Geezer Dates

by Simone Westfall — May 29, 2007

I was having dinner with a friend last night when the subject of fudging your age in personals ads came up. He had recently been dating a woman who claimed to be 45 (his age), but after about six weeks he found out that she was really 60. "She was in exceptionally good shape," he added.

"And how did you find out her real age?" I asked.

"There were certain chronological events that didn't add up when it came to talking about her kids," he explained. "That and the fact that she'd mentioned dating Bobby Kennedy."

After some discussion, we decided that it was probably okay to stretch the truth by up to five years, one way or another, but lopping off more than a decade was surely asking for trouble.

Which brings me to the topic of geezer dates, of which I've had about three in my busy online career, and these are the ones that surely enrage and befuddle me the most. I believe it is true, as everyone's mom or grandma reminds you at some point during your life, that there is indeed someone for everyone, but I'm simply not ready for a someone with liver spots (unless he has copious amounts of cash, looks like Sean Connery, or is possessed of ageless wit and charm).

The hands-down blue-ribbon-prize-winning geezer date, let's call him George, came into my life via Match.com. He claimed to be 56 and posted a rather fuzzy photo with his online profile. George first approached me, assuring me that we'd have a lot in common as we are both writers. We chatted on the phone, and he sounded to me like a diehard West Village leftie, not my type at all. But George was persistent ("Oh, come on, what's the harm in meeting?") and so finally I agreed to accompany him to a production of an Off-Broadway play I'd been wanting to see ("Bug," now a movie with Ashley Judd) and a drink afterward.

As soon as I spotted George in the theater lobby--or, rather, he spotted me because I would never have recognized him from his photograph--I knew we were going to have problems. In his photo, he had some hair; in real life, he had a mere fringe above the ears. And the vast domed expanse that covered the rest of his pate was riddled with a constellation of spots that rivaled the density of Cassiopeia on a clear night in August. He had to be in his early seventies, at least. I was furious, but suffered through the play and even managed a drink afterward (another strike against him, aside from shaving a decade and a half off his time on this earth, was that he had trouble finding the "nifty little downstairs bar" he wanted to show me, and so we wound up trudging up and down several freezing streets on a January night before finally locating the place).

The next day I sent him a note, politely thanking him for the play but adding that I didn't think we were a match. He wrote back, saying, "I think you would get a better response from men if you posted a more honest picture of yourself."

At which point I let loose with stream of invective that would make Alec Baldwin blush and added his name to my list of blocked senders.

It's not that I have anything against age, honestly--I'm going to be there some day myself--but there has to be a limit to how much you can mislead people, especially people with whom in time you might have it in mind to share a bed.

Simone Westfall is the pen name of a novelist and critic in New York City. To read all of Simone's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.