Almost A Cougar

A few days ago, I made a bet with my forty-eight-year-old wife, Kellie, that one of the young men in her French 101 class would hit on her before the end of the semester.  It hasn’t happened yet, at least not in her French class.  Had I expanded the boundaries of the bet, however, I would have already won the wager.  A pair of younger men have tried to flirt with her, but they were not from her French class. 


She was putting gas in her Lexus the other day; at the next pump, a young man, maybe in his twenties, was filling his vehicle.  He looked over to Kellie, and, in the smoothest voice he could muster, said, “Hey, how’s it going?”  He obviously wanted to pump something other than gas.  “You want to hang out and get some lunch?” he inquired.  Kellie had just eaten, so she wasn’t interested.  He should have asked when her blood sugar was lower.

Then, last Thursday, Kellie and I were at the Mottino Family YMCA; she was exercising in the gym while I was swimming laps.  Lying on the floor in a pool of her own sweat, doing crunches, she noticed a young man who kept staring at her way from a vantage point that is normally only available to her gynecologist.  “Seriously,” she thought to herself, “you find this attractive?”  Kellie got up and left the workout area to refill her water bottle from one of the two fountains just outside the gym door.  She had just begun replenishing her container when her admirer sauntered up to the adjacent fountain. He didn't take a drink; his sole objective was to get Kellie's attention.  He proceeded to rapidly start and stop the flow of water at his fountain.  The resulting pressure surges caused the water stream at Kellie’s fountain to jitter, making it impossible for her to fill her bottle.

Kellie slowly turned her head to look at her suitor.  He was smiling.  Now that he had her attention, he delivered his line. “So, how’s the workout going?” he asked.  She told him that she wasn’t really a working out, she was just killing time while her husband was in the pool.

Both of Kellie's pursuers tried essentially the same pickup line: “How’s it going?” Is that the new standard pickup line, or is it just something that young men reserve for older women when they believe no effort is required?  Do they assume that every woman over forty will jump at the opportunity to bed a twenty-something?  And how come men are not deterred by the rock on her left ring finger?  I guess this confirms what I repeatedly tell my daughters, “All men are pigs, except for your father.” 

In fairness to these hapless boys, Kellie does exude a certain aura of cougarness.  Her preference for younger men began early.  As a junior in high school she started dating sophomores, and with each passing year, the gap grew larger.  Had Kellie and I not met, she might have set the record as the world’s youngest woman ever to achieve cougar status.  Normally, a cougar candidate has to be over forty and dating a man under thirty to be considered for cougarhood.  In certain circumstances, the minimum age for a cougarship may be lowered to thirty-five, providing that the male cub is no older than twenty-five.  When we met, Kellie was thirty-one and dating Jesus, who was just twenty-three.  She was just four years shy of getting cougarized, provided, of course, that she was willing to dump Jesus for a younger man.  She did the opposite. 

I was the first older man that Kellie ever dated.  She must have finally recognized the benefits of dating someone with a job.  Yet, I feel a twinge of guilt about shattering her dreams of becoming a cougar.  At least I hope they’re shattered.