Writing A Good 60+ Online Dating Profile
Almost everyone gets stuck in the same place, and it is not the photo or the age. It is the empty box marked "about me." You look at it, everything you type sounds either like bragging or like a resume, and you close the laptop and tell yourself you will get to it tomorrow.
Here is a way around it that works. Stop trying to describe yourself. Nobody does that well, and the people who manage it come across as rehearsed. Answer questions instead. You have been answering questions about yourself your entire life, at kitchen tables and church suppers and family reunions, and you are good at it. A profile is just the written version.
The questions worth answering
Where are you from, and how did you end up here? A great many of us are not living where we started. A farm to a city, the Midwest to Arizona, the service, a job that moved, or a retirement that followed the grandchildren. That is two good lines and it hands somebody an obvious thing to ask about.
What did you do for a living? People are far more curious about this than you would expect. "I taught high school for thirty years" says more about you than any string of adjectives.
What does a Saturday look like now? The pickleball court, the workshop, the choir, the yard that is winning, the grandkids, the crossword, the trail. Specifics are the whole game.
Where is everybody? Whether the kids are twenty minutes away or three states over shapes how your week actually runs, and it is a perfectly ordinary thing to say.
Been anywhere lately, or planning to? A week at a state park, an RV trip, winter somewhere warm, a cruise, or the national park you keep not getting to. It tells people how you like to spend your time.
The three that can wait
Your last marriage. Not because anybody is judging. Everyone your age has a history, and the ones claiming otherwise are the ones to watch. It is that a paragraph about it reads as though you are still in the middle of it, and that closes the door before you have said anything else. One line is plenty.
Politics. There is nothing to be gained by planting a flag on a public page. Save it for when you know each other well enough to disagree and enjoy it.
Money. Yours, theirs, anybody's. Keep it off entirely. Mentioning what you have, or what you retired on, attracts precisely the wrong kind of attention, and that is not a hypothetical in this country.
If you are still stuck
Flip it around and write about what you would like to be doing rather than what you have done. A trip you never took. A show you would go to if somebody suggested it. A restaurant that has been on the list two years because there was nobody to go with. It is easier to write and much easier for a stranger to reply to, because they can picture themselves in it.
Then stop
Read it through once, fix the obvious typos, and post it. The urge is to keep polishing, and polishing is how a profile ends up sounding like nobody in particular. A little rough and recognizably you beats smooth and anonymous every single time.
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