Writing A Good 60+ Online Dating Profile

Before the internet, most of us made do with a small ad in the classifieds. Thirty words, no photo, and you paid by the line, so you learned to be brutal about what mattered. Telephone dating was not a great deal better. You had a minute to record something charming about yourself, and what usually came out was a lot of umming while the clock ran down.

You have it much easier now. You can sit with a cup of tea and take as long as you like, and nobody is timing you. Plenty of people still find the empty box daunting, but there is less to it than you would think.

Start with the easy stuff

You do not have to open with anything profound. Where did you grow up, and where have you ended up since? A great many South Africans have moved at least once, whether that is one province to another, a small town to the city, or back again after retiring. That story alone is worth a couple of lines, and it gives somebody an obvious thing to ask you about.

After that, just answer the sort of things you would be asked over a cup of tea. What did you do for a living, and do you miss it? Is the garden a labour of love or a losing battle? How big is the family, and are they nearby or scattered? Do you have grandchildren, and are any of them living with you? Do you have a dog, and does he behave? If you have a good story about a pet, put it in. Nothing gets a reply quite like a story about a badly behaved dog.

Been away lately, or planning to? Say where. A few days at the coast, a week in the Kruger, a trip up to family in Limpopo or the Eastern Cape for December, or going over to see the grandchildren abroad. It does not have to be grand. It tells people how you like to spend your time, which is really what they are trying to work out.

What is better left for later

Your last marriage does not need to be in here. It is not that anyone will judge you for having a history, because everybody your age has one. It is that writing about it at length can read as though you are still in it, and that puts people off before you have had the chance to meet. A short line is plenty, and the rest of that conversation will come when you are both ready for it.

Politics is much the same. There is no need to nail your colours to the mast in a profile. Leave it for when you know each other well enough to disagree properly. The same goes for anything about money, yours or anybody else's, which is best kept off a public profile entirely.

Stuck? Write about what you would like to do

If listing your own interests feels like hard work, or you are the sort who would rather not go on about yourself, turn it around. Write about what you would enjoy doing with somebody else. A trip you have never got round to. A show you would like to see. A part of the country you have always meant to get to. Somewhere to eat that has been on the list for two years because there was never anybody to go with.

It is an easier thing to write and an easier thing to answer. Somebody reading it can picture themselves along for the ride, which gives them a reason to get in touch instead of scrolling past.

And then leave it alone

Read it back once, fix the obvious typos, and post it. Do not polish it to death. A profile that sounds like you on a good day will always do better than one that has been rewritten nine times until every trace of you has gone out of it. And do not worry about the English being perfect, because most people here are writing in their second or third language and nobody is marking it.

Be honest, keep it warm, and sound like yourself. That is most of the job.

Look who else just joined