It’s just after 10 p.m. and I’m standing in a bikini near a makeshift dance floor.
It’s dark; it’s loud. A man half my age twirls toward me. “Have you tried the ?” he asks.
“It’s better than alcohol.” Has he read my mind? For several minutes, I’ve been willing my paper cup of cold herbal tea into something stronger. But it won’t work because I’m not at a bar; I’m at Othership, the sprawling facility below Winners on Bloor Street.
Perhaps this baby-faced guy recognizes my unease and just wants to make me laugh. I chuckle, but he doesn’t, and it hits me: at 48, and newly single, I’m not just out of my depth at this invite-only social mixer for “ship-heads,” as devout Othership members are called. I’m in a different multiverse.
Call it Dating 2.0. Back in my day, in the ‘90s and early naughts, dating was as simple as getting dressed, going out and drinking.
Nowadays, the music may be similar, and you still take your clothes off to have a good time — or, at least, strip down to tiny triangles of spandex — but younger generations have a different definition of hanging out. In this brave new realm of space, time, matter and energy, wellness rules. The spa is the new nightclub and sobriety the new mind-altering substance.
As I take in the scene, I feel a sudden kinship with Abe Simpson, Homer’s elderly crank of a father, who once said: “I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it.
