forthright reply I had begun to suspect. "Because I don't want to throw away the condoms on the second date," he said. "I want to be with someone who still has a few years left on her clock" was his unapologetic response. "So you're looking for the next available womb," I countered, "someone you think is still fertile enough to incubate your offspring, rather than a partner." "No, no, no, of course not!" he insisted. He wasn't that utilitarian; he only wanted someone who was still within a certain window.

These were Type A types, bursting with accomplishment and professional swagger. They had climbed the ladder and were now at its top, stunned to realize the narrow platform they ascended so doggedly held room for only one. "Meet wife, have children" was something they'd thought would just happen along the way -- but it hadn't. Now that they'd set the goal of getting married, they seemed more than a little surprised (bewildered, in fact) that this was one goal they couldn't make happen by simply applying their will. Often their opening monologues included the recent loss of a parent, or the revelation that they were staring down 50, which seemed to have galvanized their efforts to spawn. And with their eyes now on their rearview mirrors, many seemed to regret their noncommittal 20s and 30s, when driving to the top of their fields seemed to be the only thing on their minds.

"But you're 48," I would say. "How old will you be when your kids are in high school?" "Do you think you'll live to see your grandchildren?" I asked one man, who maintained it was just the next generation that mattered to him. "Did you ever consider," I said to a 47-year-old who disavowed adoption, "that if you're with a partner who is too old to have kids, then that means you can't have children either? That your partner's limitations are your limitations, because you love her?" Apparently not was the answer; his biology meant endless possibility, but hers was an obstacle. In my barrage of 10-years-plus suitors, I finally recognized a mix of both male hubris and underlying pathos. How could so many men have woken up to a desire for a family at an astonishingly and woundingly late point?

Some men told me -- and I believed them -- that they found themselves in a position they had never intended, that they had wanted families when younger but hadn't found the right woman or the right time. They'd heard the ticking of their "social clock," as I came to call it, but things didn't coalesce, and again, they had always assumed (at least biologically) they had time on their side. But when I pressed them on their dismissal of women who fell above their chosen age limit, I realized that -- despite their liberal stances, staunch commitment to equality, "never a sexist phrase would pass their lips" attitudes -- these men were reducing women to their utility, specifically, their fertility, in service of their own delayed desires to have a child. I understood that once I had passed a predetermined number of years, I would no longer be of use -- an objectification that left me stunned.

Next page: I never thought that at 35, I would be so aware of my perceived staleness