Age 45+ has online romance worked for you?

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Are you over 45 with experiences you would like to share about (a) online dating or (b) accidental online hook-ups-turned-romantic? Interested in anything you might have to say on such things as:

• How did you meet (e.g. via WP or shared-interest site other than dating site)?
• Is it worthwhile or a waste of time?
• Did it turn out well for you?
• What are the pitfalls and advantages as you see them?
• Any untoward surprises?
• Would you do it again?
• Are their ways in which your/their autism was a factor that either helped or hindered?

Last edited by HighPlateau on 29 Dec 2011, 10:08 am, edited 2 times in total.

How can hook-ups be accidental?

To me, it's an accidental hook-up when people meet on a shared-interest site and the first point of connection is an external point of shared interest rather than each other. Then a friendship evolves and unexpectedly morphs into romance. A bit like what sometimes happens in real life, I guess, and perhaps a little less artificial than online dating ... but then one pitfall of that method, getting snuck up on by Fate like that, might be if they are at different stages of 'readiness' for a new relationship. It might be extra-difficult to get in sync. What do you think?

I don't really see how being over 45 makes it any different than for someone who is younger.

The issues you mention apply to everyone regardless of age...

Sure they do. Would be happy to read your insights on the topic if you have any.

There are a couple of reasons I'm particularly asking for the more mature responses. First, they are harder to come by. The active population on WP (especially on dating threads) appears skewed towards the 20-somethings. They're preoccupied with getting started with dating. 30-somethings might be thinking about procreation or professional life. Life preoccupations are different again for the 45+, whose children may be grown up and ready to leave home. I'm wondering if the chances of relationship success are improved as people mature, if they haven't had the good fortune for the first relationship to carry them through. By now they've chalked up a fair bit of life experience and have a better idea of what they're looking for than ever before. They also have a certain new freedom to look forward to. The drivers are different, and so are the insights.

A separate, subsidiary issue is I'd need convincing that younger people are particularly respectful of the idea of older people dating and mating. I'd guess that for many it's quite an irrelevance. If that's true, mature respondents may be less comfortable and therefore less inclined to reply in a more open environment. That's just a wild guess, based on nothing but a hunch. But I do feel that there is a great deal of popular and online culture that already caters for youth. The issues are different for older people, and I see no harm in exploring them in their own right.

Anyway, it's interesting, don't you think, that more people are asking questions about the questions than answering them? Wonder what that is telling me! Any thoughts??

I agree with your rationale behind polling 45+, looking for underrepresented (on WP, at least) experiences.

I'm 44, but I have no freedoms like you've mentioned. I got such a late start that my children are still young (under 10) and I'm a single parent. So, I don't really have the freedom to date in a constructive way (no free time/money to pursue interests). Online dating has been a complete washout for me since it's all blind-dating.

double post

About seven years ago I was finally over the death of my boyfriend and decided to date again. I thought that online dating sites made sense. I did that for about a year and found it to be a lot of work without much success. I had 4 dates. One stood me up. Two were not to my liking. One, I liked but he, evidently, was not interested in me.

I decided that meeting men in person might be a whole lot less work and chose two local restaurant/bars with live bands and went out with girlfriends. Plenty of men approached me and I was interested in some of them. They all did one thing in common. They all went fishing for my age, which I'm not sensitive about. It was pretty transparent, such as;

"Oh, you were in the midwest in high school; when did you graduate?"
"71"
"Nooo, that'd make you my age!"
"Well, if that's when you graduated from HS; then yes, we're probably about the same age."
"Nooo, you're joking; really, when did you graduate?"
"I'm 53 - graduated HS in 71."
"Wow, I mean, you just don't look my age."

And that was it; I heard from one of them a couple of times but he never asked to see me again.

Once they learned that I am in my 50s they all lost interest. I am not an alarmist and am loathe to draw drastic conclusions on scant evidence; but....this went on for the two years that I was going to the clubs. I have come to the conclusion that for the most part, men in their 50s are not interested in women in their 50s (even women in their 50s who look 10-15 years younger). Guys in their 70s are very interested in me, but those have seemed so very soppy, sappy to me.

