Dating again at 40, the first month

I downloaded Hinge at 9:14 on a Wednesday night, sitting on the end of the bed in my new rental in Northcote, with a glass of tap water on the bedside table because I'd forgotten to buy anything else. The phone weighed about the same as my old Nokia from 2004 but the cognitive load felt heavier by a factor of fifty. I was 41 years old. My last first message to a woman had been a typed note slid across a library table at university in 2009. The thumb hovered. I closed the app. I opened it again. I closed it again. I went and made a cup of tea I didn't drink.

Three weeks earlier the divorce had moved from "in progress" to "done in every meaningful sense except the paperwork", and a friend who'd been through it said, gently, "you should probably start looking at the apps, not because you're ready, but because you need to remember what looking feels like". He was right. I wasn't ready. I needed to start anyway.

The strangeness of being old in a new way

Here is the disorienting thing nobody warned me about. You are not the same single person you were at 26. You are also not single in the way a 41-year-old who's never married is single. You are something else, a third category, and there is no instruction manual for it.

At 26, you were single because you hadn't found anyone yet. At 41, post-divorce, you are single because you found someone, and built a life with them, and the life ended. You carry the marriage with you. You carry the kids with you. You carry the mortgage and the lawyer's bill and the half-furnished rental and the fact that on Tuesday and Thursday nights your flat is too quiet and on Wednesday and Friday nights it is too loud. None of this fits on a dating profile.

The first weekend on the apps, I caught myself thinking I was younger than I am. I'd see a profile that said 32 and think "yes, plausible". Then I'd look at my own face in the bathroom mirror and remember that the temples are grey now and that the parents at school pickup look at me like a person, not like the kid I still half-feel like inside. The discrepancy between internal age and external age is something you don't notice until you're being looked at by strangers again. It's a strange recalibration.

The first coffee

Three weeks in, I had my first coffee. Sunday morning, a café in Fitzroy, 10:30, 45 minutes blocked out. She was 38, divorced two years, two kids the same ages as mine. We'd matched on Wednesday and messaged for four days. The coffee was, in the most literal sense, fine. We sat at a corner table. We talked about our kids. We talked about the houses we'd ended up in. We did not talk about our exes by name. We laughed once, properly, at something her son had said about a magpie. After 45 minutes she said she had to pick up her daughter from a birthday party and we walked to the door and shook hands (we shook hands, like adults at a job interview) and that was that.

Walking back to the car I felt three things at once. Relieved that it was over. Vaguely embarrassed that I'd been on a date at all. Quietly proud, the way you'd be proud of a child who'd gone down a slide for the first time. The fourth feeling, which arrived about ten minutes later in the driver's seat, was the heaviest one: I miss my wife. Not the wife at the end. The wife from 2014. And I knew, with absolute clarity, that the woman I'd just had coffee with was not the problem and not the solution, and that I had a long road ahead.

The "I'm still figuring out my divorce" disclosure

You will need a sentence. The sentence is not a confession and it is not a sales pitch. It is a calibration tool, for her and for you, and it goes roughly like this: "I'm divorced, separated about a year, two kids, still working through the emotional side of it, dating slowly". You say it, ideally, in the first message exchange, certainly before the first coffee. You say it without apology and without varnish. You say it because the alternative (her finding out three dates in that you're a wreck pretending not to be) is the worst outcome for both of you.

Some women will read that sentence and unmatch. That is a feature, not a bug. The women who will be good for you to talk to in the first six to twelve months are women who can read that sentence and think "okay, useful information, let's see how this goes". The women who panic and ghost are not bad people. They are simply not in a place to spend time with someone in your state, and you are doing them a favour by being honest up front.

The mistake is to under-disclose, to lead with the version of yourself you used to be, the dating-app version polished up like a car at auction. You will get more matches that way. You will also waste everyone's time, including yours. Be the actual current you. The actual current you is enough.

The body metaphor I keep coming back to

When a deep-sea diver comes up too fast, the nitrogen in the blood expands and the diver gets the bends. The cure is a decompression chamber, where the pressure is lowered slowly over hours. The first month back on the apps after a long marriage is a decompression problem. You have been at depth (married, settled, the pressure of family life) for years. You cannot come straight to the surface (sleeping with someone new, falling for someone new, building a life with someone new) without doing damage to the pressurised system you used to be. You need slow stages. Coffee. A walk. A second coffee. An evening drink. Months, not weeks.

The six-month rule

Here is the rule I made for myself, and the rule I'd give any divorced man at the start. Don't sleep with anyone for at least six months after the marriage has actually ended (not after the paperwork, after the emotional ending, the date you both knew it was over). The reasons are mechanical, not moral.

• Six months is roughly the time it takes for the nervous system to stop confusing intimacy with reconciliation. Earlier than that, your body will read sex with a new person as a betrayal, or as a substitute, or as both at once, and the resulting cortisol spike will set your healing back by weeks.
• Six months is roughly the time it takes for you to know whether you're attracted to a particular woman or attracted to the IDEA of not being alone. The two feel identical at three months and obviously different at seven.
• Six months gives you long enough to have a few first dates that go nowhere, which calibrates your expectations and saves you from making the next woman into a saviour figure.
• Six months protects the woman you eventually do sleep with from being a casualty of your timing. If she's the wrong one, you've wasted her time. If she's the right one, you've made the start of something good with someone whose first encounter with you was when you were not ready.

The rule is not religious. Break it if you need to and forgive yourself. But hold it as a rule until you have a reason to break it, not the other way around.

The therapy parallel

The first month on the apps is, in structure, identical to the first month of therapy. You don't really know why you're there. You feel slightly silly being there. You wonder if the people doing it are the same people you'd want to be like. You go anyway. You go because not going is worse. You go because the alternative (sitting alone in a half-furnished rental and Googling your ex) is a road with a known bad ending.

You are not, in the first month, looking for a partner. You are not, in the first month, looking for a relationship. You are looking, in the first month, for evidence that you are still capable of being seen by a stranger as a man who exists in the world, and that other men your age are doing the same thing, and that the world has not ended. The evidence accumulates. Slowly. Coffee by coffee.

Slow down. Map first. Move later.