Angel, I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. :yes: I don't think of myself as a "cougar" or any of that nonsense. For me it is very straightforward: I'm 49 (now), I know what I want, and I'm happy I've found a place where it is OK to be who I am and to talk about it. I'm valuable, beautiful, looking only for informal commitments, and have a lot to give in a trusting relationship. My heart, mind, spirit, and body are aligned and comfortable, and my friend and I agree that we enjoy the energy, presence, companionship, physical potential, and personal development potential of men 18-19 yo.
Honestly, no offense intended at all, but you pretty much fit one of the accepted definitions of a "cougar." A woman who seeks out casual, sexual relationships with men many years younger than herself. That's not a bad thing - it is what it is. You shouldn't be judged on that any more than a man who seeks the same with younger women!!
Personally, I hate that there is even a name for it just because it's an older woman vs. an older man - especially given that the
original definition usually meant "a woman over 40, pathetically desperate to recapture her youth by trolling college bars; in tacky clothes and makeup, for a night of hot sex with different college men." Lovely, right? Now, "cougar" can even mean a 30 year old dating a 21 year old, even if she didn't "chase" him! (They called a young Cameron Diaz a "cougar" for her relatively small 9 year age difference with Justin Timberlake.) But usually they pin women who seek out and serial date younger men, with or without expectation of a commitment, with the "cougar" label.
As Angel explained, many, if not the vast majority, of the women on this site were NOT seeking relationships of any kind specifically with younger men. By the way, "VYM" here means "VERY young man/men" and tends to mean 18-20 years old, depending on personal opinion. Otherwise, a lot of women here would consider anything more than 10 years younger than herself a "YM" or "young/younger man." That could even mean a 40 year-old man with a 50 year old woman and some even freak out over as little as 2 years difference, because they always thought the man should be older. Anyhow, most of us here were just going about our lives and found ourselves pursued by a much younger man or attracted to a much younger man (much to our surprise.) These young men are not usually looking for a "hook up." They saw us as a potential long-term commitment, which I think is what throws a lot of us off so much!
In my case, my YM pursued me for nearly a year asking me out and I kept pushing him away (I was 36 and he was 23.) When I finally "gave in," I figured he saw me as some kind of challenge and it would never go beyond maybe one night of fun. But that first night together, he stopped, looked at me directly in the eyes and basically said, "If this is just a one night stand for you, I don't want to do this. I want to be
with you." (He admitted later that he was already falling in love with me by that point.) Suddenly, my expectations of "a little fun that's good for my ego" turned into a man 13 years my junior having his own expectations of a long-term relationship! That is what brought me here.
So, Ageless Love tends to be made up more of women who unexpectedly found themselves in relationships with younger men, not so much women who are actively seeking any kind of relationship with much younger men. It's not that marriage to a younger man was a goal before we met them, but that many serious relationships of any age tend to go that direction. And since so many of the women here are finding themselves in a serious relationship with a younger man, weddings just tend to happily happen.
