</p><p>Note: This story originally appeared Sunday, January 22, 2006</p><p>Waah! It's hard to find a date at age 23.</p><p>Whine! I'm jaded at 26.</p><p>Sound familiar?</p><p>Just wait, say singles in their 40s and 50s.</p><p>"What happens in this age group," says Tom Blake, a California-based author who writes a syndicated column about dating in your prime, "is people are married, let's say for 30, 35 years, and the last thing on their mind is being single. All of a sudden you're out there, so you just have no idea what to do."</p><p>Blake wrote the book Finding Love After 50 to help people like him, confounded by their single status. The big problem: "How in the heck do you meet somebody in the first place?" he asks.</p><p>"Don't ask me what bars in downtown Kansas City you can go to," Blake says. "Tell me what your interests are. Then you go and join a club or two that have your interests."</p><p>Once singles find someone to date, they shouldn't let them go too quickly. With experience comes wisdom - and sometimes too critical and quick a judgment.</p><p>"It's a whole new changing of the way we think you've got to be - open-minded and not so judgmental of people," Blake says.</p><p>"When we were younger, looks were really important. As we get older, we're all going to get wrinkles, we're all going to be lacking in the energy we once had, and I try to convince these people, `Don't just blow somebody off if they're not gorgeous.' "</p><p>Once you find the date, where do you find the time? It's enough to make anyone give up.</p><p>But a group of single 40- and 50-somethings from the Kansas City area hasn't. Six men and women sat down recently with The Star to talk about dating after 35. They shared horror stories and success stories and discussed exes and kids.</p><p>THE STAR: What's different about dating now versus when you first started?</p><p>KAREN HARTLEY: Numbers. There are so many more younger people socializing. The hot single spots are obviously going to be geared for 20-, 25-, 30-year-old people. And there's no way to change that.</p><p>DICK SUMMERS: I didn't get married until I was 32, so I thought there were a lot of places to go and a lot of things to do. I used to go to the Plaza and Westport in my 20s. Getting back out when I got divorced, I went to Village Singles, which I found so large it was difficult getting into it. I'm a small-group kind of a person. I play golf, and I heard in 2000, on my way home one night, that there was a singles golf club getting started. ... I'm just finishing up the year being president.</p><p>TERRY SPRICK: One of the challenges I see is we go to things, and we think everybody else knows each other. It's such a big small town, we all gather around the people we've seen before in a group of three or a group of four. Whether we go to the ski club, the Catholic singles, the (Church of the Resurrection) singles group, we see some of the same people and tend to huddle up. It's hard to break in for a first-timer.</p><p>JUDY MADERE: The online dating thing I've tried, too, and it's not trustworthy. I think I gave it like 30 days and had a lot of one-date wonders. ... It's the comments I got. This guy with a big gut telling me I needed to lose 10 pounds.</p><p>DENETA SMASHEY: They're married, also, a lot (of them.) Or they're separated, but they all live in the same house. She has her own bedroom; he has his. ...Or they have too young of kids. I don't want to start over again. My son's 22. Me being 42, most people my age have young kids, and I won't date them. I don't want to raise somebody else's kids.</p><p>MADERE: That's been an issue for me. I had my kids very young, and I'm at a point if I meet somebody with a very young kid, I'm thinking, "Oh gosh. Do I really want this?"...I just don't want to get in the situation where I take such a big step backward when I'm ready to go on with my life.