Sex & Love: The New World

Why indeed? Although boomers usually still meet the old-fashioned way—through friends, neighbors or relatives—a growing number are searching online. Jim Safka, CEO of Match.com, says that people over 50 make up his site's fastest- growing segment, with a 300 percent increase since 2000. Some sites, like PrimeSingles.net, cater specifically to the over-50 crowd. Others attract boomers with more-specialized requirements like religion (BigChurch.com for Christians and Jdate.com for Jews) or sexual orientation (OurPersonals.com for gays). "Even 25 years ago, most people were reliant on their friends to fix them up," says family historian Stephanie Coontz, of the Evergreen State College in Washington. "People in their 40s and 50s don't want to be hanging out at bars. Now they have access to this incredible pool of single people their age."

The web helped Joe Germana start dating again. Two and a half years after Jane's death, he began to think about "reconnecting." He missed "the sweetness, the intimacy of a woman." But he was uncomfortable going to bars or clubs. "I'm in my 40s, not my 20s, and I was never a player," he says. "The thought of hitting on people just wasn't what I'm about." His thoughts wandered to his college girlfriend, and, amazingly, he found her on Classmates.com. They exchanged emails and discovered that both had lost spouses and had other experiences in common. After two months, they reunited. "There were huge sparks, a lot of mutual attraction, and a weekend that was very passionate," he says. "It felt so natural. In the back of my mind I thought, could we pick this up where we left off?"

The answer turned out to be no. Like many men his age, Germana was looking for a new life companion. But many boomers aren't eager to settle down. American women in their 40s and 50s are better educated and more affluent than any previous generation of women at midlife, and that has transformed the way they view dating. They don't necessarily want or need to center their lives on a man. In the AARP survey, only 14 percent of women said their most important reason for dating was to find someone to live with or marry, compared with 22 percent of men. College professor Katherine Chaddock, 58, coauthor of "Flings, Frolics and Forever Afters: A Single Woman's Guide to Romance After Fifty," has a full schedule with work, her writers' group, her book club, her kids' visits home from college, her mixed-doubles tennis matches and her trips to the gym. For now, Chaddock says, her ideal relationship would be a "flex time" romance. "I could really enjoy on a fairly long-term basis somebody who lives and works about 100 to 200 miles away, somebody I saw every weekend, Friday through Sunday," she says. "Then we'd take a break and I could go back and talk to my cats and do silly stuff and wear my teeth-whitener strips around the house."

Although even the most fit 50-year-old can't compete with her 25-year-old body, women are learning to accept some of the sags that come with aging—and using a little cosmetic surgery to cope with the rest. Peggy Northrop, editor in chief of More magazine, which aims at women over 40, says midlife women "are not so uptight about their bodies as they were when they were younger. Their feeling is: if I'm naked and smiling, what's your problem?"

For boomer women, this freedom at midlife may turn out to be an unexpected benefit of the feminist movement of the 1970s. "People used to say to me that because of all these changes in our society, a lot of women were going to end up lonely in their old age," says Coontz. "Well, you couldn't prove it by the ones I know." Single women in their 40s and 50s often have vast friendship networks that they've developed from college through years in the workplace and community activities. "They take vacations to meet up with friends and they have very rewarding lives without a partner," says Coontz. "It's a stunningly new ball game."

Victoria Lautman, a single mother in Chicago, thinks of herself as a poster girl for the fortysomething divorced woman. "That's not because I've got men coming up the wazoo," she says. "It's mainly because I'm very social. I give a lot of parties." Lautman, a broadcast journalist, says she is far happier than she was when she was married. "The traditional view of the divorced woman is that they're just in purgatory, waiting until the next heavenly messenger shows up," she says. "I would so much rather be alone for the rest of my life than be mired in a bad relationship." At the moment, her 11-year-old son is the main man in her life. But she's definitely looking ahead. "At some point, when my son's a teenager, he's not going to need me," she says. "And when I'm 52, hopefully I'll still pass for 42, and I won't have to go for the 80-year-olds."