I'm not scandalized about it, though honestly, the consistency of my experience is a bit amazing to me. This is how I see it; dating and attraction has a lot to do with sex and sex is biological. Biologically, women in their 50s are no longer viable for conception. And that's the biological point of sex; conception. Do those guys want more kids? No. I just think that the thought of women in their 50s is a turn off for men of the same decade. It's not logical, it's emotional; it's just how it is.

I know that there are men in their 50s dating women in their 50s; but I have a suspicion that those men just might seem the soppy, sappy, needy sorts that are unattractive to me.

Online dating? Whooa; that's a lot work for a woman my age, because the guys know my age up front and frankly they mostly want someone younger than themselves and I'm not interested in the really elderly guys.

I'm glad you see the point, mv, and thank you for providing the first proper response to my question (not that I minded the earlier respondents' debates with the topic, not at all ).

Yes, I understand your situation completely. I suppose that means the full onset of your new freedom comes around 55. But in reality it doesn't take that long, because (if my similar experience as an impoverished single parent is anything to go by) once the introduction of small freedoms begins (for my son it was around the age of 11) it gathers momentum quite quickly.

[Brief off-topic diversion: I'm happy to PM further on this if you're interested in the strategies that worked for me; just I would go too far off-topic, I think, to take it further here right now. Is there already a thread on this somewhere?]

I would be interested to know in what ways you found online dating a washout. Was any part of it good/useful? Did you meet anyone? See more prompts in OP.

MountainLaurel - this is a really interesting post. Thank you for it. I will get back to you with a proper reply ASAP.

I'd be happy to PM with you!

For me, online dating was a washout because even though I worked it pretty hard, and I went out on like 50 dates (over a year and a half period), I never found anyone to my liking (and some were outright liars, which infuriated and then amused me). It takes me a long time to become comfortable with people, and I recognize that. I gave "potentials" more than one date, but it just never went anywhere because I lost interest once I saw more of them. And (I feel terrible saying this), there were so few men I could really see sleeping with. I just wasn't attracted to any of them, except on an intellectual level. It could just be that I'm not meant for dating or relationships. The "process" is too weird to me.

Also, I pay my own way on dates, so it got pretty expensive after a while.

I have no organic way of meeting men. When I can indulge my interests, I never meet age-appropriate single men there. I've tried going out to clubs to listen to music, like MountainLaurel (it's a great idea!) but my sensory issues got in the way pretty quickly. And, again, no age-appropriate single men.

There's exactly one other single parent in my kids' school, and it's my ex-husband.

For space economy reasons, I have chosen this quote that somehow seems to encapsulate your entire narrative. [There is so much your story touches on that I’m wondering if we need a more general thread about the politics of ageing in a youth-orientated capitalist society ... I shall do my best to stay on-topic here and not launch into this guy's own palpable age-related self-esteem issues ... but you’ve really got me going with your post!]

Sorry to hear of your frustrating and annoying but very interesting experiences - very frank and good of you to share this story, I thought. Anyway, I recognise the truth of what you say. Bigotry is everywhere, and so is age-unfairness, but for women in a patriarchal world I have noticed this is amplified massively and doesn’t wait for the senior years to take hold. Age is one of the last big ‘isms’ to be tackled, I reckon, and until that happens properly I think it perfectly reasonable for women to withhold age data – just like any other form of personal data – until we are really sure who is asking and what they’re going to do with the information. [I realise that, stated baldly, this sounds a bit controversial. I have explained it better below.]

So, naturally, this age-bigotry must also be a key issue to be tackled in the mature online dating world. It is an obstacle that would surely be amplified in the non-sensory milieu of online contact, where data rather than personal introduction is the first point of connection. I was going to call the environment ‘objective’ – but then realised it is just the opposite; online is where people’s subjective starting point is the only constant. It must be very hard to break through that, change that subjectivity, from outside. So I’m going to pay this age thing a lot of attention right now.

NOTE: These are my personal views only. It might come out sounding really declarative. But I would be really interested in reading other points of view on this stuff. [If it didn't make me sound age-bigoted, I would probably express strong encouragement for over-40s to share their views, because of the perspective thing .]

* * *
As a set of numbers, taken alone, someone’s age data has no more power to describe what a person is like, or suggest compatibility, than does a street number to describe a house. So the problem rests in the assumptions triggered by that one small piece of information.

