The Children’s Hour: What Dating Guys in Their 20s Taught Me About Myself

It’s a gorgeous spring day in Brooklyn and I’m sitting in a pedicure chair at the nail salon, stoned out of my mind. My 21-year-old daughter just texted me “how do i file my taxes, like is there a website” at the same time a 25-year-old I met on Hinge texted “how do u feel about rough sex?” 

A year earlier I would have been hunched over my dining table on a Saturday morning, nursing my third cup of decaf and working on a jigsaw puzzle, listening to Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me! and scolding my cats when they knocked puzzle pieces to the floor in a bid for my attention. This was all I wanted, I told people. I had zero interest in dating.

My friends, however, weren’t buying it. “This whole NPR and cats thing is pathetic,” said one. “You need to get under someone so you can get over your ex.”

“I am over him!” I protested. But she was right—I had yet to get under anyone else.

“Listen—you’re hot, and it’s not going to last,” said another. “What are you, 42? Quit wasting time.”

“Forty-six,” I mumbled, pulling out my phone and scrolling for photos to post on one of the apps I’d sworn never to activate again. When it asked what age range I was looking to match with, I hesitated.

At 23, I’d fallen in love with a 40-year-old. I was modeling for a life drawing class and he drew my waist a little smaller, my boobs a little bigger, and my face a little prettier than I thought they were. That was all it took—two years later, we were married. Ten years and two kids after that, we got divorced and I immediately jumped into a relationship with another 40-year-old. (This time, at least, it was more age-appropriate.) On the heels of that breakup, I fell for a guy who claimed to be 45 on his OkCupid profile, but who turned out to be 50. 

“You wouldn’t have messaged me back if I’d said how old I am!” he said when he came clean on our second date. He was right, I wouldn’t have. Unfortunately, it was too late. I liked him.

The result of this serial-older-man dating, it dawned on me now, was that I’d never dated a man in his 30s at all.

Age range: 25-39, I entered in Hinge, Bumble, and Feeld, skewing downward for good measure. I uploaded the flirtiest photos I could find: me being held aloft by two shirtless cowboys on the Las Vegas strip, me in a bikini before the Coney Island Polar Bear Plunge, me after a run, cheeks flushed and sweaty spandex clinging to every curve. I described my perfect day as “getting super high and going out to dinner with you at 5 p.m. like we are senior citizens” and my dating goals as “summer lovin’, let’s have a blast.”

It worked.

My first conquest was 39, the top of my preferred age range, but his boyish manner (emoji-filled texts, a loose grasp on spelling, playfully calling me “ma’am,”) won me over. An actor who’d recently quit his day job after landing a three-episode arc on an HBO series, he lived with several roommates. This seemed adorable until I slept over and had to pee at 3 a.m. Pulling on my underwear and thin cardigan for modesty’s sake, I tiptoed into the hallway only to find the lone bathroom’s door closed, a crack of light underneath indicating that it was occupied. 

I shivered and shifted from one foot to the other, wondering how long someone could possibly spend in the bathroom at that hour. I heard the unmistakable sound of a shower curtain being pulled back and a faucet being cranked on. My heart sank. The actor poked his head out of his room. “Everything okay?”

“I think your roommate is taking a shower,” I said apologetically, unsure why I felt guilty in this situation. 

When I told the story to a friend the next day, she shook her head. “Elizabeth, you’re too old for this shit. You cannot date a man who has roommates.”

Nor could I date the man who tossed me a washcloth with the words “cum rag” embroidered on it after we had sex. “My buddies gave it to me as a joke,” he explained. He also owned a giant stuffed Minion, which loomed over me as I cleaned myself up. I kept swiping.

The 34-year-old who had a studio apartment decorated with baseball pennants and who proudly showed me the marijuana plant growing in his closet was undeniably cute, but a no-go as well. “These men are in their 30s, but they act like they’re 23,” I complained to a friend. “I’m starting to feel like a predator.” 

Sometimes, I just felt like their mother—like the morning I got dressed and made the bed while my date from the night before was showering. He gaped at me when he came back, pausing midway through toweling off his curls. “You made my bed,” he said, eyes wide. I called a Lyft and vowed to stop spending nights with my dates, whom I’d started to call “The Children” when I told my friends about them.

Nevertheless, I persisted. I slept with a 28-year-old I met in a bar playing darts and realized I didn’t necessarily have to rely on the apps. The city seemed to be teeming with young men eager to be ravished by 40-something women—but the novelty was starting to wear off for me. I hadn’t done a jigsaw puzzle in ages, and the cats looked resentful every time I walked out the door.

