Where do time-poor women go to meet a partner? - Women's Agenda

Where do time-poor women go to meet a partner?

High-profile and wealthy women of New York were recently heard lamenting, via The Daily Beast that they were short on options for finding love.

Apparently the luckier ones like Katie Couric have been set-up by well-connected friends. For the rest, though, it appears it’s matchmakers or internet dating.

It’s an issue that I hear my career-focused, successful, single friends talk about a lot. Once they hit 40 they no longer felt comfortable going to bars and clubs. Some have turned to dating websites. It’s apparently a great option if you’re time-poor due to the ability to edit the potentials prior to time-consuming small talk. One of my girlfriends found her husband this way and they are one of the happiest couples I know.

I met my husband at work when I was in my early twenties and we are still together (touch wood) so while I can sympathise, I don’t know how their shoes feel. But I have been along for the ride with a couple of my closest friends who worked crazy hours with a single focus for 20 years to reach the dizzy heights of their career success, and then woke up one day feeling lonely. At the age of 40 I marveled at the beautiful homes they owned outright. They commented often that I was lucky to have a husband and children.

For at least a decade I was the ultimate matchmaker in my circle of friends. My husband and I hosted countless dinner parties designed to match up one of my fabulous girlfriends with one of his work colleagues. We thought that our pairing could be emulated. We were never successful.

The problem we discovered was that not all men want to be challenged intellectually or debated on key issues over a few too many bottles of wine. Also, some became frightened lambs at the realisation that some of these women had their own homes and personal assistants. The women, though very successful, wanted men who were even more successful and most were looking for that show-stopping feeling of love-at-first-sight. They were unable to find that at my dining table. It was a recipe for disaster and at least a few of our well-meaning dinner parties ended in tears (mainly mine due to sheer exhaustion).

Now that we are late-forties (but who’s counting), some of my still-single friends are starting to prioritise finding a relationship. In the past it was something that they would like to have found but were always far too busy to devote any time or thought to it. But like the good women of New York, it’s getting harder for them each day to find a suitable partner, mainly due to the lack of opportunity to meet available men their own age, even allowing for the give and take of a decade.

How did you meet your partner? Do you agree it’s getting tougher for career-focused women to find a partner?

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