Way back in a different century, when my feminism was fresh and hard, and I noticed for the first time that university professors would give different attention to f***able women from what they gave to the also-rans, when as a new single mother I was going through a frumpy patch because I wasn't on the market and I was Too Damn Tired to care ... I got angry at being denied the help I needed and swore a bloody oath I was never going to be shut out like that again. I’m not saying the strategy I devised is the most politically defensible remedy, but for what it’s worth it is the truth ... and, strangely, seems to have worked. The underlying approach was to accept honestly and without judgment that what I put out could influence what I got back. What I wanted to accomplish was that other people would deal with the person they encountered, rather than some imaginary template.

• On the days I dressed and acted frumpy, I expected to be treated without fanfare and allowed to blend into the background.
• On the days I made an effort, looked great and acted charming, I expected to be treated like a queen, because I had earned it.
• Age data about a woman behaves powerfully to override the social reality of what is in front of someone, because of the way in which people make age-related assumptions about life stage. Therefore, I would not provide it. And I haven’t, ever since.

It’s not always easy. Milestone birthdays can trickle by quietly, and that might matter to some people. Some people – women as well as men – never really stop wrestling with the conundrum and can become quite obsessed with finding out my age. I find this truly bizarre (and sometimes funny), but it doesn’t do a thing to undermine the primary thesis; tends to confirm it, if anything. I am as determined as ever to avoid people making chronology-based assumptions about me and my life stage; my life has not followed anything like a standard path, so in addition to basic disrespectfulness in taking shortcuts, they are likely to make mistakes and thereby treat me falsely. It is an impediment to true interaction.

I hasten to add I will answer any real question candidly, so there is no element of coyness or avoidance or cover-up involved. Naturally, some close friends and former boyfriends know my age. There is no reason for them not to. They already know all about me, anyway! But those two little digits amount to dynamite I’m not prepared to put in the hands of strangers, simply because I believe it can blow honest interaction out of the water. To think ... all this because, one grumpy day in extreme youth, my ego could not stand being treated as an unf***able also-ran! LOL

The reason this is not off-topic (if anyone’s still with me at all) is that this amounts to a conundrum for women in online dating. In ways clearly illustrated by MountainLaurel’s experience, it works against women to declare their age upfront. To me it seems obvious that men in bars, or at their computer screens, need the chance to realise that the attractive woman they are talking to is, in fact, the attractive woman they are talking to. Duh. Without that one little itty bit of age information to distract them, a great relationship would have been possible, where soon that objective datum wouldn’t have mattered a jot to them. Sooner rather than later they would have remembered they have no intention whatsoever of breeding again; that as far as f***ing is concerned a mature woman knows how to handle herself (and her man); and during the other waking hours it’s more fun to share adventure, a cuppa and a laugh with a peer than with someone half your age who doesn’t understand a thing you’re talking about, and cares less.

I say let’s be practical about this: a great relationship trumps a two-digit piece of cold data, so withhold the data. Simple equation. Does anyone agree or disagree with my general position on this?

Will dating sites allow us to do this? I don’t know. Does anyone know, or have other ideas?

* * *
I could see many people objecting to this as a general strategy, saying, 'What are you trying to hide?' or 'You're trying to trick someone.' or 'I don't trust anyone who won't be upfront with me.' And they are all very understandable positions. It's not very reassuring for anyone - especially a very nice upfront AS bloke - to be told, even just by inference, 'Because until I know otherwise I must assume you, like most others, don't understand what the information will do to trick you and destroy my opportunity of meeting you.' He couldn't be blamed for interpreting this as, 'I don't trust you and I think all men are idiots.' So I could easily see him shutting down immediately to something like that. It's a dilemma, a real dilemma.

I don't think all men are idiots. Far from it. I love men (including some idiots ). But I do think that, unless people sit down and really think this stuff through, there are massive cultural forces acting on all of us (patriarchy, capitalism, etc.) to pre-empt our own good judgment. Good judgment isn't innate; it has to be learned, acquired purposefully. Fact: most older blokes look for younger women. Check any lonely hearts entry. While a bloke's ad may nominate an age range that includes their own (declared) age, very few include higher ages: most typical is 'bloke aged 55 wants to meet woman any age to 55 [or '40-55'] for good times view relationship'. Leaving biological reproduction and geriatric nursing services out of the equation, there is no good cultural reason for this in Western society (lots of bad reasons, but no good ones); ergo, it is a socially-entrenched behaviour that needs active, deliberate unlearning. It's not my job to force that unlearning, and the 'light bulb' has got to want to change; but I don't see much wrong with trying to sideline it as an issue by simply walking around it, do you?

