Would you consider hiring an escort?

That’s what psychologist and “dating anthropologist” Patricia Thornton, Ph.D., considered when she re-entered the dating scene after a divorce. In this episode, hosted by Nancy Franklin, we learn about Thornton’s experiences dating more than 150 men and whether or not she eventually hired a male escort. Thornton offers great advice for elders reentering the dating scene, including dating outside the lines, and even embracing unconventional relationships.

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Music in this episode includes a selection from Tech Oasis on Pixabay.

Transcript

“Listener Discretion Advised, this episode contains strong language and mature content.

Pat Thornton:  I did not have a great sex life in my marriage, and it was like discovering who I was as a sexual being. And so that's being with lots of different people, and that's kind of fun.

Intro:  This is Crow's Feet, a place where we ponder the question, are these our golden years, or does aging just suck? Well, yes, getting older is not for the faint-hearted, but aging also brings wisdom and humor, a finely tuned perspective on life. In our podcast, you'll meet writers and others rethinking our later years, people who inspire us to reimagine our future.

Nancy:  Today you'll meet an older single woman who leaped into senior dating and even considered hiring an escort. Did she? And did it lead to finding Mr. Right?

Hi, I'm Nancy Franklin, your host for this week's Crow's Feet Life As We Age podcast. My guest today is Patricia Thornton, a psychologist and Crow's Feet writer on Medium, who writes under the name Ignore the Rules. She has appeared on the BBC and her story, titled I'm a Single Older Woman Who Is Considering Hiring a Male Escort“, was published in the Huffington Post.

Welcome, Patricia. You call yourself a sort of dating anthropologist. What does that mean exactly?

Pat:  An anthropologist, when they engage in research, they are called participant observers. So they're observing the culture that they're immersed in, but they have somewhat of a distance. And so when you approach dating, especially if you're not accustomed to dating, you're a little bit anxious about dating, you can approach it from the point of view of, okay, I'm just going to see what happens.

I'm going to explore this new culture. You know, obviously, when you meet someone new, you're learning about them, you're learning about yourself as you interact. Am I feeling anxious with them?

Am I feeling happy? Am I... You're just being very observant.

You might be observant of the situation. How are they interacting with, maybe if they're at a coffee shop with the barista? So you have some distance, though, and so you're not saying you are predicting an outcome.”

You're just there observing. So an anthropologist really just wants to immerse themselves in the culture with no idea about what the outcome will be. 

Nancy:  So I'm keeping you away from being present in the moment?

Pat:  You're extra present because you're pulling in all this data. You're looking at the surroundings. You are seeing how you feel when they say this, that you bring up something, but they're not responding well.

I think you're very much in the moment. But we cannot predict outcomes, right? We can only engage with life.

We do not know the outcome. And an anthropologist doesn't have a preset idea about what that anthropologist is going to find when they explore a new culture. You're just taking in information. You have no idea whether in this situation, you're talking about dating, whether the date will go well, whether you want to see them again. But you're just gathering information. You don't have to make a decision. You don't have to do anything other than be present and be aware.”

Nancy:   You've dated over 150 men.

Pat:  Yeah.

Nancy:  So I'm assuming you've done this dating anthropologist thing 150 times. First of all, why so many? And what did you discover about yourself and men and dating in the process?

Pat:  So I did this over the span of about eight years. I was married 28 years. I got divorced, not anticipating that I would really date again. I just needed to get out of that marriage. And I would have to say in the beginning, I don't think I applied the anthropologist perspective when I first started dating. I was I didn't know what I was figuring out. I had to learn about myself not being married. I was living in New York. I had my own practice.

I was just kind of, well, who am I as this person after raising a family? And that was a process of self discovery. So, yes, I think I applied sort of an introspection like, well, who am I? And feeling a little whiplashed about that. Well, how could I be this housewife type? I still had a career, but my career was always secondary.

Now my career was becoming primary and also dating. And I was just, well, what is this world of online dating? Because I dove in to the dating apps. Being on a dating app that really wasn't great for me, figuring out other dating apps, that kind of thing.

Nancy:  That's new for you, I imagine.

Pat:   Oh, yeah, I met my ex-husband like at a party, just randomly. There was an interesting like graph recently where they showed, you know, the difference between in like the decades of, you know, there were no dating apps. And now most people meet on dating apps.

So I discovered a lot about myself. I discovered, you know, what I wanted. Really, I did not have a great sex life in my marriage. And it was like discovering who I was as a sexual being. And so that's being with lots of different people, finding that out. And that's kind of fun.

