“I wanted to write about dating only if I could be entirely honest,” Polly Langford says, sitting at her desk in the Senny Valley, in Wales, with her Rhodesian ridgeback bitch, Bibi, wrapped round her feet. She has run a dating agency for the past 14 years and has collaborated with one of her clients, the writer Suzanne Ruthven, to produce a practical guide for the over-forties called:
Would Like to Meet: The Dating Game.
It has a positive slant and encourages newcomers to try all the options, from the internet to personal ads. It needs to because, although one couple in five now meets through dating agencies, it is still considered a slightly sad way of finding love.
And, of course, I am most fascinated by the stories that didn’t make it into the book because they gave the wrong impression. Like the time Ruthven arranged to meet a prospective mate at the Peterborough Show only to discover that he was a blacksmith with a serious wind problem. “I called him the ‘farting farrier’,” she says. “And abandoned him at the show ring.” Or her other problematic meeting: a man whose idea of the perfect first date was a cup of coffee at McDonald’s and a long discussion about oral sex. But for all that, the book had a happy outcome. After endless discussions with Polly, and many dates, Ruthven, who is in her fifties, did find the love of her life.
So what are the secrets of dating in your forties and beyond? Langford gazes out of the window above her desk as she considers the question. She has an unusual view. Her house is built into a bank, so she is at eye level with a muddy field: tractors rumble by; rooks bathe in puddles; and one spring an overly curious lamb even scrambled in on to her papers. Her perspective on love is equally down-to-earth. She has spent so long talking to her clients, hearing their hopes and dreams and listening to their complaints, that she knows the crucial issues — and weight is easily the most important.
“It is no use pretending,” she says. “Some men rub their hands with glee at the sight of a buxom lady. But the majority want slim partners.” Slim means size 10 to 12. Anyone larger has to be honest about it, or diet. Langford is not being unkind in stressing this. She is just making it clear that women are up against the demands of the male libido. There’s no point arranging to meet a man if he is not going to fancy you when he sees how big you are.
Age is another sticking point. All dating agencies agree that women over 45 are harder to place because they outnumber men and because male clients are generally looking for much younger partners. But women can overcome this by joining a wide range of agencies and trying those — such as Langford’s agency Just Woodland Friends — that allow clients to contact each other directly. This means that women can select promising-sounding partners, ring them up and coax them into a date.
Langford points out that ageism cuts both ways. Many women in their fifties have to be reminded that there are lovely, fit men in their sixties and older who have a great deal to offer. But then Ruthven ended up with Langford’s agency precisely because she was so annoyed by the way other matchmakers always paired her with men in their seventies. “I said: ‘I’m a widow. I’ve already buried one bugger. I’m in no hurry to do it again. Besides, I want someone who can still raise a gallop’.’’
While we are talking the phone rings. As Langford answers it, closing the door behind her, I hear her say gently: “Now, if you keep doing that, you’ll get nothing. Don’t be too keen!” And, after a while, she rejoins me in the bright, flowery kitchen, with a microlite aircraft propeller pinned to a beam, explaining that the caller was one of her most stubborn clients, a man in his forties so desperate for love, and so intense, that he scares off every prospect.
Langford is fiftyish, slim and pretty, with a long red-gold ponytail, and she fell into the matchmaking business by accident. She started out running an agency that paired busy farmers with housekeepers, before realising that both parties were secretly looking for love. Why, then, after all these years of giving romantic advice is she still single? “I suppose I always chased danger. Hence my love of microlite-ing. I always went for Mr Wrong. Even the good relationships were traumatic.” In contrast, her clients nearly always play it safe. In fact, she finds their caution comical at times. “When ladies say that they are looking for someone loyal, affectionate and friendly, I find it hard not to tell them that they’ve just described a labrador.” But the message of the book is that if you are determined and pragmatic you stand a good chance of finding happiness late in life. The trick is to be flexible. Langford spends hours persuading her male clients to set aside their lists. “They’ll say: ‘I want a woman who is size 10, with red hair, wears dresses and is 35’. ” More time is spent explaining, to both men and women, that they should give dates a second chance, and ignore nervousness and awkward body language.
The truth is, of course, that dating-agency happy endings often involve both parties discovering, to their astonishment, that the least likely pairing is the best. A typical story comes from Liz Fogarty, who runs an agency called Attractive Partners. She had a blonde female client who smoked and was looking for a tall man who would be kind to her children. And a male client, resembling Danny DeVito, seeking a non-smoker with no ties. “Don’t ask me why, but I kept thinking of the blonde lady with the children. I told her she’d think I was mad but I had a gut feeling about the two of them. She was a good sport and went along with it — and they’ve been happily married ever since. She gave up smoking, and he loved her children.”
I found my own happy ending through Just Woodland Friends: it was courtesy of them that I met my partner Ian Bowden. I joined because it’s a rural agency and I live in the country. Also, I wanted to find a different type of man. (I was fatally drawn to womanisers.) I’m short and dark, and described myself as “40-ish” (I was 48). Luckily, I’d lost weight while divorcing. I was looking for someone who had been married and liked kids because I had three and the youngest was only 5.
Ian (43, divorced with two teenaged sons) was secretly hoping for a 35-year-old Felicity Kendall lookalike who was tall, blonde, and had no children. It was hard for him to find girlfriends because he worked alone on a 600-acre farm and rarely went out.
I rang him up and talked him into a date. We met (at the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Taunton) and instantly fell for each other. He had shy, awkward body language but I ignored it. And I apparently looked stressed, but he told himself that it would pass. (It did.) We’ve been together six years. For both of us, it’s the happiest relationship we’ve ever had.
