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The Best Dating Compliment I’ve Ever Received
A surprising lesson from dating after 60 about humor, trust and the kind of connection that makes love possible
Monica Garwood
Welcome to Ethels Tell All, where the writers behind The Ethel newsletter share their personal stories related to the joys and challenges of aging. Come back every other Wednesday for the latest piece, exclusively on AARP Members Edition.
The man sitting across the crème brûlée gave me one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.
“You make me laugh,” he said. “And you make me laugh at myself.”
That second sentence warmed me from the inside.
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J and I met online. After our third date, he called to tell me that while he really liked me and felt like we could talk forever, he “wasn’t sure there was a spark.”
I was walking my doodle. Had my sunglasses not been sliding off the bridge of my nose into the poop I was scooping, I might have given my phone the finger.
No 61-year-old woman wants to hear there’s “no spark.”
Especially after three dates that stretched two to three hours without either of us noticing. C’mon! We’d covered everything from AI to raising young adults, failed marriages, career pivots, dead parents and invisible dog fencing.
“Can we still be friends?” he asked. “Maybe happy hour sometime?”
“Sure,” I said, fairly certain I’d never hear from him again. “At least you had the balls to pick up the phone and call instead of ghosting me.”
The online dating world is haunted by spineless ghosters.
Except he kept calling.
We started meeting as friends. Every time we’d look up after another four-hour dinner, I’d tease him about our “brother-sister relationship” and his poor taste in women.
“Not bad for no spark,” I’d say, adding some air quotes.
One night, a few months later, something shifted.
Halfway through our oysters and crab cakes, he asked me to move to his side because I was “too far away.” Before we’d even left the restaurant, we locked in plans for pizza the following weekend. Then, standing beside my car, he kissed me.
Not exactly sibling behavior.
A few nights later, we found ourselves five hours into another date.
“So,” I asked, “what exactly is going on with us?”
He thought for a minute.
“I feel so … light when you make me laugh at myself,” he said. “Why is that?”
I answered without thinking. “Because it’s intimate.”
In some way, it was even sexier than the kiss by the car.
I told him, “When I tease you, I’m saying, ‘I see you.’ I’ve been paying attention. I know how your mind works. I’m going to take liberties with you, and you’re going to like it.”
To laugh at yourself in front of another person requires something surprisingly rare: trust.
You have to believe they aren’t trying to diminish you. They’re inviting you to loosen your grip on your own perfection.
I could practically see the gears turning in his engineer’s brain.
He told me about speaking at his father’s funeral. In his remarks, he’d described his father as an introvert. At the reception afterward, one of his father’s longtime friends gently disagreed.
“Oh no,” the man said. “Your father had a terrific sense of humor. Especially about himself.”
“That’s because you were on the inside,” J told him. “You got to see a side of him we kids didn’t.”
The precious compliment moved the man deeply. J’s sharing this story with me moved me deeply as well.
I grew up in the kind of family where humor was as integral as chores.
My father was an incessant teaser. It was his love language, and the unwritten rule was that nobody got defensive. You laughed because being teased meant you belonged. If Dad stopped teasing you, it meant he was in a bad mood. My mother still says their shared sense of humor was the secret ingredient in their 63-year marriage.
When my marriage ended, my friend Rebecca consoled me by saying, “He never laughed at your jokes, which you said always made you feel fat.”
Science suggests she may be on to something. A 2017 meta-analysis of 39 studies involving more than 15,000 people, led by communication researcher Jeffrey Hall, found that positive, shared humor is consistently linked with greater relationship satisfaction.
Researchers call the kind J and I were talking about “affiliative humor.” It’s the wink-wink-nudge-nudge that we’re on the same team.
Whether J and I eventually land in the friend zone or somewhere more romantic, I honestly don’t know.
But I do know this. When someone makes you laugh at yourself, tag it as the special connection it is. Because some people are funny. And then there are the rare ones who make you feel truly seen.
AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.
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