Navigating the modern dating landscape after 60 is ‘exhausting,’ but it comes with a silver lining

The modern dating world is complicated.
Gen Z is apprehensive about making the first move. A rising number of millennials are disinterested in marriage. Nearly 40% of singles are afraid of getting scammed on a dating app, per a Kaspersky study.
And, the COVID-19 pandemic tossed American singles into a “dating recession.”
It’s tough out there for everyone. But singles in their 60s might have it the worst.
Anne Vitiello, a 60-year-old single woman from New York, called dating at her age, “exhausting,” per The New York Times. “It’s like panning for gold in a sewer.”
Almost 40% of American women over 65 report being single, according to a 2023 study from Pew Research Center. Despite their numbers, there’s still no simple dating solution for women in their 60s.
“When we’re this age, people expect us to take a back seat,” Joan Vassos, 61, ABC’s first “Golden Bachelorette” told The New York Times. “A lot of us feel like we’re still kind of young, and that we’re not ready to take that back seat yet.”
In 2021, Vassos lost her husband of 32 years to pancreatic cancer. “Now I get up on a Saturday morning and it’s so quiet,” Vassos told The New York Times.
It took Vassos a couple years to feel comfortable reentering the dating scene. Now, she’s ready to meet a partner and combat that loneliness.
She knows searching for love on a reality TV show is “a weird way to meet somebody,” but like other new singles in their 60s, meeting a suitable companion isn’t the same as when they were young. The dating landscape has drastically changed.
But what’s changed? Older people are searching for love online.
In wake of divorce, Andi Pollinger, now 67, decided in 2018 to start dating again. She didn’t recognize the modern dating scene.
“My life, and the dating world, had changed drastically from when I first met my ex-husband in the supermarket in 1985,” Pollinger wrote, per the Huff Post. “Now everyone was looking for love online, and I had no idea where to start.”
“I understood that finding dates now mostly happened online and that I needed to learn the art of swiping. I was terrified and curious. What if no one wanted to go out with me? Who would be out there looking for a 62-year-old woman?”
Men and women over 50 are active online daters. Older men are the mostly likely group to pay for online dating, according to a 2023 Pew Research Study. One in six Americans over 50 have used an online dating platform.
“I went into online dating more as a kind of research, to see who’s out there and what they are about,” Carol Kramer, a 77-year-old couples’ therapist told The Washington Post. “I find people interesting. It wasn’t out of desperation, I just wanted to see who there was to meet.”
Kramer dipped her toe into online dating two years after her husband of 32 years passed away.
“I knew what it was like to be loved and to love,” she said. “I was missing that experience and that kind of special frisson that one has in a relationship that is romantic and sensual and companionate.”
Older daters primarily use online dating platforms in search of long-term companionship. Nearly 50% of online daters over 50 report using online dating platforms to meet a long-term partner or spouse. Another 30% use them to meet friends, according to a 2023 Pew Research Study.
Falling in love doesn’t get any duller with age.
The love system in your brain is a “brain system like the anger system or the fear system or the surprise system,” biological anthropologist and researcher Helen Fisher told The Washington Post. “This is a basic drive, and it doesn’t really change.”
Fisher and a group of researchers conducted a 2007 study on the intensity of long-term romantic love. They scanned the brains of 17 people in their 50s and 60s in long-term marriages who reported being “madly in love” with their partner.
They found that “the basic brain region and pathways linked with feelings of intense romantic love were just as active in people over 50 as they were among the people that we put in the machine who were in their 20s,” Fisher told The Washington Post.
As an older dater, you have a mature sense of what you’re looking for. It makes it easier.
“People at 50 know there’s a good chance that they will live another 30 years,” Francine Russo, author of “Love After 50: How to Find It, Enjoy It, and Keep It,” told The Washington Post. “And if they’re in a relationship which is not satisfying, they think, ‘I don’t want this, I want something better for myself.’”
Dating in your older years gives you freedom to be picker, because there is less pressure to settle down and start a family, Pollinger explained, per Huff Post. It also provides opportunities to get to know interesting people you would not otherwise meet.
“I realized that dating at my age meant I wasn’t facing any of the pressures of being on the hunt to settle down and start a family, so I was free to be myself and seek what would make me truly happy. Every time I met a new man, I concentrated on how I was feeling, not on the impression I was making.”
“I also realized dating could also be an adventure,” Pollinger continued. “I met an astrophysicist, a geologist, a journalist and so many other different kinds of men that I’d never encountered when I was a working mom. Dating got me out of the house a few times a month, and I usually had an interesting conversation with whomever I met, even if he didn’t turn out to be my perfect match.”