A Guide To The Ides Of 50

I ’VE BEEN FIELDING A LOT OF questions about dating apps lately.

- Susanna Schrobsdorff

There are 2 a.m. texts like: “Is 55 too old to go on Tinder?” And existential laments like: “I thought I was just leafing through photos but it turns out I was swiping yes, yes, yes, when I wanted to say maybe, maybe, maybe. Isn’t there any room for ambiguity? Not even an option to ‘save for later’?”

All good questions, though I don’t have the answers. I have no experience with Tinder or any of the swiping apps—I only made it to the browser-based era of online dating. But as the first person in my friend group to divorce, nearly 10 years ago, I’m the prime confidante for questions too embarrassing to ask the happily coupled.

But I might be relieved of those duties now that we finally have an elder stateswoman of midlife dating: Candace Bushnell, creator of Sex and the City—the book and series that tackled all the uncomfortable dilemmas of 30- something single women in the 1990s—is back with a new book and upcoming Netflix series that asks, Is There Still Sex in the City? And while she doesn’t bring back Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte or Samantha, it feels a bit like we’re at brunch with middleaged versions of those archetypes, and they’re still talking about love and sex because, well, of course.

The book, part memoir, part fiction, is a guide to the Ides of 50, a stage of life when kids depart (along with most of the local estrogen), marriages teeter and normally accommodating women stop being so accommodating. And because things are way more complicated now, they may also find themselves trying to figure out how to swipe maybe on a 27-year-old programmer from Connecticut.