How to start dating again after 60

The last time you were single, dating happened in person. A friend introduced you, or you kept running into the same man at the same market until one of you said hello. Nobody asked you to write three paragraphs about yourself.

Now most of it starts on a screen, and that is the part that stops women in their sixties. Not the meeting itself. The photographs, the form, and the feeling that you are applying for a job you are not qualified for.

You can take the parts that feel wrong out of the process. What follows is a month of small decisions, in an order that makes the rest easier.

Decide what you want, even if the answer sounds unromantic

Nobody asks you this directly, so ask yourself. Some women want a man to have dinner with on Saturdays. Some want to fall in love again. Some have no idea yet and would like to find out. All of those are workable answers, but they lead to different places.

If you want company a few times a month, you can stop grading every man on whether he is husband material and simply enjoy the evening. If you want a partner to build a life with, ask the bigger questions earlier, and spend your time where people are honest about looking for the same thing.

Write the answer down as one sentence, however clumsy it sounds. I would like someone to walk with on Sunday mornings and talk to over dinner. That sentence is enough to work from. It also gives you a way to say no, which you will need.

Tell two people

Pick two people you trust and say out loud that you have been thinking about meeting someone. That is all. You are not asking them to fix you up, though they will offer.

Two reasons this helps. It stops being a secret, and a secret grows. And friends hear things. A widowed neighbour, a cousin who plays bridge, the man who runs the walking group. Most women over sixty who meet someone meet him through a person, long before a website.

You will also get at least one suggestion you do not want. Go for coffee anyway, once. The brother-in-law with the strong opinions is not the point. Letting yourself sit across from a stranger for an hour is the point.

One photograph you can live with

You need one picture where your face is clearly visible, taken in the last two years, in daylight. Not a group shot with somebody half cut out of it, and not the photo from your daughter's wedding where you spent the whole time squinting into the sun.

Ask someone to take six pictures of you outside, or in the garden, or at a table by a window. Choose the one where you look like yourself at an ordinary moment. If you cannot stand any of them, that is worth noticing, because you are about to ask a stranger to look at your face and make up his mind.

Two more photographs are plenty. One of you doing something you actually do, and one somewhere you like being.

Pick two places and keep going back

The common mistake is trying six things once. A class you attend once is a room full of strangers. A class you attend for six weeks is a group of people who know your name and save you a chair.

Choose two things you would do even if no man ever turned up. A choir, a walking group, a painting class, a weekly shift at the charity shop. Then go every week for two months.

You will feel like the new girl at the start. That usually passes in about three weeks. If it has not passed by the eighth week, you picked the wrong thing and you are allowed to leave. It is easy to spend a year in a room you do not like, because leaving starts to feel like failure.

Keep the first meeting short on purpose

When you are talking to someone, suggest coffee rather than dinner. Forty-five minutes is a real date. If it goes well you can both say so and meet again next week. If it does not, you have lost an hour and a cup of tea.

Choose a place you already know, in the daytime, and drive yourself. Tell one person where you are going and when you expect to be home. Some women think that is over-cautious. It takes thirty seconds, and it means you are never stuck somewhere without a way out.

When the evening is flat

Some of these meetings will be dull. He will be perfectly decent and you will have nothing to say to each other after twenty minutes. That is information, not a verdict on you.

Dating at sixty is not the same as dating at twenty-five, and not only because you know more. The pool is smaller, people are set in their routines, and a fair number of men your age are just as nervous as you are and hide it worse. Expect the first two or three meetings to be ordinary. The point of them is to get your own conversation back, so that when you do meet someone you like, you can talk.

One last thing. Do not wait until you feel confident. Confidence arrives somewhere around the third conversation, and there is no way to get there without the first two.