Writing A Good 60+ Online Dating Profile

Almost everybody freezes at the same point. Not the photo, not the age, not even the fact of being here. The empty box marked "about me". You sit looking at it and everything you type sounds either like a job application or like boasting, so you close the laptop and tell yourself you will do it tomorrow.

Here is a way round it that works. Stop trying to describe yourself. Nobody can do that well, and the people who manage it usually come across as though they have rehearsed. Instead, answer questions. You have been answering questions about yourself your whole life, in kitchens and at church halls and across tables, and you are perfectly good at it. All a profile is is the written version.

The questions worth answering

These are the ones people actually ask each other in this country, in roughly the order they come up.

Where are you from, and how did you end up here? Half of us have moved a long way. A farm to a city, one province to another, another country entirely, or back east after thirty years out west. That answer alone is two good lines and gives somebody an obvious thing to ask about.

What did you do? People are far more interested in this than you expect, and "I taught grade five for twenty eight years" tells a reader more about you than any adjective would.

What do you do with a Saturday now? The curling club, the choir, the workshop, the garden that is losing, the grandchildren, the crossword, the trail. Specifics are the whole game here.

Where is everybody? Whether the family is around the corner or in Calgary or in London matters to how your life actually runs, and it is a normal thing to mention.

Have you been anywhere lately, or are you planning to? A week at the cottage, a drive through the Rockies, two months down south in the winter, or the trip you keep not booking. It tells people how you like to spend your time.

The three that can wait

Your last marriage. Not because anybody will judge you. Everybody your age has a history, and the ones who claim otherwise are the worrying ones. It is that a paragraph about it reads as though you are still in the middle of it, whether or not you are, and that closes doors before you have had a chance to say anything else. One line is plenty.

Politics. There is nothing to gain from planting a flag in a profile. Save it for when you know each other well enough to argue properly.

Money. Yours, theirs, anybody's. It belongs nowhere near a public page, and mentioning it is one of the things that attracts exactly the wrong sort of attention.

If you are still stuck

Turn it around and write about what you would like to be doing rather than what you have done. A trip you have never got round to. A show you would go to if somebody suggested it. A restaurant that has been on the list for two years because there was nobody to go with. It is far easier to write, and far easier for a stranger to answer, because they can picture themselves in it.

Then stop

Read it through once, fix the obvious typos, and post it. The temptation is to keep polishing, and polishing is how a profile ends up sounding like nobody at all. Slightly rough and recognisably you beats smooth and anonymous every time.

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