Nancy:  Talk about that a little bit. Is it OK to have a one night stand or hit and run, as you call it?

Pat:   Yeah. I mean, you have to decide what's right for you. I refuse to say that I shouldn't like pleasure. And we have been sold a bill of goods as women, especially older women, that we're not supposed to experience pleasure. If you want to have sex, you should be able to have sex. If you want to go ballroom dancing, go ballroom dancing.

If you want to bake a cake, if you want to go on an adventure by yourself, it's pleasure. And I'm looking at all the ways that we have been told as women, because we're supposed to be the caretakers, you know, everybody else comes first. When we say, well, wait a minute, what about me?

I want pleasure in my life. And if sex is part of that, fine, let's have pleasure. I'm sure there are plenty of women that don't want a one night stand, but if you do, and you're just trying to discover who you are as a person sexually, let's say you haven't had sex in a long time for various reasons, you just want to experience that.

So go ahead, experience that.

Nancy:  Well, and most of us were raised in the June Cleaver, Tradwife era of this is what you did and no one talked about it.

Pat:   Right. I was raised in that era, but yes, there's a certain amount of dismantling of all those, that's why I say ignore the rules of how you're supposed to be in the world. Well, you know what?

We've got one life and longevity is in our favor, right? And so if we haven't done certain things because we were the dutiful wife and the dutiful mom, why not say, I want a life? I read this interesting statistic recently, which said that in women over 65 years old, half of women over 65 are unpartnered.

Nancy:  Wow.

Pat:   So what about us finding ways to be in relationships that could be a one night stand? It could be a casual friendship. It could be a committed monogamous marriage.

It could be a committed monogamous relationship, but you have living apart together. Like, let's open our minds to what it could be. We don't have to be the nurse with the purse, and we don't have to be just having one night stands. There could be something in between, many ways to do our lives. It's just not talked about. It's not encouraged.

We get labeled as, well, we're not caring people, or we're too selfish, or you're afraid of intimacy, and are you commitment phobic? Whatever label they want to put on, no, we have a choice to expand our way of being in the world and deciding who we need to be with and how we should live our lives. This is it.

You got the rest of your life. While you're willing and able, let's go. Let's just embrace what we want to do.

Let's experience pleasure.

Nancy:  So what would you say to a woman who's now looking at a divorce or has been widowed and she's confronted with dating apps? What's your advice for women in terms of using a dating app? How to go about dating?

Pat:   I can hear people say it's not safe and da da da. I mean, there are certain safety measures within apps now. So you, like for Bumble, for example, where I met my now partner, my boyfriend, but you can call and video chat within the app.”

You do not have to give out your phone number. You do not have to meet them if you're not ready to meet them, and you want to have these steps. You first are texting on the app, then you can talk, and then you can video chat. And you want to meet someone as soon as possible so that you're not catfished. You actually meet, you meet in a public place, and you meet for coffee. You meet for an hour.

That's it. You just do it. First steps, I would say, is someone should just create a profile. That would be the baby step. Just create a profile. You don't have to go on any dates yet. That helps them say, oh, well, what kind of person am I? How do I want to present myself and what am I looking for? And that is a huge step you need to take.

You don't just throw yourself out there. You have to cultivate who you are and who you're looking for. And you will change that as you experience being on the apps.

But I would just say, start with baby steps and just put yourself on the app. You have to figure what app is good for you, right? So some apps are better in certain geographical regions of the country. Some are better for this. Some are better for that. Depends on what you're looking for.

Nancy:  And there are apps for specific segments of society. So religion is something. There are apps for that. There are people who are looking for certain things. There are apps that cover that.

Pat:  Right. And their apps were seniors. When I was on that app years ago, I thought it was very ironic because the pictures were just so tiny and of all the other apps, they had bigger pictures.

I'm like, oh, but where is it was called Our Time. I don't know if that still exists. And I firmly believe you don't put a lot of filters when you are looking for someone.  That would be a next step.

Nancy:  Define filters.

Pat:  Filters are when you get into the app, once you look for who you're looking for, you can designate political affiliation, you can specify education, you can specify ethnicity, you can specify religion, you can specify height, you can specify all kinds of things. And then I think you want to be very broad minded, and then you can always eliminate. I mean, if there's certain things, if you're very, very religious and you want someone to honor your religion, you would need to filter for that.

