Revising Mrs. Robinson: Navigating Cougar-Cub Dating and Relationships

Copyright © 2016 Suzanna Mathews.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-2665-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-2666-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016905197

Archway Publishing rev. date: 8/25/2016

Contents

Prologue

Introduction

1.   Who You Calling Cougar?

2.   Hunting Grounds

3.   Kitty Needs To Scratch: Desire And Drive On The Hunt

4.   Cougar/Cub Communication

5.   Cougar Rules

6.   Inside The Cubs Club

7.   Look, Mrs. Robinson, I Don’t Mean To Be Rude, But …

8.   Cougar Love And Cougar Moves

9.   Cougar Traps

10.   Cougar/Cub Protocol

11.   The Cougar/Cub Relationship: Socio-Cultural Dynamics

12.   Ageism, Sexism, And The Cougar Taboo

13.   Ageism And Sexism: Relationship Double Jeopardy

14.   Stigmatization And Social Class

15.   This Milf Is Someone Else’s Mama

16.   Purr, Growl, Hiss, And Roar: Mantras For Conscientious Cougars

Conclusion

For Dexter’s master

Desire is like the sun—it nurtures, it burns. Its heat is irresistible. It takes us out of ourselves even as it takes us deeper into ourselves. By cultivating and understanding our desires and their satisfactions, we connect to our deepest nature, to the sensuality of life and to each other.

—Kim Cattrall, Sexual Intelligence

I don’t ask for your pity but just for your understanding—not even that—no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

—Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth

PROLOGUE

The plane had just landed in Denver. It was a full flight, and the passengers didn’t hesitate a moment to unbuckle their seatbelts and jump to their feet to collect their bags from the overhead bins—except for the young man sitting next to me. His body had been slumped forward, barely moving during the nearly two-hour flight. When the beverage cart had come by, he hadn’t even looked up.

Now, his twentysomething buddies—seated across the aisle and in the seat behind him—prodded him. He begrudgingly came to life, as if he might never recover from whatever his weekend in Las Vegas had entailed. The guys lamented having to return to work the next day, that their weekend of fun was over. They reveled in the fresh memory of their raucous time. Then they turned on the most exhausted member of their party: Dude, one of his friends joshed, you ditched us for a woman old enough to be your mother!

This book is written for all the women who’ve heard—or fear hearing—the words, You’re old enough to be his mother.

INTRODUCTION

All we want is to be happy, to feel secure, to feel understood.

—Jennifer Lopez

During the final stretch of researching and writing this book, I was driving in my car, listening to the radio. A female DJ bridged the transition between the end of a song and a commercial break. Top 40 stations often dabble in celebrity gossip as filler as they move in and out of the programming blocks, and this DJ reported that Jennifer Lopez and her backup-dancer boyfriend, Casper Smart, had broken up. Lopez was in her early forties; Smart was twenty-six. The female DJ’s nasally reassurance was hasty: That’s okay; he’s too young for her anyway!

While we don’t expect insightful, informed cultural commentary from radio personalities, her squeaky dismissal got under my skin for being both too easy and cliché and for being—well—prejudiced. I couldn’t restrain myself from an eye roll.

What if she had been talking about a different couple? What if, instead of the word young, we substituted another adjective? If she had said he was too black for her, too gay for her, too disabled for her, too rich for her, too poor for her, or anything of that kind, the radio station hot line would have lit up like a Christmas tree. But no one’s pulse will quicken, nor will tempers flare (except maybe mine) over he’s too young for her. The statement reflects a culturally acceptable prejudice—that people should be in love with people who are approximately the same age that they are. And that we (the public) know what’s good for celebrities. (This is also an outrageous assumption, if you think about it.)

But bring up the subject of a romantic relationship between a younger man and an older woman, and you’re likely to hear some outright name-calling in response: cradle robber, May-December romance, MILF, Mrs. Robinson, and sugar mama are among the labels you might be called if you’re actually in such a relationship. Disgusting and weird are among the harsher descriptions I’ve overheard.

Labels like these reflect varying degrees of judgment and even disdain. Many of them simply express the cognitive dissonance (the mental conflict, confusion, or disconnect) that the onlooker experiences when encountering the older woman/younger man couple. But none has had quite the cultural sticking power as the term cougar.

