Internet Dating at 66 – A Woman's Perspective

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PICTURES

On internet dating sites, pictures are the first impression you get of your potential new date. This can be because you are searching them out or because they have initiated a contact with you. Scammers are usually going to be hot on your trail, ladies. And I have a feeling that our demographic, women in our later years, are a prime target for their not-so-tender mercies.

The pictures you will receive of these men will be of exceptionally handsome men within the age range you have specified. My age range is from 45-69. Now occasionally, you will get men who are younger but say they like older women. These guys lie about their age on those websites like Plenty of Fish (POF) that limit contact with people within 14 years of the specified age range in order to date women much older than themselves. But I will talk about those guys at a later date. The background is what you want to take a look at carefully. It will appear photoshopped. Sometimes the background will be plain but often it will appear to be someplace exotic or it will be slightly out of focus. It just has an appearance of unreality. Guys who are real will post pictures of themselves with their dead fish or hunting trophies, in the front seats of their cars, on their motorcycles, or even worse, in front of the bathroom mirror or laying down in their bed or recliner with their dogs or cats. Study the pictures carefully and after awhile, you will be able to spot what I mean.

PROFILE DETAILS

Even though POF is a mostly free website and so, because of that, you get a ton of scammers and lowlifes just looking for hookups. I like it because a guy has to put in a ton of information about himself and you can gather a lot of data about the person whether he wants you to or not. Analyze that data carefully. Even his profile name can give you a hint about who he is. If he has his first and last name in the profile like mikemorrison13 you can almost bet that it is a scammer or not a real person because who would be dumb enough to put that kind of information out there on a free website? Then POF has you put a headliner under your initial profile picture. Boy howdy! Can that ever give you insight into what a guy is after or thinking. This can range from “Seeking a serious relationship” to “I just need a lady to eat her vigona [sic]” is one I just read, honest!!

Next, we move on to statistics like age, where they live, height, job, education, eye color, hair color, body build, religion, ethnicity. We’ll save the relationship status and wants for another paragraph. You can glean a lot of information from these statistics. First, do the statistics even match the pictures? On POF, there is a lot of hacking going on, so check to see if these things match. And also, for some reason, many men think that women don’t bother to read profiles. How wrong they are! We check out those details not once, but over and over again – or at least I do, and I’m pretty sure that is common of all women. I check carefully to see if these details match up. For instance, lately I have been seeing a lot of Engineering as a job and then the guy will say he has a master’s degrees. This is not common. If a person has a degree in Engineering, a master’s degree or a PhD isn’t needed and rarely does anyone pursue that. The other thing? If you are an Engineer, you need a Bachelor’s degree, so if you say you have some university, that doesn’t add up. Now I am talking to one person who works on a railroad and says just that. But what you are doing is technically not engineering. It is maintenance. I think that many men who do not have college degrees have no idea what a master’s degree is and just pick it because they think it sounds good. I have one so it disturbs me that someone claims it and hasn’t earned it. So, just look and see what matches up and what doesn’t in these details. Look for lies. Are they doing it to make themselves look good or creating a fake profile?

Relationship details are tricky to figure out. POF has almost too many categories so it can be very hard to figure out just what a guy is looking for. For example: One I am looking at now says: Divorced, Man, Actively seeking a relationship, Seeking a Woman, for dating. What does that mean? You only want to date? But just one person? The choices included for relationship intent: I want to date but nothing serious; I want a relationship; I am putting in serious effort to find someone; I am serious and I want to find someone to marry. For what kind of relationship do you want the choices are: Hang out; Long-term; Dating; Friends. In general, I have found that Hang out means they just want a – pardon the term – fuck buddy/friend with benefits. So buyer-beware. If that is all you want, then fine. Go for it. But I have found that is very empty and can be potentially dangerous or heartbreaking. So, be honest about what you want and ask what he wants and if it is not what you are seeking, just don’t go down that road. Also, beware of the guys who say they want to marry. I think most of those are either scammers or ones who might be really desperate or have another agenda. This is a dating website, after all. Who truthfully is going to put it out there that marriage is the end game?

On POF, the next section is About Me. It used to have a minimum of number of words that a person had to put here about themselves and I don’t know if that has changed or what, but it seems like guys have found a way around that and some are putting nothing or very little here, which is disappointing. But I will tell you, the ones who go one forever and it is all about wonderful he is or it is too flowery are the ones most likely to be scammers so pass them by. Also, the profiles with English mistakes in grammar are also likely to be scammers. This might not show up in the profiles because they are written more carefully, but it will show up in the chats. But if the profile is unrealistically glowing, take care. That person is not who you think. Another giveaway? Often the profile will state “I speak English” or “I do not have a second language” but you can tell from the way that he writes that English is not his first language. A dead giveaway is when he sends the first message. It will say something like this: Hello pretty. I read your profile and I will like to get to know you better and will like to read from you soon”. Notice the use of the helping future tense verb will? No one that grows up speaking English would use that form of of the verb in speaking or writing so it is a sure fire giveaway that if he is lying to you on his profile about his language skills, then what else is he lying about and why?

