“No one chooses to be straight,” Quinn* declared, putting her arm around her wife. We were sitting in a sticky Tulsa punk and honky-tonk live music club, waiting for our friend’s band to perform. The lead singer liked to invite audience members to the stage so she could delete toxic partners from their phones. I had just told Quinn about a first date I’d recently had with a corn-fed, well-mannered, forty-seven-year-old executive vice president of a business consulting firm. He’d brought his golden retriever on the date, which snuggled to his side while we sipped margaritas on the outdoor patio of a popular Mexican restaurant. Women kept stopping by to say hello to him, making me wonder if he was “one of the good ones.” Then, out of nowhere, he confided he’d frozen his sperm before he’d had a vasectomy because he “like(d) to have sex with prostitutes in Vegas.” I pointed out the existence of condoms and the preferred term of “sex worker” in contemporary discourse. He complained how hard finding a doctor willing to freeze his sperm was. He ran over my question of why as he compared his suffering to that of women who lack reproductive choice in Oklahoma. “I don’t know why you care so much,” he said in response to my outrage over nonexistent abortion access in our state. “It’s not like you still have to worry about getting pregnant.”
When Quinn’s right, she’s right.
Yet, wham, bam, straight I am, and more often than not, I date younger men. I used to follow strict dating-age guardrails. I didn’t date men younger than the bird puppets Santa had given me when I was ten, and the birds were zero, which made my boyfriends Gen-Xers like me. But as my years have ticked up, the men I date have aged down.
I blame circumstance.
The first time I busted my self-imposed, ten-year, age-gap limit was in Turkey, where I was teaching. In a culture where family is central and having children is cherished, most single Turkish men were under thirty, and the ex-pats I knew were older (okay, my age or older), pasty, out of shape, and alcoholic. The Americans I met seemed like future founders of men’s rights groups. Bovine-eyed, dimpled cheeks, and thirteen years my junior, Adem* spoke English, murmured çok güzel (which means very beautiful) during moments of carnal delight, and made great menemen (a Turkish egg dish) on Sunday mornings. He asked me to marry him, but I didn’t want children or to drop anchor in Ankara, so I returned to the States.
When I moved to northern Iraq at age 44, I confined my dating pool to expats from the get-go. Culturally, local men my age were married, which a lot of them forgot in the presence of sex workers, and they conveniently equated Western women to “prostitutes” (again, not my word). Besides, the last thing I needed was to accidentally start sexing some student’s father.
Expats eligible for dating didn’t include colleagues because I learned long ago not to shit where I eat. That left journalists, humanitarian aid workers, private security contractors providing mission support to corporate and government clients, and DynCorp security personnel, guarding the US Consulate General compound. In a moment of weakness, I gave my phone number to a DynCorp security contractor with dark curly hair and single digit body fat at a compound pool party, partly because he was sober when almost everyone else was lit, and mostly because he was wearing only swim trunks and a smile. To his credit, he memorized my phone number on a dare because “you can see I don’t have a pen on me to write it down.”
Fourteen years my junior, Swim Trunks hauled a restaurant-borrowed table and two chairs to the rooftop of one of the compound’s residential buildings so we could dine under the sunset for our first date. He’d made sure there was a tablecloth, flowers, food catered by one of the compound’s restaurants, and he paid an off-duty waiter to serve us. This attention to detail lasted until he quit DynCorp to protest the firing of a beloved supervisor caught up in a pool party scandal involving too much alcohol and irregularly discharged firearms.
My dating age gap straddled wider with Jesse*, another DynCorp security contractor, husky and with a Jesus mane other men would kill for. Jesse was seventeen years my junior, an age gap I rationalized because we were far from home. No one I know will know…He looks older…that hair!…I’m leaving for a job in the West Bank at the end of the term. Fuck it!
Jesse pulled my name and social security number off the compound’s sign-in sheet (questionably legal), traced my name to LinkedIn, and signed up for a Premium account so he could message me directly. Normally, my freak flag would have flown, but I liked his initiative. Plus, we’d had a moment when I’d gone through security, and I’d had a puff of premonition that he would contact me. Five days later, he did. Because we both knew I was leaving in a few months, we dated with that kind of ease only a built-in expiration date provides. I still have the love note-inscribed copy of The Alchemist he gave me when I moved to Ras Al-Amud.
Time to call shenanigans…on myself. I judge men who date women twenty years younger, deeming such couplings as transactional (beauty for billfold) or worse—pathetic. Yet here I am, in Tulsa, where the median age is 37, and most people marry young, holding hands on river walks and going to concerts with Sterling*, a man I could have birthed. We met at a two-day art, music, and camping festival in Osage County five months ago. Now, we’re in an exclusive relationship we don’t label. He turned 36 a month after we met; I’ll be 58 by the time you read this.
