Dating Over 60: I Do Better With My Older Clients Than My Younger Ones

I’d rather show you my own book than tell you love has no expiration date: a bootcamp that runs from 26 to 83, a 79-year-old on her fourth date with a man I introduced her to, and the one request that quietly takes people out of the game.

Dating Over 60: The Short Answer

Dating over 60 works. In my experience it works better than dating in your twenties. I’ve been matchmaking since 1990. Roughly 40,000 people have registered with me privately, and I have united more than 1,400 couples. I’m doing better with the older people than I am with the super young people.

My bootcamp runs from age 26 to age 83. The 83-year-old isn’t the one I worry about.

What stalls people over 60 is almost never age. Fewer than 5% of the men on my registration forms will accept a woman even one year older. Most of my women in their 50s, 60s and 70s are asking me for younger. Both groups are shopping for people who aren’t shopping for them.

I’m in this decade myself, so none of this is a report from outside it.

What Are the Odds of Finding Love After 60? My Honest Answer

You’ve heard “love has no expiration date” a hundred times. I’d rather show you my desk.

The older half of it does better. Not because people over 60 are easier, but because the young market has gone strange. A young woman can get a hundred messages an hour. That forces her to throw people in the trash and hold out for the few who might be six foot two, earning half a million, Harvard.

This is where somebody hands you a percentage. I don’t have one, and I’d rather say so than invent a success rate by decade.

A woman in my bootcamp is 79. We have done three introductions, and one of those men has taken her on three dates and is looking forward to a fourth. That isn’t a marriage. I won’t dress it up as one. It is a fourth date on a 79-year-old’s calendar, which is more than most people her age think is available.

A 74-year-old man in the same class is divorced. A good marriage that ended in disloyalty. Digging in my own database I found Celia, whose consultation with me was seven years earlier. She hadn’t been on a date in 50 years. She had been widowed.

They went out. I called them during the date to see how they were doing. Both shaking. They broke the ice for each other and made another date for the next week.

SEVEN years that woman sat in my database. That is what the odds look like from where I sit.

Why Dating at 60 Stalls, and It Is Almost Never Your Age

I call it the unnatural match. Ann Parnes, the assistant district attorney who became a matchmaker, defined it better than I ever have: they’re looking for someone who isn’t looking for them back.

I keep count of this one. Fewer than 5% of the men in my world will check the box even one year older than they are. That isn’t a study. It’s what I read on my own forms, and it has barely moved since 1990.

Meanwhile 60% or more of my women in their 50s, 60s and 70s are looking younger. As Jennie Agin and I worked out on air, they have a reason. I’m probably going to outlive you, and everybody I know my age is sitting on the couch. The younger men didn’t get the memo yet.

I described the men who suffer worst from this to Gabriella Aratow, who has run Keeper Introduction Services in Santa Fe for nine years. I have a whole group of older men who are functionally out of the game. Successful men who ask for an age differential that’s entirely unrealistic for them, and who tell me they’re just not attracted to their contemporaries.

One I have known for 15 years still wants the same women he wanted back then. He seemed old to them even then.

So I stopped fighting it. I don’t reveal age on profiles. I don’t reveal height either. And one question ends the argument faster than anything else I know: tell me the person you have just described to me, and now tell me what THEY are looking for.

Dating in Your 60s as a Woman: The Market, Told Straight

Ladies, here is the arithmetic nobody wants to print.

Past 60 and 65 there are far more single women than single men. So the good men who become available get hit by what my mother-in-law called the casserole brigade.

I put it to Heidi Friedman, the environmental lawyer who wrote a book about her 104 dates, like this. A really good man who is relationship-oriented feels like a fish out of water without someone to love, so he falls in with whoever comes over first with a casserole. There are women out there preying on the men who are coming available, and it’s creepy, but here you are.

Eric Resnick, who has written dating profiles as Profile Helper since 2005, is blunter than I am about what that costs women. His clients in their mid sixties and up have spent a lifetime being the one who waits, and there are simply fewer men to wait for now.