If you’ve picked up this book, you likely already know—or have some idea—what a cougar and a cub are. The bigger question for someone involved in such a relationship is how should they navigate the special challenges and opportunities of their relationship? It was a question I found myself faced with over four years ago when, shortly after filing for divorce, I became the object of unexpected attention from men in their mid-twenties. It was thrilling, puzzling, and a wee bit intimidating.

Was I the only woman this was happening to? (No, as it turns out.) Where was the how-to manual for how to respond? As a dating coach, my bookshelves were lined with dating-advice books and self-help relationship books. But not one said anything about relationships with younger men. Or about how to reenter a dating market that has always favored youth and beauty when one is an aging, almost-single woman.

This lack of attention (and my observation that the attention that is given tends to be full of shallow, sexual hype and salaciousness) has prompted me to seek to fill this void. There is, in my opinion, a dual void—one of understanding or acceptance and one of information.

To gain a better understanding of the challenges of intergenerational relationships, I turned to two distinct sources for information: (1) the academic research—you will notice a number of academic and expert sources from the fields of anthropology, biology, communications theory, psychology, neuroscience, and the social sciences cited in the coming pages; and (2) the women and men who have experienced these relationships. Through numerous personal and phone interviews, they graciously agreed to allow me to share their stories; I have changed their names to protect their privacy.

If you have ever been the older woman in an intergenerational relationship and felt awkward, confused, embarrassed, ashamed, or condemned … this book is for you.

If you have ever been the older woman in an intergenerational relationship that didn’t blossom as fully as it could have because of social stigma … this book is for you.

If you have ever been the older woman in an intergenerational relationship and found your character, your patience, and your beliefs about love put to the test … this book is for you.

There are certainly more middle-aged men who are dating women decades younger than there are middle-aged women dating men a decade(ish) younger. This book is not for those men. That phenomenon has been observed, mocked, documented, and accepted. This book is, admittedly, for a romantic minority.

One need not be an older adult to want to join the discussion. One need be only a middle-aged adult to chafe at the myths and stereotypes about aging that are deeply entrenched in American society. As Barrie Robinson, a professor who studies aging at UC Berkeley, points out, Even those who would not say that they are ageist probably have some ageist attitudes based on distorted or inaccurate information.

What attitudes am I referring to exactly? According to a survey of adults cited in Roseanne Rosen’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Living Together, (a practical resource that even a non-idiot needn’t be ashamed to read!) only 2 percent of respondents said, It’s okay for a wife to be older. While the survey didn’t ask if it’s okay for a girlfriend to be older, one might surmise that the responses would fall along the same lines. Our awareness of this attitude can make it extremely challenging for even the most enlightened and progressive older woman/younger man combo to carry out their relationship.

Everyone has his or her own unique erotic tastes. Culturally, we’re much more accustomed to images of older men with younger women.

Women, in fact, display much more erotic plasticity (the ability to be stimulated by a wider range of stimuli) than men, according to sex expert Jesse Bering, author of Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us. A female’s developing sexuality is more fluid than a male’s from an early age; what the man imprints as erotic and attractive tends to get set at a young age and remains fairly calcified. Girls and women are less likely to get locked on a specific idea of what they find attractive. A good question for Bering would be whether the younger man in an intergenerational relationship exhibits a more malleable attraction template or if his attraction template got set to older women at a young age. We’ll explore attraction factors further in a later chapter.

But take, for example, Maurice, who says he has always liked older women (as long as they don’t look like they could be his mother!). He recalls that even when he was thirteen or fourteen years old, he was attracted to older women. When he was in his mid-thirties, he dated a woman in her mid-forties, and at his current age of forty, he’s been out with a woman of fifty-seven. As a man, he’s only mildly (but not meanly) teased by friends for his unique attraction and certainly doesn’t concern himself with notions of erotic plasticity or think to question his erotic tastes. The men I encountered in my research tended to be less affected by peer teasing than their older female partners.

Bering’s phenomenon of erotic plasticity is helpful, but it doesn’t explain or excuse the biased attitudes and responses toward the older woman/younger man relationship. And it can be a storm cloud over a relationship if a person is told and believes that the object of his or her arousal is socially inappropriate.

