Lifestyle Zone

Lifestyle. About three years after my marriage ended, friends started nudging me. "It's time," they said. "You need to get back out there." Dating sounded about as appealing as being air-dropped naked into Antarctica. And once I began, that's pretty much how it felt. The dating game was hard enough when I was in my 20s—now I not only had a demanding career, a mortgage, and stretch marks, I also had two young critics. ("You're wearing that?" my daughter commented as I left the house for one of my first outings. "He seems nice," my son said after meeting my date. "What is he—about 100?")

But being the lone single at dinner parties of my friends was getting to be tedious.

So I took the leap. I placed a personal ad in an outdoorsy magazine, started with a few coffee dates, and attempted to rebuild my faith in the whole tortured process. Before long, one thing became clear: I realized that if I were patient, sooner or later I would get that chance at second love.

I also learned that the grown-up dating game has never been so interesting. There are more players than ever before: Higher divorce rates, longer life spans, and a greater tendency to never marry are churning out more single Americans than at any other time in the country's history. Of the 97 million Americans who are 45 or older, almost 40 percent—36.2 million—are on the loose, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

We have more creative ways of finding each other, too. While the go-get-'em spirit of baby boomers had already created a bumper crop of dating services, personal-ad vehicles, and Club Med-inspired singles vacations by the mid-1980s, the more recent Internet explosion has made looking for love as routine as shopping for cheap airfares.

Being single later in life is becoming the norm. "The stigma of looking for someone is vanishing," says Susan Fox, founder of Personals Work, a Boston-based service that helps people create effective personal ads. "You get over your embarrassment when you look around and see how common it is."

People today are often as open about their adventures in dating as they are about buying books on Amazon.com. CEOs seem to have no qualms about posting a picture of themselves in Bermuda shorts in an Internet personal ad—shareholders be damned. The New York Times regularly details dating success stories in its wedding announcements.

Not only are we bolder, there's plenty of evidence that we're better at dating than younger people. "The one thing that our research continually shows is that the older a person gets, the more he or she becomes a practical dater, as opposed to being emotionally driven," says Trish McDermott, vice president of romance (now there's a title!) for Match.com. Single Americans over 55 are the group least likely to believe their romantic lives are controlled by destiny, she says, or that they have only one soul mate. Some are also optimistic; more than one in five believe they will find romance this year.

And many will. One reason for this is that we bring realistic expectations to dating. (For example, surveys show that single people in their 50s are among the least likely to expect a long-term commitment.) We're also more flexible and open-minded about finding someone.

"Younger people—especially those in their 20s and 30s—tend to be very idealistic in their search for a mate, and are so swept up in their careers that it's harder for them to make the time it takes to get to know someone," says Anne Lambert, a coordinator at Science Connection, a dating service for people with backgrounds and interests in science and nature.

In contrast, singles in their 50s have greater wisdom and grace in dealing with people, which helps in dating.

Statistics may show that we're successful when we hunt, but too many 50-plus people have given up and resigned themselves to watching Letterman alone. For instance, our new singles survey of 3,501 Americans ages 40 through 69 found that 43 percent didn't have one first date last year. We'd like to think that many of them already have a steady partner, but that's not the case: Thirty-six percent of those in their 50s admitted they hadn't been kissed or hugged even once in the last six months.

There's a one-word explanation for such abundant aloneness: divorce. As recently as 25 years ago, when someone over 50 was on the prowl, most people assumed that the person was widowed. But that's changed radically; today, a solo person in his or her 50s is far more likely to be divorced than widowed. About 15.4 percent of all Americans in their 50s are divorced, while 6.2 percent have never been married. Only 4.4 percent are widowed.

To a married person, such statistics sound like hairsplitting. But anyone who has ever endured the agony of Bitter-Ex Syndrome on a first date knows the effect divorce can have on finding a new relationship. What's more, research shows that those who have fled unhappy marriages may be less likely to remarry later in life. Many paddle around the dating pool indefinitely, very much aware that second marriages are statistically more likely to fail than first marriages.

This is no doubt one reason that the number of older singles who shack up without marrying has skyrocketed. Recent data from the U.S. Census found that among households headed by a person who is 45 or older, 1.2 million contain two adults who are not related or married to each other. That represents a dramatic increase from 1995, when just 736,000 of such households contained two unmarried adults.

Carolyn Taft, 57, from Duxbury, Massachusetts, spent the first 15 years after her divorce on the dating sidelines, swept up in the day-to-day tumult of raising her children and working "humongous hours in venture capital—my social life was pretty much zip," she says. When she finally began to go out again, she found the dating scene to be far different from her younger experiences.