How to Improve Your Age on eHarmony

You need eHarmony's help for this one. If you registered with the wrong date of birth, you cannot change it yourself, so contact Customer Care and include your correct birthday in the format MM/DD/YYYY. Check the digits twice before you send it, because the number you send is the age every woman on the site will see.

Write to Customer Care and say plainly that you entered the wrong date of birth when you registered. Then give the correct one in the format eHarmony asks for, MM/DD/YYYY. Keep it short. They need the right date and enough detail to find your account, and nothing more.

Keep a copy of what you sent. If you have to follow up, you can point to the exact birthday you asked them to use instead of typing it out again from memory.

Once it has been fixed, look at your page the way a woman would and make sure the age showing is the one you meant.

The format is where a correction can go wrong a second time. MM/DD/YYYY means the month comes first, then the day, then the year.

A man who grew up writing the day first can swap the two out of habit, and a birthday in early summer turns into one in spring. Get two digits the wrong way round and you are back where you started, waiting on Customer Care again. So write it out, then read it back to yourself as month, day, year before you press send.

Your age is one of the first things any dating site sorts people by. On eHarmony, age is one of the factors members set in their Member Preferences, and the site's own advice to anyone wanting more suggested partners is to widen it. That tells you how much work the number is doing.

So a wrong birthday sends your page to the wrong women. If the site thinks you are older than you are, a woman whose range stops at your real age may never see you. If it thinks you are younger, you reach women who are expecting a younger man, and the first date opens with a correction.

Your own range matters for the same reason. Set it to the ages you would honestly be glad to take to dinner, and let the accurate age on your page do the rest.

Some men who spot a wrong age on their account are tempted to leave it, especially when it makes them younger. Do not.

The first date then starts with a confession or a lie. If she finds out at the table, she stops wondering whether you are fun and starts wondering what else is not true. Everything you wrote about wanting honesty and something serious now reads like a sales line.

There is a practical problem too. The age on your page has to agree with your photos. A man listed as 34 whose photos show gray at his temples invites exactly the doubt he was trying to avoid.

If you have been talking to women while the wrong age was showing, tell them early and lightly. Something like: "Small admin note, the site has my age wrong by a year. I fat-fingered my birthday when I signed up and it is being fixed."

Said in a message before the date, that is a funny little detail. Discovered on the date, it looks like a cover story. The facts are the same in both cases. Only the timing changes how it lands.

a dating coach's approach to age is simple. When a woman asks, he tells her. Now and then he makes her guess first and gives her a hard time about her answer before he says it. He does not hide the number, because a man who is comfortable with his age turns it into a non-issue.

Whatever your age, there is a version of your life that suits it and a woman who wants exactly that life. Your job is to show it honestly, not to argue with the number.

That comfort is worth more than a few years either way. Put an accurate age on your page with current photos next to it, and let the women whose range includes the real you find you. The ones who say yes to that are saying yes to the man who actually turns up.