At 33, when Susan Kaur* first started dating her partner, she was embarrassed by him.
After browsing on Bumble, she’d matched with Rohit* – a 36-year-old software engineer – and he asked her on a first date.
‘I thought hard before I said yes,’ Susan tells Metro.co.uk. ‘Then when we first met, I felt like I was settling as, physically speaking, he’s not the kind of guy I usually go for.
‘He has average looks and as vain as it sounds, I have only dated attractive men.’
We’ve all been there. We show a picture of our new crush to friends and awkwardly promise that ‘they’re better looking in person’, but Susan’s embarrassment of her potential new suitor didn’t stop there.
‘His spoken English wasn’t that good… and that bothered me because I’ve always been with well-spoken men,’ she adds.
‘Good conversations are important to me, and as I primarily use English to express myself, this was something that was difficult to overlook for me.’
Despite these reservations, Susan felt that her dating life so far had ‘been a mess’, so she wanted to give him a second chance even though he didn’t ‘tick all the items’ on her list.
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‘He seemed like a genuinely good guy, and aren’t those in short supply these days?’ she adds.
Still, although Susan continued to date Rohit, she kept their relationship secret for the next four months.
‘As far as my friends knew, I was still single, even though I was actually dating him,’ she explains. ‘Even my family didn’t know about this guy.’
After about 12 weeks though, Susan’s embarrassment did begin to subside. ‘It took me quite a lot of time to appreciate him for what he is or has, rather than what he isn’t or doesn’t have,’ she admits.
‘I love that he is kind and a feminist, and I’m happy I’m with someone genuine, rather than a mere charmer.’
More common than we think?
Susan’s admission comes after 34-year-old ex-beauty pageant winner Lesley Hunter confessed to being embarrassed when she started dating her 74-year-old now husband, Vince.
The 40-year age gap between the couple proved to be a talking point for people in her life, including Vince’s children who were older than Lesley.
‘I have to say that in the very beginning when I was dating him I was a little embarrassed. I was more sensitive to the “grandpa” statements, but within a year of us dating I just thought “screw them”, I didn’t really care anymore,’ Lesley said on her podcast Ask the Hiring Manager.
‘I do understand that, if my father was with someone 40 years younger, I would probably be concerned initially, so I could completely understood what they were thinking,’ she added.
Although it seems her husband Vince was a little embarrassed at first too. Speaking on the Love Don’t Judge podcast he spoke about their first date after meeting in Chicago.
‘The first night we went out, we had dinner and I asked Lesley “Do you know how old I am?” because it felt a little awkward, but she was comfortable and I got comfortable,’ he explained.
The pair have now been together more than a decade and appear very happy, and as for Susan, it looks like she’ll be tying the knot with Rohit too.
This isn’t to say it was always smooth sailing. ‘My embarrassment could have ended the relationship,’ Susan explains. ‘But, he’s the sweetest guy and he never got mad at me for not telling my friends and family as soon as he did.
Why do we have a type?
‘We are shaped by our own frames of reference throughout our upbringings and social experiences with others,’ Dr Natalie Powell told Metro.co.uk. ‘Our early attachments with our primary caregivers (usually parents) will form the basis of how we form relationships with others.’
‘We will therefore often go for “types” that are familiar to us – that is patterns of interaction that we have experienced regularly before – even if these patterns aren’t particularly good for us!’
But this doesn’t mean you can’t change your type, like Susan did.
According to Dr Helen Nightingale, this is something we can change.
‘Yes you could change your approach and can train oneself to go for something different, providing you’re fully cognisant of it,’ Dr Nightingale told Metro.co.uk.
‘It’s a bit like recognising you have a drink problem and need to do something about it! If you deny you have a problem nothing will change. If you realise you have a problem then you are half way there.
‘But you have to be pretty determined to change and make effort to change in a controlled and specific way. It really requires effort.’
‘I told him I needed time and space, and he gave me both. When I did eventually “come out” to my loved ones about our relationship, there was a shift…he told me he felt a lot more sure about us now.’
The pair are engaged now and for the first time in her life, Susan says she feels ‘safe and secure’ in her romantic relationship.
A lot of the embarrassment Susan believes was largely down to her internalising of the societal stigmas around dating.
‘People are supposed to date in their league, and when they don’t, there’s a lot of judgement and shaming,’ she explains.
‘Also, we tend to see people as walking checklists and many of the items on these lists are things that we cannot control, like good looks and financial stability.
‘Our criteria for a partner needs to be far deeper than that!’
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