Pepper Schwartz - Dating After 50 For Dummies

Dating After 50 For Dummies

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Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013952428

ISBN 978-1-118-44132-9 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-46094-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-46095-5 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Chapter 1

In This Chapter

Evaluating the state of your mind and body

Knowing the best places to find dates

Keeping safety in mind

Saying and doing the right things in a relationship's early stages

Talking about sex and money

W hen you haven't dated for a long time, dating again may seem so daunting that you don't want to approach the subject, much less start the process. But sooner or later, you feel a change in the way you think about various activities and daily life, and you know you'd like companionship or maybe a life partner. You also know that just waiting for the right person to show up hasn't been a successful strategy. At some point you realize that you need to tackle what it means to date again, and you start thinking about who you're looking for, where to look for potential dates, and what you have to do to prep yourself for dating.

Dating takes some rethinking of how you use your time and how you want to present yourself. Quite frankly, if you haven't dated recently, the rules of the road have changed, and you need some time to learn what they are. This book is meant to be a guide to dating from renovating your dating skills and intuition to figuring out online dating to meeting people in new places. I also cover safety, which was probably not so important when you were in high school but is terribly important when you start meeting new people at this stage of your life.

Dating can be a lot of fun, and it's definitely a growth experience. Yes, it has its down moments and frustrations, but the upside is terrific. You can have a great romance, meet interesting people, learn a lot about yourself, and widen your horizons. Dating after age 50 (or at any age!) is worth the effort.

As you take on dating after some time out of the game, you need to evaluate your state of mind and body. I suggest that you work through some checklists to evaluate the emotional and physical state you're in now. This is ground zero because if you don't feel good about yourself, you'll transmit that feeling to everyone you meet, and it will undermine the possibilities that may have been there if you had come across as a self-confident person who is living a fulfilled life. You need to make sure that you can feel good about yourself before you even get fixed up, go online, or join a singles group.

Chapter contains some tools to help you review your state of mind, but in general, you have to attend to the following main aspects of your emotions:

• Let go of past failures or frustrations and assume you can do better. You also need to let go of the hold on your soul that people youve loved or lived with still have. Your past relationship may have left you with shrapnel in your heart or a beloved spouse may have died and left you sad and lonely. Life deals people grave losses and traumas, and no one, least of all this author, minimizes these losses. The challenge is to put them in a place that allows you to approach someone new full of optimism and energy for exploring a relationship. If youre not in emotional shape to do that, you have to work on your emotions until youre ready to open up to someone new.
• Get to a good place regarding your feelings about yourself. Youre older now and no longer have the face or shape of a 25-year-old. Of course, you know that rationally, but you have to find a way to feel good about who you are now. If you dont like the way you look, you can either do something about it (exercise, lose weight, and so on) or accept the belief that youre worth knowing and desiring just the way you are.