(Re)trouver l’amour après 40 ans
141. Finding (again) Love After 40
You are over 40 years old and would like to be in a couple but have the feeling that it’s more complicated to meet someone at this age.
You have the impression that your age penalizes you in dating, or that the people you meet often come out of a significant breakup, have family obligations and are less inclined to invest in a new relationship.
Or perhaps you have a desire for children and don’t know how to manage the biological clock challenge while giving yourself time to make connections.
Or finally you have the impression that apps are more for younger people, or that the people on them are a bit too “old” for you.
In this episode I will focus on the challenges specific to dating after 40.
If you’re coming out of a divorce you can also listen to episode 140 on how to bounce back after divorce. If you’re a single parent I invite you to listen to episode 100 on single parent dating challenges. And if you’ve been single for a while, there’s also episode 99 on getting out of long-term singlehood that you can consult.
Getting Older: A Barrier to Dating?
The belief I still encounter too often among the women I coach is the feeling that from a certain age your chances decrease in dating, because you think you’re less attractive than someone younger, because you’ve gained weight with age, because you have more aches than before. Let’s not lie to ourselves — there is still pressure around “ageism” towards women: look at women’s media or social networks and it’s everywhere, and there are also inequalities in terms of age gaps between men and women in relationships. My invitation is rather to see this constraint as an opportunity to make a better selection when choosing a partner:
- Do you want to feel scrutinized because of your age, or because you’re aging within the relationship?
- Do you want to be chosen only for your physical appearance?
- Do you want a partner who drops you at the slightest setback or health issue? In that case, this filtering is actually beneficial for you too. Meeting someone at 40 can really be a wonderful opportunity to check whether you share the same vision of aging — in terms of health, diet and exercise — and that’s not a minor thing, because this aspect will take up more and more space in your respective lives and in your relationship.
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The Forties: The Second Boom of Singlehood
With a divorce rate of nearly 50%, the end of your thirties and the beginning of your forties is often the age range when couples separate or divorce, and many people become single again.
These singles already have experience, meaning they have had a first long relationship, with both its positive and negative sides, and often take time to reflect: understanding why the relationship didn’t work, what they would do differently, possibly redefining their vision of the couple, identifying their share of responsibility and changing it. This potentially increases the chances of having healthier, more fulfilling relationships.
So, contrary to what many of my coached clients think, meeting someone at 40 is a real opportunity to meet someone who really wants to build a healthy relationship and who is also ready to question themselves.
My advice here is to check whether the person you meet has truly worked through their grief, learned from their last relationship, and is putting changes into practice in their behavior or way of relating.
Challenge Your Choice of Partners
There are two scenarios I encounter quite often among my coached clients over 40 that, in my view, can lower your chances of meeting the right person for you.
The first scenario is a person approaching forty who hasn’t yet had a long relationship, who wants to start a family and who, by default, rules out people who are divorced or already have children — either out of fear of the demands of a blended family, because the person hasn’t grieved their previous relationship, or because they no longer want children.
Rather than judging the person on their status, my invitation is to form a more nuanced opinion of that person’s situation, by looking for example at:
- Has this person truly worked through the grief of their relationship?
- How is co-parenting going with the mother/father of their child?
- Is this person capable of giving — does this person actually give — a real place to your relationship (in terms of time, priority…)?
- Is this person open to having other children?
And then challenge your assumption against the potential advantages of such a relationship:
- You get to experience life with a child without necessarily carrying the full responsibility.
- If you want children yourself, there may be fewer obstacles to starting quickly on the baby project, since a form of family life already exists.
I had the example of a coached client who didn’t necessarily want children herself, but who met a partner with children, and through this she was very happy to experience life with a child without the responsibility that had originally made her give up having her own. By challenging this assumption, she opened the door to a very beautiful relationship with her partner and their child.
The second scenario I often encounter is women who forbid themselves from choosing partners younger than them, because of their age and their desire to start a family. Here I invite you to use the same reasoning as before — that is, to form an opinion of the person rather than exclude them based on age alone:
- What is this person looking for in a relationship?
- How does this person envision having children? What is their timeframe?
- What is their life experience? What is their emotional maturity? Because ultimately it isn’t age but experience that brings maturity.
- What is their view on age gaps, on aging?
- How much importance does this person place on their partner’s physical appearance? Can this person accept that their partner may age faster than they do?
Verify Your Level of Expectations
I already touched on this in episode 126 on how to make friends as an adult. With age you can get the feeling of being compatible with fewer people, because your values are more defined, your tastes and habits are more set, what you want and what you don’t want — and in love, as in friendship, this requires you to appreciate the other person’s differences, to see them more as an enrichment than a constraint, and to learn to focus on what unites you.
To give you an example, I have a coached client who found love at 65. Her partner had chosen to live in a motorhome to explore Europe. At first she saw this as a big difference in standard of living — she was used to more luxurious vacations. She also wanted to break out of her routine now that she was retired. Once she looked past that, she actually saw that this way of traveling also met her need for a richer, more varied, more discovery-oriented, more fun life — so that ultimately the difference in the luxury aspect of travel mattered less than what united them: discovery and variety. And she could still treat herself to luxurious getaways whenever she wanted.
The Necessary Condition: Clearing Out Your Old Baggage
Whether you’re still single at 40 or coming out of a long relationship at 40, this is the ideal time to do deep work on your way of relating and on the influence of your past experiences on your love life, before entering a new relationship and in particular to take stock of:
- The cause of your long-term singlehood, or the reasons for your last breakup
- The influence of your past on your way of relating
- Which relational skills have been hardest for you to put into practice, and how to learn them.
To understand how your past influences your love relationships, and why it’s stored in your body, you can watch my free webinar that explains “How to free yourself from your love patterns and finally be happy in love?“
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Love has no age — at 40 you can still live a beautiful relationship for 60 years.
I’d like to end this episode with a message from a former coached client, the 65-year-old one, who told me at the end of coaching: “The only thing I regret is not having done this deep work sooner. If I had done it at 40, I would already have had 25 years of a happy relationship. It changes your life!“
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Love has no age — at 40 you can still live a beautiful relationship for 60 years.
I’d like to end this episode with a message from a former coached client, the 65-year-old one, who told me at the end of coaching: “The only thing I regret is not having done this deep work sooner. If I had done it at 40, I would already have had 25 years of a happy relationship. It changes your life!“
Going further
If you want to deepen the subject and identify your own love patterns, you have my book Opening up to love, available in all bookstores.
This deep work, you do of course in the Opening up to love program.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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