The idea that only a desperate woman makes the first move is, in his words, just STUPID. He has yet to meet an emotionally healthy man who isn’t delighted to receive an introduction from an intelligent woman. The ones who are turned off are so insecure that it’s a bullet dodged.

Eric Resnick, Profile Helper

Gabby Aratow’s line about looks frees more women than it flatters. If a modeling agency hasn’t paid you, you’re probably good-ish looking enough, and that’s a perfectly okay realm to be in. A rung below this decade, dating over 50 is the earlier chapter.

Dating in Your 60s as a Man: What I Read on the Registration Forms

Gentlemen, you won’t enjoy the first paragraph.

A large share of the men I meet over 60 have taken themselves out of the game and don’t KNOW it.

Ann Parnes describes the type exactly. The senior gentleman, recently widowed or recently divorced, who isn’t attracted to his contemporaries and asks for younger. The women he hopes to meet don’t want a man 15 years older. They see what happens down the road, and they’re not ready to be the nurse yet.

What moves a man isn’t a lecture, it’s a question. Ann asked a 75-year-old client this: are you going to be strict about it, or if I tell you there’s somebody who matches your energy and your lifestyle and whose number is closer to yours, will you be open? He said flat out, I am. That is most men, when somebody asks properly.

My own version is the reveal in reverse. There are no ages on my profiles, so when he asks how old she is, I say: remember, I don’t reveal YOUR age either.

Then there’s the man who does it right. He was my husband’s former business partner at the Great Expectations offices. His wife had a serious stroke in her late forties. He cared for her for 25 years. She died three years ago and he’s ready for a blossoming.

He is 78. I have him talking to three women. One in her fifties, one in her sixties, one in her seventies. I told him the young one was probably not going to go for him.

She is the one who kissed him. She gave him his first kiss in four years.

I was wrong out loud, in front of everybody. I’m glad I was. And if you never married at all, I wrote a whole page arguing that’s not what people think it is.

Dating After 60 and Widowed: The Two-Year Rule Is Nonsense

Somebody decided a widowed person must wait two years before dating, and that anybody who doesn’t is a red flag. I asked my friend Julie Spira, the online dating expert who has been at this since Love@AOL in 1994, what she makes of it.

Her answer: oh my God, he’s going to be long married in two years. He is going to be married in a year. It might be six months. People who loved companionship and had happy marriages go and find another companion. Not the same flavor, not the same crayon out of the box, but somebody who brings something to where they are now.

Now the part nobody expects. Being widowed carries higher esteem with my clients than never having been married. People tell me outright they want somebody who has been married before, ideally widowed, who knows what it takes to hang in there for 50 years.

I add the counterweight every time. Plenty of people never married and still raised children and stayed committed for decades.

Dr. Elena Michaels, the naturopath who was with her husband for 50 years, hates the word itself. Come up with another word for it, she told me. Single. I just like single. She also said the thing this subject needs to hear, against all the urgency. You have time to find out whether somebody can hold you when you’re down.

She knows why she says it. Right after her husband died, a fabulous man reached out. It felt easy. Four months in she found out he was married. He had told her he was separated. Then she found a photograph on social media: him and his wife celebrating their anniversary, in a town he had called a work trip.

If that sounds like the man in front of you, read what I think about dating a man who is separated but not divorced. My page for widows and widowers is the practical one.

Red Flags When Dating in Your 60s, and Why I Don’t Lead With Them

The red flag thing makes me nuts. I say look for green flags instead.

My position, said on air to Heidi Friedman: the red flag for me is a woman who has that red flag. Somebody who has read so many lists she now interviews for disqualifications instead of meeting a person.

Everything general lives on my page about red flags in a relationship. Here is what changes after 60.

Nurse or a purse. I first heard it from Feisty Frida Ferman, my mother-in-law, who was married to Al for 56 years. I thought it was funny. Having now heard it around 250 times, it’s not. What it says is: I’m not paying for anything, and if he gets sick, I’m out of here. Ladies, if you have ever said that, STOP it.