* * *
Gosh, that turned into a bit of a rant, eh. Hope it made some kind of sense. In real life it's not something that preoccupies me daily. I just thought it might be interesting to write it out properly, just this once, because it came up. Though I have been accused of being 'obsessed about this age thing', to me it is other people who are obsessed by it. If I politely decline to answer, and in the face of persistence I quietly and briefly explain that I have noticed people use it as a shortcut which can lead to false assumptions, and I am happy instead to simply tell them whatever they want to know about my life, yet they persist, then insist, then accuse ... well, who is exhibiting obsessive behaviour?

Last edited by HighPlateau on 30 Dec 2011, 9:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm of two minds about this. I think it's more my single mother status than my age that has stacked the deck against me, in terms of choice, but if I lied about my age (or withheld it), I'd be preoccupied with three things:

1) that I was a lying liar from Liarville (and this would bother me so very much),
2) that I was kidding myself/grasping and pathetic in trying to pass myself off as younger (I know, that's not at all what you were saying, only how my brain interprets it), and
3) that ultimately I would not be able to respect a man for whom this is important, so I would have wasted my time.

Again, these are my extraordinarily rigid biases, but I have not tried at all to "game" the system and thus have not even tried to date in the past several years after so much disappointment. I think I finally figured out that the pool available to me didn't meet my standards. I have effectively priced myself out of the market. Not sure how to break free from that. I have additional difficulties, too, in that I don't get very much out of "companionship", at least not the way other people do. The minute a man gets clingy or schmoopy, I run because it horrifies me (not because he's serious but because he's too needy).

ETA: This sounds much more accusatory than I mean it to. I would love, love, LOVE to be able to be this casual and empower myself and just let things roll off my back. I'd be so much more successful at dating and would probably find value where I didn't find it before. I should do SOMETHING, but I'm stuck as to what. Regardless, it's not like my status as a single mother is negotiable. My ex-husband has women THROWING themselves at him. I most assuredly recognize the aging dichotomy.

Would be interested in hearing about the 'other' mind sometime.


I don't know where you are or what your hometown is like culturally - sounds like not that common to be a sole parent - but I'm not sure that scarcity applied in Australia at the time I was doing it. It was so very common for women to be raising children independently, that most men (the sort I would be interested in, anyway) really weren't batting eyelids about it. It just never really came up as an issue at all, that I was aware of. It probably didn't hurt, either, that my social milieu is on the Bohemian side, mostly musicians and actors.


Do you really see these as interchangeable? To me they're worlds apart. Lying is lying. Withholding a meaningless datum that may be abused while being forthcoming about all real matters, as I see it, is both: (a) a self-protective measure, therefore legit; and (b) derived from feminist realpolitik, therefore legit. Where is the wrong? A benefit to one person doesn't mean a harm or deficit to another, if all real matters are completely upfront. What objective truth does a figure convey, that is remotely revealing of someone's nature, personality, life, proclivities or compatibility? I'm not having a go at you, mv; far from it. I really appreciate your willingness to weigh in. I just literally don't get it.


In my clumsy way, this is what I was trying to get at, too, in my 'really nice AS bloke' hypothetical. I reckon a lot of people would react in just this way. It's a problem.


Mm, you may have something here. So am I busy trying to attract men I don't respect? Nah, I don't think so. I don't tell my women friends either ... but that might be just because I don't want them spilling the beans in the outer social life. A hard one. I'll think more on it. Thanks. [Okay, have thought on it. I don't think this respect thing applies. The point is that all men are trained up in our culture to have this silly invisible block. Unless they've realised it's there, they haven't had the chance to dismantle it. I say give them the benefit of the doubt and the chance to shine.