I can’t help it—dating young is fun. This thirty-six-year-old is up for anything—be it Sunday salsa lessons in a park or being extras in a campaign commercial for our new mayor. Sterling didn’t talk endlessly about himself on our first date nor did he try to kiss me after our six-hour festival hang. After our second outing, he texted to say the sky looked like the dress I had been wearing and to “ask for a kiss like if I came back.” As someone who dates across decades, I appreciate how the thirty-something set asks for permission. I texted back “No.”
Sterling isn’t intimidated by the eclectic life I’ve led, and he knows better than to box my ambition in. He doesn’t criticize what I wear or admonish my love of the night life like some Dad-figure. (I mean, who wants to bed their dad?) I can’t say the same for my previous age-appropriate partners. Perhaps our parental age gap squashes the urge to compare or control because we’re at such different life stages. What I see in my rearview he’s still got before him, which gives our relationship a shelf life. At least for me. I don’t want to prevent him from having the experiences an unencumbered life affords. When I asked him if he wanted children, Sterling said, “I don’t know. I want to see where this is going.”
In a recent interview on the Writing Stories podcast, Lydia Yuknavitch describes the cultural messaging women receive as “a few storylines that will be sanctioned and purchased and consumed.” She argues that creators are being trained to tell the same stories, and “we need to punch through that.” Until the current zeitgeist of films such as Babygirl, Lonely Planet, and The Idea of You, sanctioned storylines drove home that a much younger man desiring an older woman was outrageous. Guess what? Sometimes, I think that, too. Pores show on my time-scratched face. My body looks like I’m standing in a bagel instead of being Nicole Kidman thin. Men tell me I’m sexy rather than beautiful. And although I get daily compliments on my style, I wonder what my 36-year-old, with his lush brown curls, Caravaggio lips, and big dick energy sees in me. There are plenty of cute-to-beautiful, thin-to-hot, twenty- and thirty-something women he could date. But if he were Gen X, I’d probably think that, too. My insecurity is age proof.
Sterling got carded when we were sitting at a marbled, Art Deco hotel bar. “He’s thirty-six!” I blurted to the bartender while my boytoy (his term) hid his face and fished out an ID. And although he had just paid for dinner, and I make more money than he does, I leaned in and whispered, “You’ll have to get these drinks. I can’t have people thinking I pay for sex.” We were the only customers at the bar. I’m waiting to see how this will karmically come back to me, probably as some waiter asking me what my son will have while we peruse menus.
Unlike the current batch of Hollywood blockbusters, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy excluded, sexing the thirty-six-year-old isn’t a transformational experience towards self-discovery and self-acceptance. I still suck my belly in when my clothes come off. I’m tempted not to wear my night guard and definitely don’t wear my Frownies when Sterling sleeps over. Accepting that I’m closer to 60 than 40 has been a steep learning curve. Although I’m starting to embrace—even feel proud of—our age gap, part of me wants to keep my lacy bras on when Sterling and I have sex because bench pressing only slows gravity, not defies it. But neither my belly nor my saggy boobs keep me from enjoying Sterling’s BDE and soft choking hand.
I’ve already lived enough lives to know who I am. And because I’ve lived my life on my terms, I don’t have to reconcile who I used to be with who I am now—they’ve always intertwined. I’ve never wanted children, a house, and all the things that go in it, unconventional choices for women coming of age in the late 80s and early 90s. I followed my own trajectory instead of molding my life to accommodate a partner’s and getting a house and health insurance in return. I choose to date Sterling because I’m crazy about his hair and lips. I like that his dick works…all the time. I’m awed by his mechanic/welder mind, which functions from the tactile rather than the cerebral. There’s a sweetness to him that hasn’t been snuffed out by wrecking-ball breakups or a bank-account emptying divorce. I don’t need him, but I do want him with no expectation of a forever after because I don’t know where my storyline will go.
As executive orders ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and words like advocacy and women trigger review, we need a kaleidoscope of stories that observe the beautiful forms women’s lives can take when they have the volition to shape them. Stories that portray the quotidian of coupling without justifying the who or the how old or the why of it. Stories that punch through the sanctioned story line of “forever after” and celebrate relationships that are mutually desirous, respectful, and compelling for however long they last. I hope the pop culture canon will also feature post-menopausal women, who’ve stayed single by choice and who lead exhilarating and purposeful lives irrespective of having a partner, not because of one. Stories that show women, who age non-surgically yet have satisfying sex with younger lovers they like. That this sex doesn’t have to enlighten or validate them because they already know themselves and accept their shortcomings. That their stories become normalized instead of venerated as small-scale revolutions or acts of empowerment.
*Not their real names
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Having worked in conflict zones such as Iraq, the West Bank, and Ukraine, Alex Poppe writes about fierce and funny women rebuilding their lives in the wake of violence. She is the award-winning author of four works of literary fiction and Breakfast Wine, a memoir-in-essay, about her near decade in Iraq. Breakfast Wine will be published by Apprentice House Press on June 10, 2025.
© 2025, Alex Poppe
Halfway Down the Stairs 