How Midlife Relationships Work

The personals specify STR or LTR, (short term relationship or long term) as if those were the only choices. I’m not so sure. I think that there is a growing hybrid, the MTR, the mid-term relationship.

As one very smart and very attractive 50 year old woman explained to me, the problem is how to be “looking for long term relationships and dealing with the libido in the meanwhile.”

I think it is The Central Issue in dating at midlife. It is the thing that everyone struggles with.

I think the problem of how to have a sex life when single at midlife is equally vexing to both men and women. Midlife adults are sexually active and want to be. But how?

The best answer is a good long term committed relationship. It’s the best sex, the easiest sex, the most emotionally satisfying sex and the richest, most textured sex. Far and away, most of the people who report having the best and most frequent and most satisfying sex at midlife are people who are married or settled into in long term relationships. Then sex simply becomes part of pleasant domestic tranquility.

Midlife singles, by definition, are people who experience long sexual dry spells. These are people who, for one reason or another have backed away from long-term committed relationships. By 35 or 40 they’d tried for the Big One and they’ve either left or been left or have avoided it altogether.

It Really Is a Jungle Out There…

Mate Poaching. I think this term was coined by evolutionary psychologist, David Buss. It’s quite common. Just as you suspected. And it is especially common in the de-regulated world of midlife dating. 20% of long term relationships begin when one or both partners are involved with others. This holds steady across age groups and couples who are married, living together or dating. From current Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a survey of 16,000 men and women in 53 countries. 60% men and 40% women have attempted to entice others who were already committed to others for short term flings. 47% men and 32% women succumbed.

Poachers tended to be people who were adventuresome, sexually attractive, and willing to talk about sex. Those who cheated tended to be people with high self-esteem but were selfish, distrusting and immodest. Also, the more a culture allowed for equality between men and women, the more likely it was that men and women did equal cheating and poaching.

Further, this is generally known. In a study in Britain, forty-five percent of women owned up to secretly checking the text messages on their partner’s phone, compared to 31 percent of men.

Among younger people, nine percent of Britons admitted to dumping a partner by sending an MS text message on a cell phone. Among those aged 15 to 24, the figure rises to 20 percent.