But my feeling is open it up, open up age. I think you need to embrace that there might be younger men than you that might be interested. Men typically, especially older men, always want to date younger, and that's what I loved about the Golden Bachelor, but they showed so many women of a certain age who were vibrant, interesting, sexy.

So don't limit by age. Filter by what's really, truly important in your life.

Once you get in there, you can see. And then as you get used to being on the app, you can change. Every day you can change. Oh, I'm going to open it up to this. I'm going to close it down for this. I used to always think that I needed to be with someone who was a parent.

And then I said, well, wait a minute. And I had met some not so nice people who were parents. And I'm like, okay, that's not a filter I want to have.

So you can play around with the filters. I would say to be as open minded as possible. Remember, you're the anthropologist, you're exploring a new culture, your new way of being. So explore it as like, oh, my gosh, this is an interesting thing. Not that you even have to engage with it beyond setting your profile up.

Nancy:  In setting up the profile, were there things that you noticed that men and women did differently or that were red flags for you, that you would suggest people not do with their profiles?

Pat:  I'm heterosexual, so I was only looking at men. And sure, there are things that, I mean, sometimes I'm just amused by things. I mean, back in the day, I think that people take, that photographs are better now.”

But there were so many photos of men with fish, big fish, or in front of their bathroom mirror, there's shower curtains, there's a toilet. And it got to, it was just hilarious. Like, okay, can you get a friend to take a picture?

Or can you, you know, get a professional photographer? Oh, God forbid that you would actually pay someone to take a photo of you. So I think that's changed.

And then you could ask them questions in the text. And that's when you start messaging and they're not asking you anything. Then I'm like, okay.

Midpoint Promo:  The Crow's Feet Life As We Age podcast team is planning something special for our Valentine's Day 2025 episode, and we want your advice and your experience at the heart of it. Whether we're talking about a relationship of one year or 50, we know that successful relationships aren't always a bed of roses. So we'd like to hear from you.

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Nancy:  Today on the Crow's Feet Life As We Age podcast, Dating in Later Life. From the practical stuff to a relationship of living alone together, with psychologist and dating anthropologist Patricia Thornton. So, this may be a sensitive subject, but have you ever had a really bad date?”

Pat:  Yes. I mean, you're alluding to the essay I wrote that's on medium. It's more than just about the sexual assault, but it's about, let's think about how we want to be in the world, and what are our options as sexual beings when we maybe don't want to have a relationship.

So that was because it was about hiring a gigolo. That was in 2018. This happened to me.

I wrote a piece about it that was published in Huffington Post, and then I reworked it a tiny bit, but it's on medium now if people are interested in reading about that. But I'm here to tell the tale. This guy was a sociopath, but I dated over 160 guys.

He was one sociopath. He had me violate my one rule, which was never to go to a private place on a first date with someone, to his apartment, and he tricked me into going. That was, you know, whether I was drugged. There was a question whether I was this, whether that. I don't know, but I ended up in his apartment, but I got out, you know. So it's life, you know.

That was an experience.

Nancy:  Not to make light of it, because that is a concern, but not to let it deter you from moving on with your life, to get whatever help you need, to realign your priorities, to figure out how you can avoid the situation. Again, I think it's probably all stuff that you did over the course of time.

Pat:  But I didn't. See, that's the thing. That was an anomaly. I didn't change how I dated. You know, I really was the same person. And you just, you know, bad shit happens.

And it's not your fault, right? And that's the thing. It's like I didn't all of a sudden change who I was and how I approached dating. I just had to live with the fact that this happened. He was a sociopath. And yeah, there's sociopaths, psychopaths, you know, running around and you might become a victim.

But I refuse to think of myself as like victim and live a victim's life, right? You know, I'm like, I have agency. I reported it.

I went to, you know, the NYPD SVU. And that's a whole story there. Yeah, we won't go into that. Let's just say they are being sued. But it was an experience, right? The thing is, we can be so consumed by what ifs and say, well, I'm just going to just be in my little private world and never do anything.

But you know what? I want to live a full life. Yes, you put certain safety precautions in. You don't have somebody pick you up at your house. You stay on the app until you meet someone. You don't exchange numbers.

There's a lot of things you can do. Tell a friend before you meet up with someone. Be in a public place. Don't get into your car right away. Run an errand so they're not following you.

Whatever, whatever. But get out there and still live your life. You can't let fear decide how you should live your life.

Nancy:  So let's talk about one of the other interesting things. You had a Huffington Post article about hiring a sex worker, which you ultimately didn't do. But tell me a little bit about how that thought even crossed your mind.

