Montauk Pioneer - January 16, 2009 -

Valentine's Day will be here sooner than we realize and I started to think about the different kinds of couples out there. These days there really are no "role models" like in the past. One thing that is changing is the age difference of the older woman and younger man. In the past, if you saw an older man and younger woman, no one said anything. But an older woman with a younger man has been raising eyebrows ever since Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) tried to seduce Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) in the 1967 movie The Graduate.

Older women have come a long way since then and it has become more acceptable in today's society to see a couple where the woman is on the average of 15 years or so older than the man. Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher are a couple that are a perfect example.

This past December, Lifetime TV debuted a movie Flirting With Forty based on the popular book by award winning author Jane Porter. Heather Locklear portrayed a divorced mother of two who takes a trip to Hawaii in celebration of her 40th birthday and meets a younger man, a surf instructor named Kai, played by Robert Buckley. They wind up having a vacation romance that turns into something much more serious.

The movie was done in such a tasteful way, showing how age is just a number and what matters is the connection between two people. The best thing about this movie is the fact that it is based on Porter's real life.

There were many promos that ran on Lifetime to promote this movie and many women were eager to watch it. In fact, there were even Flirting with Forty parties the night of the show where girls got together to watch the movie and snack on goodies. I was so intrigued at how many women were talking about this that I decided to get in touch with Porter to see how things were on her end. She had such a great response to the movie both before and after, not to mention book signings in the midst of it all. I began to wonder how many people in Montauk watched the movie, since Montauk has a lot of surfers along with older women who love them.

This Valentine's Day romance will abound and I thought it might be fun for ladies to write in about their stories involving the younger man-older woman relationship. So between now and our next issue (which will come out February 13th,) you can send in your experience and we'll put some of them in the paper. You will be anonymous in the paper and all you have to do is email it to me at . Your name will be entered to win an autographed copy of Porter's Flirting With Forty book along with some other miscellaneous goodies. There is no purchase necessary. Make sure you email your name, daytime and evening phone numbers and best times to reach you. The winner will have their picture taken and it will appear in our February issue of the Montauk Pioneer.