My hope is that if you can increase your knowledge and diminish your fear, you will have better relationships, regardless of your chronological age or individual maturity level. Think of this as a primer on the fundamentals of cougar/cub dating.

Many people have wondered why I chose such a niche topic for my first book. I’ve been interested in women’s studies and feminist issues since the early 1990s, but the idea for my particular angle on this book came from hearing a sermon from my minster, a highly educated, spiritually sophisticated black American who shared how a lifetime of messages of inequality and inferiority had been directed inward in his youth. Indeed, social scientists have observed a phenomenon of internally-reinforced disenfranchisement among African Americans who suffer from internalized messages of racism, even after laws were enacted and policies changed to provide for their civil rights and freedoms.

Although the pressures of the intergenerational relationship does not carry the same weight as the struggles experienced by those who lived through the civil rights movement, his comments merely set the wheels turning in my head. This dual reality of empowered on the outside but oppressed on the inside also may occur in the gay community. Think of the openly gay individual who may speak outwardly of empowerment but who has internalized a lifetime of homophobia from classmates, family members, or the media. Though her situation is probably less extreme (and I do not wish to make an apples-to-apples analogy here), an older woman in a cross-generational relationship with a younger man may absorb and unwittingly come to believe the ageist and sexist beliefs of her culture. And this can compromise her—spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and sexually. It’s my intention to call those ageist, sexist beliefs into question and ask whether they are relevant or useful in the cougar/cub relationship. (And that includes the terms I just used—cougar and cub—which have the advantage of being clear and simple but the disadvantage of being loaded words for some. More on that later.)

It is still far more common for women to pair up with older men than with younger men. According to a Huffpost Living article posted April 7, 2014, men averaged 2.4 years older than their female partners among Facebook couples. This is not a significant age gap, of course. The Facebook study found that the age gap tends to increase among older couples, whereas younger couples tend to be closer in age. Analysts attribute that to the school effect, where young people are more likely to meet in high school and college. Nothing surprising here, so what about other measures?

A look at census data shows that the number of marriages between women who are at least five or ten years older than their spouses is small; with 5.4 percent having a five-year gap and 1.3 percent having a ten-year gap. But both rates doubled between 1960 and 2007, according to an October 2009 New York Times article. These figures don’t exactly point to a dramatic trend but probably belong in the cluster of changes that came about during the decades when women entered the paid workplace en masse.

Since the census data only reports on marriage, and many older woman/younger man relationships do not progress to marriage, it gives an incomplete picture, at best, of the cougar/cub chronicle. A whole story unfolds before vows and rings are exchanged and names are changed. More frequently, a whole story unfolds without vows, rings, and name changing. A growing number of single middle-aged and older women have been married, divorced, and are dating without any intention of remarrying or even cohabitating. They are part of a postmarriage culture in which a large number of women aren’t even getting to the dating (courtship) stage with their younger companions.

I don’t assume that you have designs to marry your younger boyfriend or have his child. I only assume that you are seeking happiness, fulfillment, and support—as we all are—and that you are probably in new territory if you’re in your first (so far) intergenerational relationship. The first thing you might want to figure out is if you like and will use the term cougar. Let’s explore that.

CHAPTER 1

WHO YOU CALLING COUGAR?

It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.

—W. C. Fields

To be a cougar is to be uncommon. And to be a cougar/cub wife and husband is rarer than rare. According to 2012 Census Bureau data, 85.9 percent of husbands are older than or about the same age as their wives. A little over half of all husbands are at least two years older than their wives. This is commonplace; it is socially acceptable, and it is biologically justified. We’ll explore all that later.

The first question I needed to explore when endeavoring to write this book had to do with the name cougar. Where did that come from? What did it mean?

Pinpointing the exact origin of the use of the term cougar proved to be a hunt for a linguistic needle in a haystack. I like to speculate that some stand-up comic threw it in his act, or TV writers had a real roar about sticking it in a script. Who knows? But the word caught on. It was fun to say, rolling off the tongue with its hard C and growling R. It sounded like what it was—sexy and fierce.

