5 hours ago
9
I was raised on the scripture of the 1990s: Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen. It was the Golden Rule. The dating equivalent of Slip, Slop, Slap. Whispered at sleepovers. Bolded in the margins of Dolly magazine. Never pick up on the first ring. Never say you’re free on a Saturday. Be the prize, not the contestant.
In my 20s, this felt like power. (It was mostly fear in better lighting but I didn’t know that yet.) I mastered breezy indifference. I timed my texts to the minute: double the time he took, plus 10 for mystery. I thought I was teaching men my value. I thought I was training them to love me.
But I am 51 now. Looking back on that first year of dating after divorce at 50 – the apps, the profiles, the quiet violence of being matched and discarded by an algorithm – I realise something uncomfortable: I wasn’t training them. I was hiding.
There is a specific humiliation in dating at midlife that we rarely discuss: the dissonance between who we are in the world and who we become the moment a man with a nice jawline delivers the modern cruelty of the read receipt – the blue tick that confirms he saw your message, and chose silence.
In my real life, I am capable. I have interviewed politicians for the BBC. I have managed budgets. I have navigated the death of parents and the collapse of a marriage. I am a woman of substance. Yet give me a “maybe” from a man I met on an app, and I regress three decades. I stare at my phone. I debate the semiotics of an emoji with a girlfriend who is also a high-functioning professional. We analyse the silence like Kremlinologists.
Is he busy? Is he pulling away? Should I post a story to remind him I exist? It is excruciating. It is beneath us. And we do it because we are terrified.
We play these games at 50, not because we are arrogant, but because we are convinced our real selves are simply … too heavy. We have lived. We come with stretch marks and opinions. With ex-husbands and custody schedules and school WhatsApp groups that never sleep. With the quiet maths of rebuilding a life alone. With grief that sits just under the surface.
And, often, with a dangerous, unspoken need to be held. Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the same fear: If a man saw the full weight of us – he would run. So we perform. We wait three hours to text back. We say “I might be free later” when we have been free since Tuesday. We pretend we are at gallery openings when we are actually defrosting chicken and watching Succession for the third time.
We treat them mean because we think kindness reads as desperation in a woman our age. And the deeply annoying part is: it works. Beautifully. Just in the wrong direction. Treat ‘em mean is a filtration system for avoidants.
When you perform unavailability, you don’t attract secure men. Secure men don’t want a puzzle. They want a person. They want to know if you’re free on Friday so they can book a table. Play the game, and you attract the hunters – men who love the chase because the chase requires no intimacy. Men addicted to voltage. To uncertainty. To the spike.
I spent the last year attracting these men. I was excellent at it. Busy. Elusive. Apparently very keen-inducing. I kept them orbiting my indifference while I quietly starved for actual connection.
The uncertainty spikes your dopamine. We think it’s chemistry. It isn’t. It’s a stress response. The moment I dropped the act – the moment I said I like you – they vanished. Because I had broken the contract. I had stopped being a fantasy and started being a woman.
At 50-plus, the maths has to change. I don’t have the time to keep men keen. I don’t have the energy to manufacture mystery just to hold their attention. My mystery is real now. It lives in the life I’ve rebuilt. In the grief I’ve carried. In the resilience it took to still be standing here at all.
If I have to trick men into wanting me, I don’t want the win. Because the prize for winning that game is a relationship where I can never rest – where I must perform indifference day after day or the spell breaks.
So I am retiring the strategy. I am done auditioning for the role of Cool Girl. She was exhausting to play – and frankly, the reviews were mixed. I’m replacing her with a woman who texts back. Who says what she means. Who admits she wants to be held. It is a terrifying bet. It goes against 30 years of training. But I’m betting on this: The right man won’t want a challenge to conquer. He’ll want a partner to rest with. And God knows – I am ready to rest.
