I’ve had only one cougar dating moment – one that made me reluctant to pursue the cougar lifestyle wholesale. At age 35, I was mistaken for 23, and picked up at the gym by a 22-year old student. We got to my place, and he called his mother to have a 25-minute conversation explaining that he wasn’t going home that night. He didn’t know what he was doing in the bedroom, either.
As a survivor of the kind of fantasies indulged and encouraged by chick lit and Sex and the City, and years of internet dates, I was curious about Myna Wallin’s book. She delivers an engaging story that reveals the shallow trappings of the dating world. In addition to the kind of ludicrous encounters one expects with younger men found online, Wallin pokes merciless fun at dating conventions and self-promotion.
I wanted to read a book that explained what I started to suspect as I continued to date in my early 40s, but could never really admit to myself outright, and this one delivers. While Wallin is unafraid to create a female character who is far from interested in taking care of a family, a husband or a proxy son, she also manufactures sympathy for the cougar, by showing interactions with men whose goal – sexual congress – is cynically wrapped in promises of romance and commitment.
Olivia is in her early 50s. She’s sexually active and lives a comfortable existence in Toronto. She isn’t looking for love, but she shows readers an honest, confessional monologue about the dating lifestyle. In between dates, she tells of her relationship with the handsome but overly earnest William, who is 18 years her junior.
Wallin’s merciless wit subverts the chick-lit genre by critiquing its man-chasing imperatives and the cultural clichés of the dating lifestyle. As I followed Olivia through one scenario after another with William, whose art history doctoral studies impress her, I could relate to the “reluctance” part of her cougar existence. She’s impressed by his beautifully “cut” pectorals and abdominal musculature, but doesn’t want the bother of consoling him as he pities his own tanning salon sunburn.
It’s refreshing to read a tone of ironic detachment from the fantasies that fuel dating culture stereotypes and manufactured elements of desire in books like Bridget Jones’s Diary. For all the candid character sketches offered by that novel (which I thoroughly enjoyed), women are, in the end, pulled inexorably through the fantasy-sequence of losing and then regaining the man. Not only does he come back to rescue the princess, but he does so with the undeniable intent to marry her. Ditto Sex and the City.
With Confessions, nothing of the sort occurs. Rather, interspersed in the narrative thread are replicas of online dating profiles. Man #2400, “Yr boy toy,” is turned off by “posers and wankers” while his pick-up line is, “Would your lingerie like to get acquainted with my briefs?” And then there’s the man who wants “a girl to look like a girl. The smaller the panties, the better.”
Olivia has moved beyond the fantasy that a man will rescue her from maidenhood to provide a secure bourgeois marriage and household. This is a novel about enjoying life, enjoyment which may include multiple sex partners. The reluctance ensues when she realizes it could be a long night ahead when lying next to a boyfriend who only wants sex twice a week for health reasons. With the good-looking younger man comes the scaffolding of vanitas, and the need for Mother.
Younger, marriage-minded women may read this book with deaf ears. After all, the happily-ever-after narrative dies hard.
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