I've heard this topic tossed around by a fair amount of people: how long to
wait before starting to date after the demise of one's marriage. I see far
too many variables in that statement alone, to waste a whole lot of brain
space on the question. I tend to be analytical, an over-thinker anyway, so I
feel pretty safe in going with my own base instinct. But strictly for
argument's sake...

I've heard lots of other people's opinions about it: Two years seems to be a
generally accepted time frame to heal oneself from the wrenching effects of
divorce.

My friend has a theory, he got it from HIS friend, who did some looking into
it and came up with this statistic derived from research done by (my friend
recalls) UCLA's psychology program.
 
I quote my friend: "Statistically, there seems to be a point, after a
divorce, which is about 25% of the length of their marriage/significant
relationship.  Remarriages/significant relationships that happen *before*
that time have a very high divorce rate; ones after about that time have
relatively low divorce/crash 'n burn rates."

Okay, in my case that's 6.25 years.

Easy for a man to say.

For a woman things aren't that easy. I was 45 when my marriage ended. Add on my allotted suffering/recovery time and I'll be 51 or 52 when I can finally think about dating someone really cool. Unfortunately, for a 52 year old woman, that's gonna be a 70 year old gentleman, (or in my case, a real old wrinkly biker dude with fading shriveled tattoos. Or whatever.).

I notice some guys feel fairly strongly about that rule of thumb, or
something similar. Fine. I'll just hang around with some 'disposable dates'
till my time span's up. Kind of a dating purgatory, I guess. Oh wait, I
meant that in a semi-sarcastic (and funny!) way - but I just realized - it's
exactly what I HAVE been doing.