Internet Dating Advice for Women in Their 60s

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

Is Romance Dead?

The picture above is so sweet. Wouldn’t you like to have someone make that grand gesture to you on a date? Now, if I could just get someone to take me out on a date. Lately, that seems like an impossible mission. I filter the hits I get on the dating websites very carefully. First I look to see if they are close to my living area. I would prefer that they be within 25 miles of my home town. Why? Well, let me tell you about a recent story.

I had been talking to this guy who lived in a town 72 miles away, about an hour and 15 minutes drive. Between us is a big city, quite a bit closer to me than him. But he does come here to do business fairly often. And the town where he has a small business is closer still. One day, he was actually in the big city running errands and asked if we could meet for lunch. While I work in this city, because I am a part-time worker, I do not stop to take a lunch break, but eat at my desk. So I asked if he would still be in town when I got off work and we could meet up then. Well, that wasn’t going to work for him, as he needed to get back to his pets. He had also invited me to drive to the small town (52 miles away from where I live) where he has his business for lunch, but on that day I had an appointment in the afternoon and that is the day I work from home on my second job, so it wasn’t convenient. Another offer he made was for me to drive to his house and he would take me to dinner and provide “entertainment”. I wasn’t thrilled with driving to a town I had never been to at night on roads I was unfamiliar with to meet a man I had never met before so I said no. Can you see a pattern developing here? We finally agreed to meet for dinner in the big city. Even then, the date got cancelled and reset a couple of times due to his needing to reschedule due to work conflicts. After talking about food and restaurants choices, I picked out a nice Japanese restaurant, which offered hibachi, or sushi, or other menu choices. When it came down to it, he said that since he was driving in so far, he expected me to pay for his meal. I said no, I didn’t think that was fair. But we could each pay for our own meal. It wasn’t like I lived in the city either. But if he felt it was unfair, then maybe he could pick a place we could meet that was more like halfway and we could each pay our own way if he thought that coming into the city was too much of a burden on him. His response was “How about this? Let’s just forget it then.”

I reminded him that he had no problem with inviting me to drive all the way to his place of business or his home without a thought. But if he felt that way, then I was fine with no more contact. Thankfully, I never heard from him again. He immediately blocked me on the dating website and Facebook. I sort of felt like I was being held responsible for whatever his ex-wife had done to him. But I was glad that I had held to my self-imposed boundaries and stuck to my guns about what I would do and not do and found out what kind of a man he was before I spent any time with him or invested any emotional attachment on him. Besides which, our political affiliations and beliefs were miles apart and I don’t think we could have reconciled them.

So, the moral of this story is that it is okay to take your time in getting to know someone in the process of getting to the point of making a date with him. You will find out a lot about the person and who he is in the way that he goes about setting up the date, how he wants to meet, where he wants to meet, if he is willing to drive very far to meet you, how soon he wants to meet you, if he is willing to talk on the phone prior to meeting you, and so much more. So now, you understand why I prefer to filter out most men to ones who live close by. You have to have something special that attracts me if you live very far away to make it worth the inconvenience it is going to take to date you if you live a couple of hours drive away.