A 23-year-old on Hinge responded to my two-cowboys-holding-me-in-the-air photo, saying, “Can I pick you up by myself?”

“Probably with just one arm,” I replied, zooming in on his profile photo. His biceps were the size of my head.

“I hope we’re talking about the same arm,” he answered, followed by an eggplant emoji.

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” I wrote.

“Who’s Pete? Should I be nervous?” he asked. I didn’t reply. 

A few days later he followed up. “Did Pete take you away from me?”

Several months into my dating misadventures, I hosted a holiday party and invited my ex-husband, with whom I’ve stayed on friendly terms. (We share two children and a long history, after all.) “I finally found out what it’s like to fuck someone 17 years younger than me,” I told him in my crowded living room after a couple glasses of wine, puffed up with bravado.

“It’s not so great, is it?” he said, to our friends’ great amusement and my chagrin. Touché.

I couldn’t bring myself to sleep with everyone I went out with. One that didn’t make the cut, a teacher who was barely out of school himself, folded his lower lip down on our first date to show me a tattoo that read, spicy. I told him I needed to go home. He walked with me to my subway stop and asked if he could kiss me. The Children, I’d discovered, like to ask first. I was trying to get used to this.

I had a vision of 80-year-old Elizabeth wishing she’d let a 27-year-old kiss her when she’d still had the chance. For her sake, I consented. While he was kissing me, I felt the rumble of a train pulling in under my feet and longed to be on it. He moaned, grinding against me. All I could think about was how a friend had told me a story about her young son waking up with what she referred to as a “kindergarten boner.” I pulled away and hurried down the subway stairs.

Once I had so many Children in my queue that I messaged all of them to say I’d be at a certain karaoke bar that night at 10 p.m. They should turn up, I said, if they wanted to meet in person. “It’ll be like a group date on ‘The Bachelor,’” I told my friends who go every week. “They just don’t know it. A surprise group date!”  

Only one guy actually showed up, and when I introduced him to my friends, one of them couldn’t keep it together and collapsed into hysterical laughter. “How old is he again?” she snickered. I turned to him and shrugged, then spent the rest of the night fending off his advances.

What am I doing? I asked myself more and more often. Instead of questioning my motives, I got as high as I could, as often as I could—which brings me back to that spring afternoon stoned at the nail salon, juggling texts from my daughter and a man far closer to her age than to my own.

This one, I thought, seemed different from the rest. Sure, he wanted to know if I liked rough sex and sent me his share of dick pics, but he always asked first. He worked at an artisanal cheese shop, rode his bike everywhere, and carried an NPR tote bag. He seemed sweet. At 25, he was also the youngest of The Children so far. I was willing to give it a try. I am still young. I am fun. I am hot. I am not wasting it, I repeated to myself.

I met up with him after church one Sunday evening. We strolled through the park, sharing a joint and chatting about Brooklyn real estate and skyrocketing rents (an evergreen topic). He told me he’d just moved into his own place, no roommates, and asked if I wanted to see it.

You can do this, I pep-talked myself as I kicked my shoes off in the hallway outside his apartment. Soon we were pressed up against each other on the couch, his tongue in my mouth, his bare skin so hot against mine that I wondered if he might be coming down with something. I suppressed an urge to lay my hand on his forehead and ask if he was feeling all right. Clearly, he was feeling well enough. 

In spite of his earlier inquiry as to whether or not I liked rough sex, he was quite gentle—that is, until he pulled out of me, came all over his chest and growled, “Now lick it up!” I was about to comply when he put his hand on my shoulder and said earnestly, “But only if you want to.”

When I told this story to my friends later (and believe me, I relished telling it), I played it for laughs. Aren’t kids these days funny? Don’t they know that asking permission for every little thing kills the mood? My fellow Gen-Xers howled with delight. Yes, yes! The kids these days!

And it was funny. I had to swallow a giggle when it happened—but that was all I swallowed. Being given an out made me realize I didn’t actually want to “lick it up.” If he hadn’t stopped me, I’d have done as I was told. Now I saw that it was fine if I didn’t. He wasn’t going to get mad at me or think I was a prude. 

Pulling my clothes back on, I was flooded with relief I didn’t expect to feel. For all my talk about The Children, I had to admit that, in this situation at least, I was not the more mature party. I think I need a time-out, I told myself as I walked home through the magnolia-scented air.

Soon after, I deleted my dating apps, not just deactivating them but scrubbing them from the internet altogether. I was surprised to find that I immediately felt better, knowing my image was no longer out there to be swiped on by anyone, of any age. I was ready to grow up.

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