I Dated Younger Men For Years. Here’s Why I’m Finally Hanging Up My Cougar Card.

“The perfect antidote to my divorcee despair, he looked like a vintage Ryan Gosling and smelled like Mentos candy.”

This was the moment I swore off all the young dudes: waking up sore and tangled in steamy sheets after another late night of raunchy RV sex. Next to me slumbered the gorgeous, long and lean man who, at 31, was young enough to be my son. And judging by the firm, hot pressure against my thigh, he would soon be raring to go again.

“I can’t do this anymore, Mad Max,” I whispered, using the nickname I’d given him because of his nomadic life, his half-wolf malamute named Avalanche, and his battered and blacked-out truck with the giant tires.

The reasons weren’t surprising. Aside from his Energiser Bunny sex drive, we faced the usual cultural disconnects that short-circuit May-December romances, from life-shaping events like 9/11 to misaligned musical tastes. The night before, I discovered he’d never heard of the iconic Mel Gibson roles in the original Mad Max and Road Warrior movies. The whole time we’d been dating, he’d assumed I named him after Tom Hardy’s character in the 2015 remake. It was another absurd example of how our experiences just didn’t fit together. It felt to me as if we were always trying, and failing, to complete a puzzle from the boxes of our respective lives.

However, there was more to this ending, and it threw me because I’d been comfortably dating younger men for a long while, ever since my brutal divorce at 43, when I had a fling with a 28-year-old I called Jr. Mint. The perfect antidote to my divorcee despair,........

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