How to Get Married Over Forty

Calling all 40 Over Women. If you want to know how to get married (because it’s next to impossible) then start with this relationship help for older dating from the new book, How To Meet A Man After Forty (And Other Midlife Dilemmas Solved).

Take a look around you. How do you compare with other women over 40? Do you look good for your age (GFYA)? Or, do you look more like Every Inch Your Age, or EIYA? Because if you look EIYA, then will probably never have sex again, and you will definitely never ever get married. At least that’s what I got out of Shane Watson’s new book, How to Meet A Man After Forty, And Other Midlife Dilemmas Solved.

Categorizing women 40 plus into GFYA or EIYA is just the beginning of the book’s silliness. Check out her idea of a “midlife dilemma” (hot off the back cover):

• Should I wax my mustache?
• Am I told old for a leather jacket?
• Am I having the right amount of sex?
• Am I good for my age?
• Why do I hate my best friend?
• Am I turning into my mother?
• Can I be single and happy?
• Is it just me, or is life getting much, much weirder?

If those are midlife dilemmas, I’m a disposable cell phone. Clearly somebody’s been spending a little too much time shopping or sucking up fumes at the local nail salon.

Weird.

Are You A Natural or a Plastic?

The, so called, “Naturals,” (women who [stupidly] think they can age naturally) better start worrying. Plastic surgery and youth worship have so affected our perception of beauty, the author argues, that even though “The Plastics” (women who believe plastic surgery can stop aging – think [yikes] Faye Dunaway) might look “weird and inhuman” next them, “you [The Natural] look crumpled and saggy and ill…the exhausted old crone who let herself go.”

By way of supportive evidence, she later informs us, “there is a cutoff age—let’s call it 38 for the sake of argument—after which some men think single women should be supplied with gray uniforms and kept in camps on the outskirts of towns so that they don’t interfere with normal, healthy interaction between the sexes.”

Oh, oh, now I’m feeling insecure being the dreaded Natural Camp. I sure hope she’s joking but then again, how can she be? She’s not funny.

Weirder.

Some Things You Must Know to Get Married

Her advice on friends gets down to editing out the ones that make you look old or bad (because they’re better at something than you – those “showoffs”).

If challenged about being single at your age, lie. Here are some suggestions: “Who says I’m single?” Or, “Well, it could be that I shouldn’t have spent the nineties on Easter Island.”

She unravels such mysteries as:

• Do men prefer heels? (They “adore” them)
• Do men like underwear to match (“It’s a bummer, but they do.”)
• What do men make of unfitted or unisex clothes (“Men just don’t get clothes that have no desire to be sexy.”)

Tips for Turning A Date Into A Mate

If that isn’t helpful enough, she really shines with her advice for turning a date into a mate (or at least a second date). The key, she warns, is to not be so intimidating – “tone it down, way down.” For all you professional powerhouses out there who have forgotten what that means:

• Smile
• Forget your work
• Don’t take control (at least not all the time)
• Don’t tower over him (if you’re taller)
• Keep it light
• Don’t sound like you’ve done it all
• Go easy on the irony (he might not get it and it may come across as nasty)
• Laugh a lot, “like a madwoman”
• Be intensely interested in everything he says
• Don’t talk about yourself, unless pushed and then keep it brief
• Disappear at some point (create a little mystery)
• Make him responsible for you (Say, “Would you get me a drink?” Or, “Would you let me lean on you while I do up my shoe?”)
• Flirt with other men (while still making sure he knows he’s number one)

Get Married And You’ll Be An Expert Too!

Watson’s claim to relationship gurudom rests with the fact that she got married for the first time in her mid-forties. Apparently, this single act is so improbable, so verging on impossible, that it’s enough to launch her to “iconic status.”

At the end of the book we learn she married an older guy (“men get better with age”) with three teenagers. Hmmm, all that doing-every-thing-it-takes-to-not-look-40-ever and then acting like nothing’s changed since the fifties only to end up as a Stepmom who has mastered the art of making drop-scones?

Weirdest.

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