I Dated Younger Men For Years. Here’s Why I’m Finally Hanging Up My Cougar Card.

This was the moment I swore off all the young dudes: waking up sore and tangled in steamy sheets after another late night of raunchy RV sex. Next to me slumbered the gorgeous, long and lean man who, at 31, was young enough to be my son. And judging by the firm, hot pressure against my thigh, he would soon be raring to go again.

“I can’t do this anymore, Mad Max,” I whispered, using the nickname I’d given him because of his nomadic life, his half-wolf malamute named Avalanche, and his battered and blacked-out truck with the giant tires.  

The reasons weren’t surprising. Aside from his Energiser Bunny sex drive, we faced the usual cultural disconnects that short-circuit May-December romances, from life-shaping events like 9/11 to misaligned musical tastes. The night before, I discovered he’d never heard of the iconic Mel Gibson roles in the original Mad Max and Road Warrior movies. The whole time we’d been dating, he’d assumed I named him after Tom Hardy’s character in the 2015 remake. It was another absurd example of how our experiences just didn’t fit together. It felt to me as if we were always trying, and failing, to complete a puzzle from the boxes of our respective lives. 

However, there was more to this ending, and it threw me because I’d been comfortably dating younger men for a long while, ever since my brutal divorce at 43, when I had a fling with a 28-year-old I called Jr. Mint. The perfect antidote to my divorcee despair, he looked like a vintage Ryan Gosling and smelled like Mentos candy. In bed, he was like a warm river with well-timed rapids. We basically binged each other for a few weeks, then moved on with fond farewells.

Soon after, I blasted off, literally, on the back of a Harley, arms wrapped around a hot contractor over a decade younger. 

It’s not that I wasn’t attracted to men my age and beyond: they were just so hard to find. If anything, younger men pursued me because I look and act younger than my age. Plus, MILFs will always be a thing.

Nevertheless, my Mad Max experience provoked a new rule: no more dating anyone I could’ve reasonably given birth to, which allowed a 13-year age gap with my next boyfriend, Jeff, a mature, successful single dad. We parted after a year, and a few months later, I met Scott, yet another man in his mid-40s. 

I gave it a go, but the ground was shifting. My age — formerly a kind of no man’s land between biological and chronological — began to matter. It was no longer “just a number.” And no amount of red-light therapy, collagen creamer, and cat/cow yoga poses could stave off this new horizon. 

All the while, I felt a new burden: going out wasn’t just about looking good, but looking younger. Work doubled; fun faded. Where once two products sufficed, it now took four. A spritz of hairspray didn’t cut it ― I needed root colour for greys and taming sticks for flyaways. Contouring wasn’t about sculpting cheekbones but cheating gravity. 

More importantly, our energy levels didn’t match. We may have looked around the same age, but we didn’t feel it. When Scott floated the idea of a rugged, six-hour hike, I felt a check-engine light go off in my knees. I’d sigh when he suggested dinner at 7:30, then a movie at his house. I’d calculate bedtime (at best, 1am), when what I really wanted was snuggling with lights out by 10. Sure enough, I’d fall asleep during the show. 

Ultimately, sex, too, became mismatched. It was more like a luxurious meal I wanted once or twice a week, not fast food every other night. And massage, once merely a warm-up act for sex, had become a satisfying intimacy all its own (at least for me). I came to see that at a certain point, the physical gap widens, then gapes. And sometimes this shift isn’t subtle, it’s seismic. 

My break-up with Scott was the most mature — and strange — I’d ever had. Sure, there were some annoyances as well as a few political conflicts. Maybe we could’ve worked them out. But the decade-plus divide bothered us both; our priorities and desires were on different timelines. I ran retirement numbers while he contemplated a starter home. I was redecorating my empty nest; he was shopping for his daughter’s school lunches. In the end, we accepted we were both on journeys, yet he had much further to go. It wasn’t anyone’s “fault.” 

Not long after, I came across Erik Erikksen’s Psychosocial Stages of Human Development. The theory posits nine stages in a lifespan, including when you’re uber social in your teens and 20s, or feeling the “squeeze” of family vs. career in your 30s and 40s. Each is marked by a central conflict that must be resolved for healthy personality growth. 

No matter how old you are, if you let it, a strange acceptance arrives with each stage. So I’m reframing growing older as an adventure — a new territory both frightening and intriguing. Now I want to explore it with someone at the same place on life’s path. 

The other day, I sat at a lunch counter beside a grey-haired man with a nice “older” face (turns out we were born a few months apart). With a weird joy, I noticed he was also squinting at the menu. I pulled out the glasses I usually hid out of regrettable shame, and we shared them, laughing about how everything from our elbows inward looks like it’s being viewed through a wet window. That sparked a sharing session about the silly indignities of aging, and I felt so free — the way I do with my female friends. I hadn’t known how guarded I’d been around men. Instead of feeling like my body was betraying me, I saw how I could accept the changes alongside someone who gets it on a gut level.

He invited me to see a band we both loved in our teens. “It starts early,” he said with a knowing smile. Who knows where this will go, but even if it’s just friendship, I’m excited about it.

I once measured love by how fast it moved. Now it’s about who’s beside me when the road starts to rise. 

Joelle Fraser is a MacDowell Fellow and author of two memoirs, The Territory of Men and The Forest House. Her award-winning work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and was recognised in Best American Essays. She is currently seeking agent representation for a memoir project. Follow her on Instagram @joellefraserreno. 

Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at [email protected].