Online Dating For Singles Over 60

So here you are. Sixty something, on your own again, and whatever it was that brought you here, the dust has more or less settled. You have decided it is time for a change. Time to get out of the house. Time, quite possibly, to meet somebody.

Cast your mind back to your last first date. There is a fair chance it was with the person you then spent the next few decades married to. How old were you? Twenty one? Eighteen? Either way it has been a while. Thirty or forty years, for some of us. Things have moved on.

Which means most of what worked last time is off the table. The drive-in has long gone. Nobody is going to be won over by a mixtape. And what the other person is hoping for from an evening out has changed a good deal more than the venue has.

So let us go through what is different.

You are older

This sounds obvious. It is worth saying anyway. You are not eighteen, and neither is anybody you will be meeting, which is mostly excellent news. It does mean that arriving outside her place on a borrowed motorbike with no exhaust and a torn leather jacket will not carry quite the charge it did in 1979. Probably for the best. What you have instead is better: you know who you are, and you have given up pretending to be somebody else. People can tell, and they like it.

Your date comes with a history

So do you. They have likely been married, possibly more than once. There may be children, grandchildren living in the house, a business, an elderly parent to look after. Half the households run by somebody over 60 in this country have several generations under one roof, so this is the normal situation rather than the exception. None of it is about you.

When the ex phones halfway through dinner, that is his past, not your present. When hers arrives to fetch the grandchildren and looks faintly put out to find you in the kitchen, that is not aimed at you either. The only thing that ever works here is saying so out loud. Tell them what you are comfortable with and what you are not, ask them the same, and sort it out between you. You are both quite old enough to manage a conversation.

You have baggage

Everybody has by this stage. The temptation is to rebuild the good bits of the last relationship out of new materials. Resist it. This is a different person, and if you are honest with yourself, so are you. Let the thing turn into whatever it is going to turn into. It might be better. It will certainly be more interesting.

Leave the suitcase at the station. You can always send for it later if you find you miss it.

What has not changed

The main thing, really. Everybody wants somebody, and turning sixty does not excuse you from that. If anything you have the advantage now. You know what you are after, you know what you will not put up with, and you have stopped wasting years on the gap between the two.

So take a breath and sign up for an online dating account. Worst case, you get a few decent conversations and something to tell your friends about on Friday.

Author: Judy Porter.

Look who else just joined