How to Meet Women in Your 60s

You meet women in your 60s the way men meet them at any age: you spend regular time in places where it makes sense for you to be, and you talk to the women who are there. Age is not the obstacle most men think it is. In our coaches' view it costs you in two ways, and both can be fixed.

One of our coaches says there is no such thing as too old. He points to a man he knows who kept dating attractive women around 40 well into his 60s, with game the coach calls ordinary and nothing special. If that worked for him, the rule is not that the sixties close the door.

The first is progress. On one of our weekly Q&A calls, a coach said age hurts only when a man has made no progress in life for his years. A 40 year old with the success of an 18 year old looks stalled, and the number is not the cause. The same test applies to you. A woman does not count your birthdays. She sees whether your life kept moving: work you care about, something you are good at, a place you go, people you see.

The second is proximity. The question is whether you are around women in a way that looks natural. Most of this article is about fixing that one.

The coach's example is blunt. College men with ordinary game end up with college women because they share classes and dorms and are around them constantly without trying. Put a 40 year old with good game into that setting, and the coach says he would do very well, as long as it was not strange for him to be there.

So the problem is not the women. It is that many places full of women are places where your being there needs an explanation. A man forced into a setting looks like he has an agenda.

Build presence that makes sense instead. Take a class you would really take. Join a club or a volunteer group. Eat lunch in a restaurant with other people around instead of at your desk. Do some of your work from a coffee shop. Go out with friends who are single, men or women, and do not worry if the friend who comes along is younger than you.

A coach said on a webinar that daytime has a benefit for an older man. A woman on her own has no friends beside her who might judge her choice. If she likes you, she can simply go along with it.

If group settings make you nervous, start with women who are alone. A woman at a café table or walking down the street is a good first conversation. When that feels easy, try a small group, and raise the difficulty a little at a time. A coach also suggests dropping the label. Instead of calling yourself an introvert, think of yourself as a man who prefers to talk with a few people he likes.

One of our coaches worked online with a student in his 50s who started out, in the coach's words, conversationally toxic. He would begin conversations and the women would turn away. He took occasional calls for some months, and he actually went out and talked to women. Then he reached the point of having consistently good conversations with women half his age, and getting dates.

The coach's point is that older men have set habits, and the work is to put ego aside and do the plain right thing even when it feels foreign. He says he has had students well into their late sixties who did this and did well. The same advice holds at your age: start small, keep going, and do not let a habit from the last twenty years decide what you try.

Do not lie. If she asks, answer plainly and keep talking. A coach says that your taste often does not move up as fast as your age does, so the age question is likely to come up for you. The best way to handle it is to let her know you and like you first. By the time the number arrives, it is one fact about a man she already likes.

A coach calls an online dating profile a passive extra: it takes little time and should never be your whole plan. Use it next to the places above, not instead of them. The classes, the lunches and the daytime conversations are where you build the habit of talking to women, and that habit is what makes the rest work.