The profile that sells too hard. Eric Resnick finds that profiles which sell hard scare away healthy people. The ones left behind are happy to exploit what you’re selling. A team at a bank of computers mines your profile. Then they give you exactly the attention the tone of it says you’re lacking, checking in daily. From there it’s a short jump to thousands of dollars.

My own answer is to reveal no last names, no ages and no incomes. Eric’s rule is a good first filter: meet within a week, because somebody running a scam usually won’t. It’s a filter, not proof. Nobody you haven’t met should ever be getting money out of you, whatever the story, and if you notice you’re keeping the whole thing from your friends, that on its own is the warning.

Money, Trusts and Grown Children: The Conversation Nobody Writes Down

Nobody warns you that the hardest conversation at this age is about a trust. Here’s the one I actually have.

Most people I see at this age already have theirs set up, and their children already know what to expect. That’s why so many couples over 60 partner up without ever remarrying. That argument gets a page of its own: living apart together.

Then the grown children, the landmine on a first date. He asks about your daughter and the truth is that the relationship is broken.

Joshua Coleman, the psychologist who wrote Rules of Estrangement, says you don’t owe a confession before you have reason to trust the person will see you fully. His script: not quite as close as we used to be, but I’m working on it. How about you? Tell the truth briefly. Save the rest for later.

Sex After 60, and the Born Again Virgins

A lot of people come to me having only just started thinking about dating again after a death or a divorce. We affectionately call these people born again virgins. In many cases it has been years, sometimes decades, since they’ve done anything at all south of the border.

Elizabeth Ashford, the founder of Beyond the Bees, gave the practical answer. Get comfortable with yourself first, so it’s not a shock with a partner. Then say it out loud in advance: I’m almost embarrassed to share that I haven’t been intimate in this long, and I’m nervous about it. People aren’t mind readers.

She and I disagree about timing and I’m leaving the disagreement standing.

And Jeff Abraham, who runs Promescent, gave me the line I now repeat to everybody. Do not use the word performance, because then it stops being intimacy and becomes an Olympic event.

When a woman tells me she wants a younger man, the reason is often that the last one had ED and she still has a strong libido. All lovely. My second question is the one that matters. Is there only one way you can achieve ultimate satisfaction in sex?

If she expects a 77-year-old to be Johnny on the spot the way he was at 27, both will be disappointed. How much of our own pleasure can we take responsibility for, and can we ask out loud for what we need?

How to Meet Someone After 60, On the Apps and Off Them

Start with the apps, because writing them off is a decision people over 60 make far too fast.

Fix your profile first, and DELETE the line about looking young for your age. Eric Resnick cuts that sentence on sight, because it announces shame rather than pride. We might look good for our age, but we’re not fooling anybody.

Off the apps, the best network for this decade already knows where you live. Julie Spira’s grandfather got married at 87, introduced by the mailman. Know your FedEx driver, your Instacart person, the post office guy, because they know who lives five doors down and who has been crying for three months.

I blew this myself. Patrick delivered my groceries. I thanked him and over-tipped him, and never once said: send me all your single friends.

Widen the map, because it’s your biggest advantage over a 30-year-old. Your kids are raised and you can work from anywhere. I introduced a man in Bali to a woman in Alaska. Ann Parnes has a couple in their late sixties and early seventies whose first date was an overnight in his city.

So when somebody says they need a partner within 45 minutes because of the traffic, I say: once you love each other you go for the weekend.

And stop looking for THE one on every introduction. That is the difference between chemistry and compatibility, and it costs people more good matches at this age than anything else.

Come get registered with me. Then you exist in my world on the day the right person walks through my door. My bootcamp runs from 26 to 83, and here is what working together looks like, including what hiring a matchmaker actually costs. Frida’s standard is the one I’ll hold you to. Can he fog a mirror, and can he drive at night.

FAQs About Dating Over 60

julieferman.com · Julie@JulieFerman.com · 805-371-9557