Learning to be less concerned about what others think

Do men really prefer younger women rather than women their own age when looking for potential partners? This question came up at a recent couples' dinner party where the men sat talking together at one end of the table about cars, motorcycles and the stock market and the women sat at the other end talking about work, leadership, and eventually movies and television series. At one point one of the women brought up a recent survey that purportedly says that men really do prefer younger women rather than women their own age as partners; dating sites seemed to confirm this from their statistical data. Older women had a harder time finding a suitable partner on most dating sites because most of the men on the sites, even men their own age, preferred younger women. She thought that was very unfair to older women (namely women our age) and brought it up for discussion to the entire table of guests; the men wisely avoided the subject so the topic didn't get discussed much further. What should the men have said anyway? That it's not true? They cannot say that it's not true nor that it is true. Older men may be more interested in younger women than in older women on these dating sites, but no one really knows how the game plays out. Do the younger women actually go out with the older men? Or do they end up preferring men their own age?

What I found interesting is that any of the women sitting at that table would even care about this topic. All of them are in good relationships. All of them are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves financially if their husbands left them for younger women. They all make/made very good salaries and have good careers. Yes, it would be unfair, unkind, abominable, etc. if their husbands left them for younger women. We can all agree on that. My mother would have called them cads. But the women would survive. My major question is the following: why do women even care about what men think in this regard? Why do women need to see themselves in the eyes of men at all after many years of doing so? Because when you are younger you compete with other women for available men, you are looking for potential partners for marriage and children, you are looking for someone to perhaps take care of you financially, and so on. Competition is part of the picture when you are young. Much of this is built into who we are as human beings; the human race needs to continue and the instinct is to reproduce. That instinct leads to finding a partner with which to accomplish that. Men are looking for fertile women, and those women are usually young, under the age of fifty, because the childbearing years usually end around that time. Most young couples end up being together with partners their own age; some marry younger partners, some marry older. But the majority of young people marry within their own age group. So should older women be mad at evolution and the biology that renders women infertile after a certain point? Of course not. They shouldn't even be preoccupied with these thoughts after a certain point. Why should they? Why should they be at all preoccupied with what men or society at large think about them as older women? Trying to compete with younger women (or younger men in the case of older men) is just plain foolish. And if the older women I know, who are accomplished career women with no financial problems are concerned about this, then what about women who are less fortunate, financially or otherwise? 

My point is that older women should be less concerned about what men and society think of them and more concerned about enjoying their lives and their good fortune whether or not a man is in the picture. Nice if you have a good man with whom you can share your life, but what if there is no good man in the picture? Should you lay down and die? No. You should take your rightful place at the table of life; you've earned it. You should 'take up space', make your presence known, bring up your interests and hobbies, be yourself and live in harmony with yourself. Pursue your interests as far as they take you. If you have good health, be happy. Be happy in your own company. Take the trips you want to take by yourself. Do what you want to do. If you don't 'live' and merely wait around for a man to do these things with you, how long are you willing to wait? When will you do the things you want to do, when you are eighty years old? Forget about whether men will like you. Stop trying to mold yourself to please them. Don't define your worth in terms of whether you are together with a man or not. Why spend the last chapter of your life worrying about whether your husband would prefer being with a younger woman? If he leaves you for one, let him go, he wasn't worth hanging onto anyway. Look at your life as the adventure it really is, with its ups and downs and detours. It's your life, no one else's. I cannot imagine a worse fate than spending my entire life trying to mold myself to fit any man's preferences, rather than having lived my life being true to myself.