The whole cougar term has been a bigger thing in the media than it has been in my real life, says forty-one-year-old Cammy, whose partner is thirty-two-year-old Kirt. It feels like it’s meant to be derogatory, but I think the term is funny. Someone called me a cougar a few weeks ago at a family brunch, and there was this whole conversation about me being a cougar, so I just owned it. As far as I see it, I’m doing okay. I’m a forty-one-year-old woman who has this sweet young man! He cooks, he cleans, [and] takes care of the house; he does the man stuff and the domestic stuff!

Cammy’s approach—rolling with the punches and not letting the label get her down—is one adopted by a number of women to whom I spoke. Some women, like sixty-one-year-old Shelly, were dating younger men before there was even a term for it. I was a cougar before they had cougars, says Shelly. I kind of laugh and joke about it, but I don’t think it’s a positive label. It sounds like the woman is pursuing [the younger man], forcing herself on him, and I have never done that. I don’t even look at them! Instead, they typically have pursued her.

Penelope is much more put out by the term cougar than Cammy is. I’ve been called that, but I hate the term cougar, she says. It implies [the] women are after someone to have sex with or the men are after someone to support them.

Aryn doesn’t like the term either. "It comes across as desperate and predatory. And the term cub doesn’t give the man any credit in choosing the relationship. It treats him like a child. He’s a grown, adult man. Those two terms show exactly what’s wrong with society’s perception."

While you may not love the cougar label, it’s hard to leave it. There are cougar cruises, cougar beauty pageants, cougar-themed sitcoms, and cougar/cub online dating sites. It begs the question: "Is pop culture responding to a bona fide phenomenon, or are ‘regular’ women taking encouragement from a few celebrity cougar/cub relationships held up for our scrutiny and inspection? Are they saying, ‘If [a famous actress or pop star] can have one, why can’t I?’"

There are cougar pop stars—Mariah Carey, Cher, Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, Tina Turner.

There are cougar comics, such as Kathy Griffin.

There are cougar socialites, such as Ivana Trump.

There are cougar reality-show stars: Kris Jenner, Adrienne Maloof, Sonja Morgan, Linda Hogan.

There are cougar actresses: Demi Moore, Halle Berry, Lisa Bonet, Joan Collins, Geena Davis, Bo Derek, Deborah Lee Furness, Eva Longoria, Julianne Moore, Susan Sarandon, Sharon Stone, Robin Wright.

There are cougar models-turned-TV personalities, like Heidi Klum.

There are cougar/cub film and television characters. In the movie Class, Andrew McCarthy’s character has an affair with his best friend’s mother, played by Jacqueline Bisset. Joan Collins plays the titular character in the movie The Bitch. An enduring favorite of modern young men is Stiffler’s mom (played by comedic diva Jennifer Coolidge), who gets nasty with one of his buddies in American Pie. My personal favorite was the perpetually sexually amped-up Samantha Jones, who dates a young stud named Smith in the HBO show Sex and the City. And I’m excited to welcome the more recent additions of Abby and Will in Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce, Camilla and Hakeem in Empire, and Lydia and Jimmy in Significant Mother.

There are also famous cougar authors: Candace Bushnell (who wrote the book that Sex and the City was based upon) and Joan Collins.

Perhaps it is these women or women like them whom Maurice is thinking of when he says, "The media has almost glamorized older women dating younger men. Where it used to be taboo, it’s almost, well, not a fad, but glamorous!"

But the average working woman in middle-class America may not relate to these celebrity women. The noncelebrated are at varying places along the spectrum of being rich and gorgeous, and they are presumably unaccustomed to the slings and arrows of public opinion that are shot at celebrities from TMZ and other gossip rags.

Like me, you are probably a normal woman with a career or a calling to pursue, kids to raise (or check in with, if they’re already raised), neighbors to maintain hedgerow relations with, households to run, and aging parents to support. You are not impervious. You have no managers or publicists to issue statements about respecting our right to privacy or how happy and grateful this new relationship has made you and your partner. You did not make $17 million on your last blockbuster film or hit song or global tour. Yes, money is cold comfort, but it is some comfort when weathering the behind-the-back vitriolic comments, under-the-eyelids looks, and outright stares that can come with intergenerational dating.

I can only speculate how the cougar moniker actually came about.

One answer is that it’s efficient. Throughout this book, I use alternative terms (cross-generational