Another man holding a fish in his profile picture… This one is clearly still married… Friends with benefits? What am I, 25?
When Suzie de Jonge ended her 15-year marriage to husband Stuart, she learned the hard way that dating in your 50s is not for the faint-hearted.
Just two years earlier, her marriage had been solid. She loved Stuart, had a beautiful daughter, and they lived together in a charming home.
But it all unravelled after the death of her father and her subsequent ‘mid-life crisis’.
Trying to juggle her business, motherhood and a social life became too much, and the menopause left her with insomnia, hair loss and hot flashes. In her despair, she saw a doctor and then tried therapy.
It was during therapy that Suzie felt a profound and indescribable shift within – as if she were stepping over a threshold, leaving one chapter of her life behind and entering another.
In her heart, she knew she was moving forward into something new, and Stuart was no longer the partner meant to walk that path with her. Or so she thought.
It hadn’t always been like this.
When Suzie de Jonge ended her 15-year marriage to husband Stuart (pictured together on their wedding day) she learned the hard way that dating in your 50s is not for the faint-hearted
The couple grew apart when Suzie had a ‘mid-life crisis’ and felt like a ‘different person’. Going to therapy only widened the gap that was forming between them
Suzie, then a 39-year-old single mother raising her daughter, had first met Stuart on a blind date arranged by a close friend.
At the time, she hadn’t been on a date in years, but her friend sold her on Stuart, whom she described as genuine and ‘down to earth’.
Still, Suzie had her reservations and only agreed to go on the condition her friend and her partner at the time joined them. So it became a double date.
‘Stuart was unlike anyone I had met or dated before,’ she recalls.
‘I had low self-esteem and used to date the wrong people. He was grounded, kind, had a dry sense of humour and we bantered a lot. I felt safe with him.
‘We had similar upbringings, were hard workers, and had the same morals.’
In 2005, after three years of dating, Suzie and Stuart married. They bought a house, adopted a dog and were ready to spend their lives together.
But four years later, things began to unravel after Suzie’s dad died suddenly.
‘Stuart and I are like yin and yang. I’m a very positive, spontaneous person while he can tend to be a bit more negative and reels me back in,’ Suzie explains
‘I had never lost someone I was so close with before. I was dealing with the grief and noticed I was riddled with anxiety but thought everyone was like that,’ she says.
One morning while driving to work, she realised she was gripping the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles had turned white.
She felt anxiety and, in turn, shame about how she was feeling. It became so intense she barely left her house.
She went to a doctor who told her it was not normal to feel so tense 24/7.
Stuart only wanted the best for his wife but, being a ‘blokey bloke’, he wasn’t great at talking about feelings. As Suzie began to work on herself in therapy, she became increasingly distant from her husband.
‘I started changing as a person and unravelling why I am the way I am and my lack of self-worth, but Stu didn’t change,’ she says.
‘He didn’t need to change – I understand that now – but at the time I felt the gap between us got bigger and bigger.’
Over time, she became more aware of fundamental differences in their personalities and believed Stuart’s actions and worldview were having a negative impact on her mental health.
‘Stuart and I are like yin and yang. I’m a very positive, spontaneous person while he can tend to be a bit more negative and reels me back in,’ Suzie says.
‘The energy of that felt really heavy [at the time] and it was hard for me to be around that when I saw the world through different eyes.
‘I tried talking to him about it but he didn’t understand, which is fine, but at that point I couldn’t deal with it.’
One night, she let it all out. Through floods of tears, she unloaded her feelings of isolation and resentment. That evening, they slept in different beds. The next morning, they did not speak.
The marriage fell apart.
‘We sold the house and both rented elsewhere. My whole life I had never lived alone, which was scary, but I just needed space,’ Suzie says.
DATING IN YOUR 50s
Suzie spent 18 months alone before she began to think about dating again.
Even then, the prospect was terrifying. But eventually she plucked up the courage to download the Bumble dating app and create a profile.
‘Putting yourself in a position where you walk into a room to meet a total stranger is a very vulnerable thing to do,’ she recounts.
Suzie felt completely out of touch. She didn’t understand half of the lingo people were using on apps and hadn’t been on a first date in years.
Swiping through the matches, she was perplexed by the number of men holding fish in their photos. Others used images of themselves wearing sunglasses or hats so she couldn’t tell what they looked like. Some had selfies with their children. There were pictures that had clearly been taken decades ago.
She was ‘catfished’, ‘breadcrumbed’ and ‘ghosted’ – terms she’d never heard of before. Within a matter of months, she realised how shallow the dating pool is when you are in your fifties.
On a particularly mortifying date, a man snuck out the back door of the restaurant and left her with the bill. She felt humiliated.
Suzie often found her dates wanted talk to her about their exes and how ‘horrible’ they were.
‘Having learned there is always two sides to a story, my spidey senses confirmed that these were not the people for me,’ she adds.
The final straw was a man with a murky past.
‘He was happy to boast about what a successful businessman he was and really built himself up to sound like Mr Wonderful,’ Suzie recalls.
‘He said we should meet but for someone inexplicable reason, my intuition told me to google him. I found out he had recently been in jail for assaulting his then-pregnant partner as well as defrauding his staff of their superannuation.
‘That was enough for me to go, “I don’t think this internet dating thing is for me – I’d rather stay single.”‘
It turned out that perhaps the grass wasn’t greener after all.
On a particularly mortifying date, a man snuck out the back door of the restaurant and left Suzie with the bill. She felt humiliated
WHAT I FOUND IN THE BEDSIDE TABLE…
Three years after leaving Stuart, Suzie was still single. Neither of them had got around to filing for divorce so they were still technically married.
Life was busy with her work and social life, plus she was moving into a new home.
In the middle of packing up her clothes, shoes and furniture, she opened her bedside table drawer and found a collection of cards Stuart had given her over the years.
‘I didn’t even realise I had kept them all. Birthday cards, Valentine’s Day cards, anniversary cards. I opened each one up and read them and was shocked to see what he had written,’ Suzie says.
‘Each one of them declaring his love for me and how he was looking forward to spending the rest of our lives together. I felt an overwhelming pang of loss and pain in my heart.
‘How blind was I? Why was I unable to see and feel that love, accept it and let it in? Now I know why – because I didn’t feel I deserved it. And so, like every other relationship I had been in, I sabotaged it.’
Suzie decided to write down what she was feeling and shared it with her therapist.
‘Why don’t you share that with Stu?’ she suggested.
When she did, it was the start of rekindling their love. After three years apart, Suzie put their differences aside and decided to work things out with Stuart.
In the middle of packing up her clothes, shoes and furniture, she opened her bedside table drawer and found a collection of cards Stuart had given her over the years. ‘I opened each one up and read them and was shocked to see what he had written,’ Suzie said
‘Our reunion was quiet – no big fanfare, just a gradual coming together,’ she says.
‘I felt nervous I might stuff things up again, but I gradually was able to relax and now here we are.’
During their time apart, the pair had learned a lot about themselves. They realised strong communication had been lacking in their marriage, which is why Suzie felt so distant from Stuart after she started going to therapy.
They made a promise to each other to work on that.
Suzie now acknowledges she put unfair expectations on Stuart when she was grieving her father and struggling with her mental health.
‘I had no right to expect him to change who he was just because I was going to therapy. But that’s who I was at the time,’ she admits.
‘Now we’re closer than ever and can’t imagine parting ways again. He’s stuck with me.’
Suzie has released her second book, ‘Musings of a Menopausal, Insomniac, Crazy Dog Lady’, an unapologetically quirky read about how she turned her life around.