Pat:  The thought had crossed my mind before the sexual assault. I was at a... If you read the essay, I was at this...

It was like a lecture on dating in the 20th century, 21st century, by these supposedly high class, high style, very knowledgeable matchmakers. What I learned later is they were just kind of trying to find women in the audience so that they could pair them up with their clients and they were charging exorbitant amounts of money. And they were talking about who should pay for a date.

I raised my hand and I said, I think I should pay for the date as much as a guy should, or split the bill. And they said, oh my God, that's terrible. It must mean that you don't like sex.

And I said, what?  What is paying for a date having to do with me? And I said, I love sex.

And then she said, be careful because you might end up high or jiggle low. And I thought, you know what? That's a damn good idea, you know?

And so it had occurred to me even before the sexual assault. Okay, maybe it's because I'm a psychologist and I have heard everything. I'm very much of, well, okay, sex is a wonderful thing.

We are human beings, right? We are sexual beings till we die. How can I have sex if I don't have a relationship?

Well, there are ways to have sex without being married, without being the nurse with the purse. What about the idea of hiring a jiggle low? Paying for sex is illegal.

But what about that? What about paying for sex, you know? And actually, there was a recent essay, I think it was in Medium, about sexual surrogacy.

And we usually think of sexual surrogacy for couples who have issues regarding sex, and a therapist will recommend it. Well, they actually talk about, well, what about people who haven't had sex in a long time? Or people who are physically limited, right?

There was a movie ages ago about that. Helen Hunt and the Iron Long. And what about that?”

What about that for women and men too? But it's more thought of as like, okay, the men will hire the prostitutes. Well, what about us women?

We like sex, we want sex. Even the New York Times had a thing about vibrators and Wirecutter. Wirecutter is where they evaluate stoves and vegetables.

And there's a thing on vibrators like, okay, we've come a long way, but is that the answer? Don't we want human contact? So anyway, the essay was precipitated about this event, but it was like, okay, so if I can hire someone to give me a massage or mechanic to fix my car, why can't I hire someone to have sex with me?

Nancy:  You're in a relationship now.

Pat:  Yes.

Nancy:  Can you tell me a little bit about this? What's different? Is it a different relationship? Are you married?

Pat:  No, we're not married. I met him actually the day after I turned 65. I had come back to New York.”

This was in 2021, and after the apocalypse of COVID, and I had a big birthday for my 65th birthday, and I had four dates lined up that weekend. And he was one of the dates. It was just a normal, nice date. And I was just eager to explore the world of dating again and see what that was like, because it had really dried up during COVID. So I met him then, and we were still wearing masks at the time. He came up behind me.

We were on a street near the Greenwich Village, and he tapped me, and I turned around, I thought to myself, oh my God, he's so young. And I knew he was young. You know, his age was there.

I kind of put my ages lower. I usually lied about my age. And then we had a drink.

It was lovely. We took a walk around the village, and he asked me to have dinner. And I said, that would be lovely, but not tonight. And gave me a hug. And we had stayed on the app. We had not exchanged numbers.

And I loved that, that he didn't pressure me to exchange numbers. After we got home, we messaged on the app, and he said, I'd like to see you again. And then we exchanged numbers.

I didn't see him for a couple of weeks. And then we met up again. And then he identified as solo Polly, and I identified as solo Polly.

That's a whole discussion. It's just that we were not into committed. We wanted to have fun.

We were interested in dinners and museums and sex, but not anything where we glommed on to each other. Well, lo and behold, we fell in love. And we can talk about all the ups and downs with that, but we fell in love.

And now I'm in what I consider a living apart together relationship, which is way more common than people talk about. Basically, and I think this is true of a lot of women my age, we don't want to get married again. We don't want to share a household 24-7, 365 days a year.

We've done that. We don't want to be the caretaker. We don't want to be the nurse.

And so we have this arrangement where we did find an apartment together in New York. I moved in with him in May, but we have our separate wings. I also have my small little bungalow in California, and I am technically a California resident now.

So I'm in California, and he visits, and then I go back to New York. And so we have sort of a bi-coastal and separate wings relationship. But we're in love, we're committed to each other.

It's a monogamous relationship. He doesn't want to be glommed on. I don't want to be glommed on.

We have, we're independent people. You know, the living apart together piece of it, and why I know it's bubbling in the culture, but people don't talk about it is a recent obituary. This was Helen Fisher, pretty well-known psychologist in the field of relationships and love.

She's done a lot of research. She was a consultant for Match. She married late in life.”