I think MountainLaurel's experience is incredibly on-point here: these interesting men were attracted to her IRL until they learnt her age. Then they struggled with it, because their reality was telling them one thing while their internal comptroller insisted on another, then they switched off, allowing the datum to prevail over the evidence of their actual senses. It's just silly. After a couple of dates, the balance would have swung around to the proper alignment and none of it would have mattered ever again.]


We all have biases, some acquired by accident and others honestly come by. Not rigid; just there. We can choose them, if we choose to.


Me, neither.


I can't remember ever really setting out to meet someone since my mid-teens, so I really don't have a clue about this. Was kinda hoping a recent scenario might blossom but that now looks unlikely, so I'm trying to sort out my thinking upfront for when/if I decide to start looking around. In the past, relationships have just sort of happened without conscious effort on my part. But I no longer think that is the best way to go. There has to be a way of making it less random, building in a better chance for long-term success. That has to be based on inner compatibility, it seems to me, to which chrono age is far less reliable an indicator than actual psych-age, actual contact. Perhaps online meetings can help this kind of compatibility recognition in a way that fierce upfront physical-attraction-driven RL meetings often do not.


I simply don't know what standards to apply, apart from the obvious integrity (honesty, decency, fidelity, [basic] solvency, etc) ones. But this is helping. Thank you.


I get that people use the word 'needy' to mean something distastefully over-dependent. But I'm uncomfortable with the usage, would prefer a different expression, because I absolutely and unapologetically need other human beings in my life. I am not, voluntarily, an island. And I like to be needed; the difficult transition out of primary parenting taught me that. I suppose, like so many things, it's a matter of degree and everyone's line is in a different place. Tricky.

Thanks for your thoughts. Keep 'em coming.

Having read your thoughts (thanks! very interesting!) I think it's safe to say that we live on opposite ends of the planet, both literally and figuratively. (Are you still in Australia?)

I live in conservative New England (Boston, to be specific). I know very few divorced-with-children people in my social circle. It's simply too expensive here to live divorced. I know some happy couples, I know some content couples, I know couples that I suspect are cheating, I know couples that likely loathe each other, I know couples that have that resigned look in their faces, like "OMG, I'm sooooo outta here when the kids get to (X) age." But they all stay together because they have to.

I work in the financial industry, I would love to expand my circle to know more arty and bohemian types; it's very difficult to go outside one's circle here (people aren't snotty, they're just ... reserved). It's difficult to make new friends, especially as a person with AS.

I think I have trouble figuring out how you withhold your age and having no one know it. Here we measure our experiences in stuff like when we graduated, who knew whom at college (and where we went to school), where we worked and when, stuff like that. It would take a lot of jettisoning and starting over to have a circle where no one knew my age. I suppose it's possible, that there would be a circle of people for whom it would never occur to them to ask, but I've never met anyone like that.

I think I recognize that men have this "silly invisible block", but I just cannot play to that. Again, I don't see getting to know someone without it coming up, anyway. I've caught men in lies about their age (out-and-out lies, not withholding) and I ended things right there. I think it comes back to this: what are they hiding? And I can't get past someone thinking that about me. I think the two online sites I've tried both require age, anyway. I can see hiding income (that's no one's business), I'm just differently-minded when it comes to age.

I would love to have a situation develop where I meet someone new organically, but there seem to be no opportunities either because of my age or my situation or my lifestyle or a combination of these things. I've taken adult education classes and I found a lot of couples, kids in their 20s, and single women. Likewise at my gym there are couples, kids in their 20s, married men that are age-appropriate for me, and single women. My work is all married people or kids in their early 20s (*very* conservative industry). My kids' friends' parents are all married. Some try to set me up, but it's more out of pity or discomfort than out of "Hey, I think this guy and you would really hit it off!" I do take advantage of situations as they arise, but they seem to go nowhere because they have no possibilities.

Oh, the single parent thing here isn't a social/cultural stigma (okay, maybe a little, since it's *so* odd to be a single mother with small children - people think, "Wow, he must *really* have f****d up" or "She must be one hell of a shrew to drive him away when the kids are so young."), men just shy away from single mothers because they're worried they're going to have to support someone else's kids, eventually. They don't seem to grasp that I don't want their money and that my kids already have an involved father. Or, some men are concerned that my ex- is still in the picture so much (yes, I've actually run into this). Can we really choose our biases? I'm not so sure.

