Online Dating For The Over 60s In Argentina

Somewhere in the last few years this stopped being strange. Argentina is now one of the heaviest users of dating apps in the world, and while the loudest part of that is people in their thirties, the quiet part is everybody else. Including, increasingly, us.

If you are reading this with a certain amount of suspicion, that is fair enough. Most people arrive here suspicious. It usually lasts about a fortnight.

Why people our age end up here

Not because we have run out of options, whatever your nephew thinks. Because the ordinary ways of meeting somebody quietly stopped working.

Think about how you met people before. Work. Friends of friends. The neighbourhood you were raising children in. Every one of those had somebody else doing the introducing. Then you retired, the children moved out or moved provinces, the friends became couples or widows, and nobody replaced any of it. It is not that you became less sociable. The machinery just switched off.

A dating site is that machinery, put back. Nothing more romantic than that, and nothing more sinister either.

What it is actually like

Less dramatic than you are imagining. You write a few paragraphs about yourself, put up some photographs, and then you read about other people and message the ones who look interesting. They do the same. Some conversations go nowhere, which is fine and costs you nothing. Some go somewhere.

The single biggest difference from meeting somebody at a party is that everybody here has already declared themselves. Single, roughly your age, and looking. At the taller or the centro de jubilados you are hoping all three happen to be true of somebody in the room, and hoping is doing most of the work.

"I am no good with the computer"

You probably are, and you have probably been proving it every day without noticing.

Nearly nine in ten Argentines over 60 have a smartphone. Seven in ten use social networks, and for most of us that means WhatsApp: the family group, the photographs of the grandchildren, the voice notes that go on for four minutes. If you can do that, you can do this. It is the same set of skills with different buttons.

Among people over 60 who stay off the internet altogether, the most common reason given is not the cost and not lack of interest. It is not knowing how. Which is a solvable problem, and often solvable by a grandchild in twenty minutes if you ask.

One practical note. If you are on a prepago plan where WhatsApp is bundled and everything else eats your data, browsing here will use some of it. Do your reading on the wifi at home, or at the centro, or at the library, and save the data for the messages.

What about what people will say

This is the part nobody puts in the brochure, so let us put it here.

For a lot of people the obstacle is not the technology and it is not the strangers. It is the adult children. Argentine families are close, opinions get expressed at the Sunday table, and there is a particular silence that descends when a woman in her late sixties mentions she has been talking to somebody.

Two things worth saying about that. The first is that it passes, and it usually passes faster than expected once they meet the person and discover he is not a fortune hunter but a retired schoolteacher from Morón who likes fishing. The second is that it is your life. You have spent a great many years arranging things around other people. This one you are allowed to arrange around yourself.

It is also worth being straightforward with yourself about what you want. Plenty of people here are not looking to remarry or to move anybody into the house. Company for an afternoon, somebody to go to the cine with, somebody to talk to on a Wednesday. That is a perfectly good thing to want and there is no need to dress it up as anything grander.

If you were married a long time

Most people here were. And for a good many of us it did not end in a decision, it ended in a loss, which is a different thing entirely and comes with its own weather.

There is no correct interval and anybody who tells you there is has not been through it. Some people are ready in a year and some are not ready in five, and both are ordinary. What is worth knowing is that wanting company again is not a betrayal of anybody, and that the people you will be talking to here are, in very large numbers, in exactly the same position. You will not have to explain it from the beginning. That is one of the quiet advantages of doing this at our age rather than at thirty.

The honest disadvantages

It takes patience. Most messages go unanswered, most conversations fade, and this is not a comment on you. Everybody experiences it, including the people not answering you, who are also being ignored somewhere else.

There are people here who should not be. A small number, and they follow a recognisable pattern, and we work at keeping them off. Read the article on dating scammers before you get going. Ten minutes now saves a great deal later.

And it does not do the last part for you. At some point you have to put the telephone down, arrange a coffee for Thursday, and go and sit opposite an actual person. That bit is exactly as nerve-racking as it was at twenty-two, which is either the worst news in this article or the best, depending on the day.

Where to start

Write the profile, badly if necessary, and put a photograph up. You can improve both later and almost everybody does. Then send three messages to people who look interesting. Not one, because one carries too much weight, and not thirty.

Then get on with your week. That is genuinely the method.

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