by Jessica Leshnoff | Comments: 0
*Editor’s note: Names of a number of the interviewees have now been changed for privacy.
Annette Wheeler* didn’t recall the precise minute she first heard the definition of “cougar,” but she did keep in mind dashing to her computer to appear it. To her surprise and bemusement, there is a new term to explain exactly what she was indeed doing nearly all of her life — dating younger guys.
For several ladies, more youthful men — lots of them 15 years or even more their juniors — are a fit that is natural.
Wheeler, a redhead that is fiery lives outside Baltimore, leaned right back inside her seat and sighed. “i enjoy younger men,” the 60-year-old purred. “I liked more youthful dudes even though I became in senior school — like a or two younger year. I 
became a cougar before there have been cougars.”
Certainly, Wheeler’s pre-marriage and post-divorce dating history reads like a steamy screenplay. She listed a string of teenagers with who she had different relationships, periodically punching figures into a calculator to find out age distinctions she had never ever considered within the beginning. She never analyzed her attraction to younger guys (or their attraction to her), however with “cougar” an term that is increasingly popular to explain older women dating much younger men, her longtime preference is unexpectedly into the spotlight.
For Wheeler along with other ladies them 15 years or more their juniors — are a natural fit like her, younger men — many of. Boomer ladies are searching more youthful and feeling a lot better than ever. Widowed, separated, or divorced, a number that is growing teenagers for dating and companionship. And because males have now been dating younger ladies for ages, what makes a lot of of us surprised — shocked, even — that females would follow suit?
Love and Sex
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Confessions of a Cougar
Valerie Gibson, composer of Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating young guys, is perhaps all too knowledgeable about this standard that is double. The cougar that is self-proclaimed her first guide in the topic — Younger guys: where to find Them, Date Them, Mate Them, and Marry Them — 14 years back, “and without a doubt something,” she said in a whisper. “It caused an awful stir — and never a great one. Everyone was horrified. These people were positively horrified that older females should really be sex that is having more youthful males.”
When a lot of us think “cougar,” we visualize the greatest cougar associated with the giant screen: The Graduate’s renowned, martini-sipping Mrs. Robinson. These times, real-life cougars are stars like Demi Moore (whom, inside her 40s, married then-twenty-something heartthrob Ashton Kutcher), the coiffed cast that is reality-show of genuine Housewives of Orange County, and, yes, everyday women — suburbanites and city-slickers alike.
While there’s no denying that cougars are slinking to the conventional, there’s still a component of taboo surrounding these age-spanning relationships.
“It’s definitely considered creepier for ladies to venture out with younger men,” admitted Junie Smith*, a cougar that is 52-year-old lives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “For a 70-year-old guy to head out with a 40-year-old girl, rather than a 70-year-old girl heading out with a guy that is 40-year-old? A 70-year-old girl going away with a 40-year-old man is known as creepy.”
Why the standard that is double? Smith figured it comes down right down to science: “It most likely has one thing regarding the concentration associated with the types on procreation,” she quipped.
All clinical notions apart, older ladies decide for more youthful males for similar reasons that older men choose younger women.
“The mindset of experiencing a person that is youthful your supply who allows you to feel great, whom enables you to feel ageless, enables you to feel desired and desirable,” Gibson said.
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