I believe she probably had a marriage earlier, but she said she was going to be, they were going to be living independently. But in the obituary, in the New York Times, she recently died, and they said she died at her husband's home. I'm like, wow, they're finally talking about this.

And they just, you know, not a big hoopla, but she died at her husband's home because they maintained separate residences. And I'm like, here's a guru about relationships, and she figured out how to do this late in life, to have separate homes and in a committed relationship, right? So we need to accept that this is part of our culture now, and it should be celebrated, not say, oh, what's wrong?

You can't be, no, you're not married. What is, what's wrong? Why are you not doing that?

Nancy:  What advice would you give to your younger self about dating, relationships?

Pat:  Like most of us who've had marriages then got divorced, we had children that were the product of that marriage. And I could have said after I was with him for 33 years, married for 20, I could have said, yeah, I want, I could have left sooner, but I don't think that I could have, right? So every time I think about like, I don't live a life of regret.

I feel like the past is the past. Who knows about the future? The future is uncertain.

So I don't have regrets about my life. I feel like this is what's brought me to here. But even if you were unhappy, you don't have to have regret.

We can't redo the past. We can only be present and we do not know the future. So if you spend your life thinking, what if I did this? Well, okay, but you didn't or you did. That's it.

Nancy:  Now that you've had a chance to think about it again, any more thoughts?

Pat:  Have different parents.

Nancy:  No, we can't do that.

Pat:  Exactly. There were certain things that led me into the first, my only marriage, and a lot of that had to do with my fucked up family. But I can't change that.

So you deal with what you have. I'm not a woo-woo like, oh, this is fate and they're only. But my boyfriend is very much younger than me.

I don't think we would have, well, we probably would have met anyway, except for being on a dating app because he lives in a different culture, in work world than I do. But he would have been really young. If I had met him 20 years ago, you know what I mean?

It's like, no, it's like this is where I am now.

Nancy:  I mean, so that follows hand in hand with the last question I have. We ask all of our guests, which is what would you tell someone about getting older?

Pat:  I think part of life is letting go. As you move through life, you're letting go. Like I had to let go of my children, right?

At various stages, they get on a bicycle and you let go. They get a driver's license, you let go. They choose a path that maybe you don't think is the best.

We have to let go, right? It doesn't serve you well. If you're cleaning, right?

And then it's letting go, and it's letting go of some of the things that you kind of thought were going to be there, but aren't. So physically, there are things that are changing for me, as they do as we get older, and it's adjusting. Like the latest thing is, I started seeing these things in my eyes, and then I started looking at Dr. Google, and then like go, no, just go to the eye doctor and say, well, these are floaters, and they occur because the back of your eyes, the viscose area starts to firm up and crackle and he gets these lines, and we don't worry about it unless there's like a ton of them, or you see light, and I'm like, okay.

But now I've had to get used to this in the last week, this thing that just is there. And so it's letting go of the fact that I thought my vision would be better. It's kind of saying, this is where I am now, what can I do to make my life as best as it can be?

This is just floaters, right? I really, you know, for people who have much more serious issues, it's hard. You have to say, okay, but what can I do now?

I can't, maybe I can't walk anymore, maybe I can't do this, or maybe I can't do that. Like I dance and I kind of teasingly say, well, I don't want to live anymore when I can't dance. Well, you can dance with a walker.

So it's changing our perception and accepting this is how we are now, and be lucky that we've lived this long. The alternative is not so great, right? And so we've gotten this far.

And if there comes to a point where I'm so disabled and so can't do things that I like in my ability to live a productive, interesting, good life, then I may make a decision that says that's enough. But it's adjusting, right? But we've had to adjust all along.

It's just more apparent now, I think, especially because we lose some of our physical ability. You hear more and more women of a certain age, our age, is saying, you know what, we're tired of all this. We can live a life without feeling like we have this voice that says, you must be a certain way.

And we can say, I'm just going to do my thing. You can't sit there again with regret, like I didn't do something or I wish that I, you know, my knee wasn't bothering me or whatever. You say, okay, but you adjust.

Nancy:  Thanks for listening to Crow's Feet, Life As We Age. And thanks to our podcast team, our founder, Nancy Peckinham, along with Betsy Allen, Lee J. Bench, Melinda Blau, Jan M. Flynn, Gene Feldeisen, Jane Trombley, along with editor and sound designer, Rich Halten.  And I'm Nancy Franklin. The Crow's Feet original theme was composed and performed by Rand Bishop.

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