I expect I’m not the only one to have noticed that dating in midlife seems a heck of a lot more complicated than it did when I was in my 20s.  Finally, some validation that this is a fact....and some explanation as to why it is so.
 
Dr. Phillip Belove is a psychologist with a focus on marriage and family who has a special interest in midlife dating.  In this article, he de-mystifies many of the puzzlements, frustrations, and challenges of playing the dating game in midlife.  And, he sheds some light on how some long term relationships go bad in midlife.

I want to offer you new ways to think about dating at midlife. It is not the same as dating when you are in your twenties, or even in your thirties. Dating plays on your emotions and stirs up strong feelings. As complicated as that can be, it becomes even more complex at midlife. There are reasons for this.
 
First of all, dating these days takes place in a culturally de-regulated situation. There are no strong traditions to guide the dating process. There are no groups of elders watching the process unfold. People are pretty free to do anything they want.
 
In addition, there is a second emotional process, which is as powerful in its way as dating, and this is the process of the midlife transformation. Instead of one, there are two powerful emotional currents in the dating process at midlife. If you can think more clearly about how you are being played by these currents, you’ll be able to handle yourself better.

When two powerful rivers join there is a lot of turbulence created as the two currents merge. The waves reinforce each other or cancel each other out. The steady flow is interrupted. Down stream, things run smoothly again. But you have to get through the passage. I’m asking you to join me in looking at dating at midlife as a point at which two powerful currents merge.

Dating involves trying to change your life. When you make someone into a partner, you give him or her access to your unconscious. The song says, "You’re getting to be a habit with me." When that happens you start taking someone into account automatically when you make decisions. You’ve made them part of your unconscious processes. That is a big change.

The midlife transition is a different kind of change. It involves reorganizing your personal style. Doing that, plus figuring out how to make a new person part of your life, is making two big changes at once. Both change processes that follow a predictable course. Both processes tend to interfere with each other, however. I think it helps to appreciate this.

First we’ll look at the changes that happen in dating. Then we’ll look at the changes that happen in the midlife transition. As we go along, I’ll try to point out how one set of changes influences the other.

Dating happens in stages. I’ll call the first stage Search and Decide. I’ll call the second stage Testing It Out. I’ll call the third phase, Settling In or Getting Out. First you search for someone with whom you might want to spend time with and, more or less simultaneously you decide on what the possibilities are with that person. That phase is emotionally challenging in one way. Then, if you find a person you want to go to the next stage with, you get involved in a testing process. You spend a lot of time with them and occasionally you have difficult negotiations about how to make two lives fit together.

The way people do the Search and Decide phase depends greatly on their state of mind. Many who are single at midlife are preoccupied with other concerns children, aging parents, businesses, divorces and/or they are in an emotional state that makes it difficult for them to be open to new relationships. They are wounded, angry, exhausted, or resentful.

The Search and Decide phase of the Dating process can also be put on hold by the Midlife transformation process. Often around 40, the stresses just mentioned will trigger an intense self-examination. At midlife some people start to tinker with how they take their place in the world. They start to change their style. That change in style includes a change in how they want to be in a couple.

This midlife change process also happens in stages. And there are times in the middle of the process when people don’t know quite what they want. They become cranky, distant, hypersensitive and demanding. They will defend their midlife change process and they will sometimes give it a priority over relationships.

Like dating, the first phase of the midlife change is also a search. It is not a search for an Other, it is a search for Self. It is a search for the lost parts of you. For whatever reasons, there are aspects of your personality you’ve tucked away and not used, not acknowledged, or not liked. When you start to feel that your life is almost half over, you begin to reconsider your opinion of those dormant parts of yourself.

There is a lot written in wisdom literature about this search for the lost parts of the Self. Some consider this search the equivalent of the search for wisdom. Older people value wisdom more than smarts. Now isn’t the time to pursue this discussion, but I do want to mention it. I’ll speak more about it elsewhere.

For now it is enough to say that you are re-inventing yourself. You are re-tooling your ego. You are re-imagining who you are and what you are. You are looking at the person you thought you were back when you were 20 and you are deciding whether or not that is "really" who you are. Part of re-visioning, (the more common word would be "revising") yourself, will be revising your ideas about your ideal partner.

This re-visioning process is a modern phenomenon. In the last 20 years, as midlife moved from 35 to 45, as the years of good health and vitality were extended, as it became possible to have a second half of life that was a full life, a new kind of psychological technology was born, the art of re-inventing your life, the art of creating guiding visions. We’ll talk about how we can help you do that later. Right now, I want to emphasize that this re-visioning is a natural and spontaneous process. The techniques are attempts to teach many what a few have done spontaneously.