Yes, you were right, I meant "needy" in the sense of "distastefully over-dependent". I need my space. I need a lot of it. But I'd like to think there's a man out there that's cool with that. I think there are plenty, I'm just exhausted by the process. Like MountainLaurel said, so much effort for so little return.

Yes, I'm still in Australia, but partly grew up in UK and feel connected to both places. Seems to me that now I am free of parenting responsibility, the online option opens up all sorts of exciting residential possibilities ...

Thanks so much for your story. Nobody could possibly say you haven't given the attempt at meeting someone a really good shot! You come across as someone with a great deal of self-discipline and energy. I'm sure I couldn't have held it together in such (to me) confining circumstances - i.e. tightknit community, nuclear family scenario. I absolutely don't mean to be rude; it's about the figurative 'opposite ends of the planet' to which you refer. The other bloody oath I remember making was at the age of 13 when I swore I would not have a life like my mother's. So far, I haven't - not even remotely.

[Still might go to PM on single parent stuff if I find time, because it's off-topic, but I'd like to keep this online dating thread going.]


That's true everywhere I've heard about. Households work best on two incomes, or two adults energising a single above-average income. It is a limiter - but again, perhaps this is a recommendation for online dating, where the main investment is time (plus perhaps a modest joiner's fee if you're using an introduction service).

Have you ever experienced hooking up online but not through a dating service as such? Some kind of personal interest area - even WP (although the demographic here does seem to be mostly 20-something to 30-something)?


It would probably be exactly like that in the small town that I have moved to. The longtimers here all have that connectedness with each other. They already know who went to what school what year and so on, going back for decades. I guess my situation is pretty unusual in that way. But it's not a big deal. People can work it out if they want to. In the city there are people who were at school the same time as me ... if they know, they know. I don't lose a moment's sleep over it, because my point is not that I am hiding my age; the point is that I am trying to intercept and short-circuit a silly piece of accidental bigotry that I have no respect for and should not be given the power it seems to exercise to prevent real friendships growing in the first place.

While I'm sort of making a lark of this, I'll come clean and say I think it's far more than just silly. For a woman who wants to be partnered, this 'small' bit of silliness, in terms of flow-on effects, can be ruinously destructive if it forces them into unwanted isolation. Loneliness destroys lives. It causes suicide, clinical depression, random acts of anger, cancer, strokes. If it is seen instead as the tip of a massive age-loathing iceberg, which is in fact societal although it tends to play out most punitively for women, we really need to do something about the reinstitution of the sort of Elder respect that existed not so long ago in our culture. It seems to me that at least part of that debate must include the way in which capitalism created youthism, and what has flowed from that. Elder respect still seems to be alive and well elsewhere on the planet; people are not generally cast out merely because they attain seniority and wisdom; in fact, the honouring of Elders seems to be an integral part of all human civilisations - including, historically, our own. So I reckon this age loathing is an unwelcome visitor, a temporary artefact, worth chipping away at, any damn way we can!! !

Whoa! How's that for escalation? Nobody will want to date me now, *sigh*. I suppose this sort of view wins me no friends within the financial industry, either. I sincerely hope I haven't scared you off with all this vehemence, mv. Ah well. What's right for me is frequently wrong for others. I'm used to it by now.


Guess that's a 'no' for online dating, then. 'Organically' sounds right, though. And that is exactly what I suspect will happen - and probably when you least expect it, because life is like that. The last time I so wasn't looking I wasn't even leaving home socially, a LTR turned up in my kitchen in casual company with a friend who definitely had no romantic or matchmaking intentions. Go figure. [Our first interaction was me having to ask him to move aside so I could get something out of the cutlery drawer. The second thing I seem to remember was noticing long sleeves in warm weather and deciding to check for track marks the first chance I got ... there weren't any; it was just a fashion choice. But there's always something to be untrusting about ... ]

You sound like a very nice person with all your integrity intact. People who are happy with partnering tend to repartner. And some people don't really care that much, but they'd be well in the minority.


Me, too. All of ^^^. Aspies face more challenges but I don't see that knocking us out of the equation at all. I'm not noticing any serious deficit of desire for a soulmate on the pages of WP, are you?