POF next has a section titled Lifestyle where you can find out if they smoke, drink, or do drugs, are ambitious, have kids or want kids. Then there is a section labeled More About Me where it gives the zodiac sign, if they have pets and what kind, a choice that says something about yourself, if you own a car, whether or not you speak English or some other language, and about the length of your longest relationship. Next is a list of your interests, and finally a section for conversation starters. As you can see, POF, for a free site, has a lot of information on a person that is provided even if someone chooses not to fill out the parts where one has to write much about himself. There are lots of drop down menus that they must choose from that gives you a lot of data to sort through. Which is why I like it even if there are a ton of scammers, lowlifes, and people I wouldn’t date if they were the last men on earth (or fish – haha) on the site. Because remember, just because someone sends you a message, it doesn’t mean you have to respond to them.

I have used several other dating websites besides POF: Match.com, Silver Singles, Zoosk, Hinge, Bumble, OKCupid, and checked out a few more over the years. They each have their positives and negatives. Match is quick to respond if you report someone and lets you know if there is a problem with anyone’s profile. But I have only met one person on there in all the time I’ve had my account and they mainly keep sending me people who live in another state as suggestions, so I haven’t been all that impressed. I do like that it shows, if they choose to select it, what political persuasion a person is and that is helpful. But they do not make a person give that much information about themself nor do they have them say what kind of relationship they are looking for so if they don’t self-proclaim it, you have no idea. And the most hits I get from there are men from out-of-state, which I am not interested in. I think most of men that contact me from out-of-state are either scammers, married, or just want to sext.

I’ve been internet dating for 2 1/2 years so far. I was so naive when I started out in March of 2019. Right away I got catfished by two experts. I had no idea that there were men out there waiting to nab women like me in the hopes of getting money or my personal identification materials rather than my love and affection. When I had tried it a number of years before in grad school, it was much easier to meet people. They were more open about their intentions and proclivities. Usually the most likely thing they were hiding was a wife. And even then, they usually disclosed it fairly quickly.

But back to my story about the two catfishermen. One, claimed to be from Italy originally and worked for a firm in my hometown as a financial advisor. He had a teenage daughter and was a widow. We chatted online for a bit and then switched to email and hangouts on Google. Before we could meet in person, he flew off to California for a meeting. While there, he got a call that his mother in Italy was very ill. So, off he flew to Italy to be by her bedside as he was her only son. He was only there a few days and tragically, she dies. But in the meantime, he had been called again away to business in London and wasn’t at her side when she passed. Oh, so sad. And out of all the people he has helped through the years in business, the only person to bother to attend her funeral is some Irishman he had done some deals with through the years. The heartbreak of losing her only sister puts his elderly aunt in the hospital. While he is still there in Italy, he is offered a huge business opportunity with some oil barons from the Middle East that is set up through his Irish friend. The sad part is, he needs someone to co-sign on these papers with him but his aunt is too sick and his daughter is too young. So, he wants me to sign with him. Me a woman he has never met before but has been carefully wooing by email for a month and telling me how much he loves me (which I have been denying because I know he is full of bolognese sauce) and he wants me to co-sign on some huge business deal! I said, uh, no, I don’t think I will be doing that. Do you know what my brother, the retired policeman would say if I told him I was going to do something stupid like that? Then he got kinda cranky and nasty and said some mean things and of course that was the end of our relationship.

On to catfisher #2…this one got me because he said he was a gemologist. Ladies, I am here to tell you right now. There are certain professions on those websites to watch out for that say scammer right off the bat. They are: gemologist, almost anything that says to do with gold or mining engineering, oil and or gas engineering/exploration, if they say they work out on a rig or do oil platform design, and almost anything related to geology, which pisses me off because I have a degree in geology. Now, I can catch most of them in a lie, because they don’t know the answers to my questions. But you just pass them by. They are out to scam you. This guy said he bought and sold gems for people. Same deal, went out of town before we could go on a date. Went to Belgium to buy a bunch of stones at an auction. Then told me he didn’t have enough money to pay the taxes he needed to bring them back into the States. His bank was refusing to authorized more money and for some reason his lawyer couldn’t act for him, nor his also teen-aged daughter (he was also a widower) to get him the money he needed. If he didn’t come up with the money, they were going to put him in jail. I circumvented him from even asking me for the money by telling him I didn’t have it nor even if I did would I give it to someone I didn’t know and hadn’t even met. He said he understood, but again, quit talking to me shortly after I told him that and I never heard from him again. I reported both of these guys on Plenty of Fish, but later saw this one’s photo in the line-up, so it did no good.

The funny thing is I told both of these guys that I was talking to the other yet they both continued to try to scam me and hope they were better at it than the other. Mr. Italy was the over-the-top, full-on, flowery speech, lovey-dovey romantic in his approach until he didn’t get his way. Catfish #2, who claimed to be Dutch, was more reticent in his approach and actually more successful because he was more believable until his end game of trying to get 5,000 Euros from me, which I think was about 7 or $8,000 at the time. Like I had that kind of money! What a hoot! He was certainly barking up the wrong tree! LOL But I have heard that there are many women that fall for such approaches because they are so desperate for the attention they get from these men that they will do anything to keep it coming. Please don’t do that. Don’t give these scum anything. First, they are not who or what they say they are. They are a gang of thieves. Out to steal whatever they can get and use you however they can. These two were very good at what they did. Most are not even that good and you can tell because their English is very bad or broken. Another clue to watch out for.

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.