Early Menopause Gave Me a Dating Superpower | Dame Magazine

The man across from me glowed, the light of his phone casting a blue blush on his face. In the 20 minutes since we’d met, this was about the tenth time he’d checked his screen. Had he texted me from another OKCupid date? “Eli” was handsome, a doctor, and, by his own admission, stoned out of his mind.

“You told him you didn’t want to see him again?” my girlfriend, Sasha, asked the next day over coffee. “I mean, maybe he was texting a patient?”

“Can you imagine getting a diagnosis from him?” I laughed. “‘So sorry, you only have-oh, ‘scuse me while I swipe right.’”

But my girlfriend didn’t find it funny. High or not, Eli was a single, 40-something doctor living in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Sasha was, like me, single, spectacular, and in her early 40s. With Eli being the dating market’s equivalent of a unicorn, and Sasha and I on a par with feral cats, neither could believe I’d turned down a second date. Until recently, that kind of sangfroid hadn’t been my way, either.

Unlike most 42-year-old women, I’d stopped having my period four years earlier. I was post-menopausal. Early menopause-defined as the cessation of monthly cycles before the age of 40-is somewhat rare, and not without long-term health risks. Yet by the time I met Eli, I’d come to view myself not as a…