Writing A Good 60+ Online Dating Profile

Before the internet, most of us made do with a personal ad in the back of the local paper. Thirty words, no photo, and you paid by the line, so you learned to be brutal about what mattered. Telephone dating wasn't a great deal better. You had a minute to record something charming about yourself, and what usually came out was a lot of umming and ahhing while the clock ran down.

You've got it much easier now. You can sit at the kitchen table with a cuppa and take as long as you like, and nobody is timing you. Plenty of people still find the empty box a bit daunting, but there's less to it than you'd think.

Start with the easy stuff

You don't have to open with anything profound. Where did you grow up, and where have you landed since? Half of us have shifted a fair way, whether that's a farm to the coast, Auckland to somewhere quieter, or back from twenty years in Australia or London. That story alone is worth a couple of lines.

After that, just answer the sort of things you'd be asked over a cuppa. Do you follow the rugby, or the netball, and who do you go for? Is the garden a labour of love or a losing battle? How big is the family, and are the mokopuna up the road or across the ditch? Have you got a dog, and does he behave himself? If you've got a good story about a pet, put it in. Nothing gets a reply quite like a story about a badly behaved dog.

Been away lately? Say where. A week at the bach, a run round the Coromandel, a few days in Central Otago, the Rail Trail you keep threatening to do, or a trip over to see the grandkids in Brisbane. It tells people how you like to spend your time, which is really what they're trying to work out.

What's better left for later

Your last relationship doesn't need to be in here. It's not that anyone will judge you for having a history, because everybody your age has one. It's that writing about it at length can read as though you're still in it, and that puts people off before you've had the chance to meet. A short line is plenty, and the rest of that conversation will come when you're both ready for it.

Politics is much the same. There's no need to nail your colours to the mast in your profile. Save it for when you know each other well enough to disagree properly over a beer.

Stuck? Write about what you'd like to do

If listing your own interests feels like hard work, or you're the sort who'd rather not go on about yourself, turn it around. Write about what you'd enjoy doing with somebody else. A trip you've never got round to. A show you'd like to see. A part of the country you've always meant to get to. Some restaurant that's been on the list for two years because there was never anyone to go with.

It's an easier thing to write, and it's an easier thing to answer. Somebody reading it can picture themselves along for the ride, which gives them a reason to get in touch instead of just scrolling past.

And then leave it alone

Read it back once, fix the obvious typos, and post it. Don't polish it to death. A profile that sounds like you on a good day will always do better than one that's been rewritten nine times until every trace of you has gone out of it.

Be honest, keep it warm, and sound like yourself. That's most of the job.

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