Am I a Cougar?

Setting aside any feminist misgivings I might have about the contemporary usage of the term Cougar, it can be useful. But it is perhaps applied too broadly. I was catching up with a girlfriend of mine the other night and filling her on the status of my relationship with Ricky, whom she’s never met. She asked how old he is and when I told her, I suddenly felt really self-conscious and asked her if I was a Cougar. “Yes!” she said emphatically. But I’m too young to be a Cougar! Aren’t I?

Ricky, my beau, my cub, my whatever – is 30. He just turned 30 recently. He was 29 when we started dating, and I had just turned 35. It’s interesting to note that of the last 3 guys I dated, plus one who I never actually dated due to outside complications but wanted to – all of them were 29 when we started dating. Granted, I was 33 when I dated the first 29 year old, but the fact remains that there’s a definite pattern.

I think that 35 might be the last age when I can get away with dating a man in his 20s without it being icky. And 29 is practically 30, so it's not a big deal, right? But I have to admit, I was so happy for Ricky to turn 30! I am deliberately not making a distinction between early 30s versus mid 30s versus (GULP) late 30s. He’s in his 30s, so am I, end of story! I think.

Ricky and I were out the other night with a friend of his who is even younger than he is (it’s possible, apparently!) who asked me my opinion as to why he was recently attracting women in their 30s. I speculated it was due to us 30-something women knowing that if we meet a single man our age, there’s a reason he’s single, and we probably don’t want to step into that hotbed of issues. But a man in his 20s- well, he’s single because he’s young. He might be a fixer-upper, but the price of prime real estate can be too high for us to pay. Any single woman in her 30s knows this to be true.

This young guy has been dating these older women, and so I asked him why he was likewise attracted to them. He started out by saying that he likes that older women have something interesting to say, they are more confident, more sexually capable, and less apt to play games. OK, I get it. That sounds good. And then he added that they were, frankly, more desperate, and that helped too.

Oh my. The dreaded “D” word. I suppose that’s why I am loathe to be labeled as a Cougar. That’s why I am pretending that 30 and 35 are same age. No one wants to be labeled as the “D” word. And don’t desperate and Cougar go hand-in-hand? Even Manthers and much younger women smack of desperation, and we’re used to seeing those pairings. But the truth is, I felt more desperate when I was 25. I was desperate to be loved, desperately afraid that I wouldn’t be, and desperate to try to make myself into someone who could be. And now, I don’t have any of those fears.

We are so quick to label women as desperate- desperate if you're single, desperate if you date younger men, desperate if you date older men, and you can even end up a desperate housewife. Maybe Cougar isn't the label I should fight against, it's the idea that women are forever insecure, worried and willing to do anything to try to fill the void. But while we continue to fight that battle, I maintain - 5 years older does not a Cougar make!