Online Dating Safety For The Over 60s In Argentina

Online dating later in life is in some ways safer than the old way of doing things. You get far more choice, and you get to keep your distance from somebody who interests you for as long as you like, right up until you decide to meet.

What follows is not a warning. It is the ordinary sensible planning that makes the rest of it enjoyable, so you can stop thinking about it and concentrate on the company.

While you are still online

• Trust your instincts. If something feels wrong, it very probably is, and you are under no obligation to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Wind the conversation down politely if you can. If that does not work, simply stop replying. You do not owe a stranger an explanation.
• Be honest in your profile. The whole thing runs on trust, and it works both ways. It is easy enough to shave a decade off online, and very hard to look sixty across a table when you are seventy.
• Look at what is behind you in your photographs. Your street, your number, your car and its plate, the view from your window that any neighbour would recognise. And make sure nobody else is identifiable in them, particularly grandchildren.
• Hold back the details until you know who you are giving them to. Your address, where you worked, where you bank, when you are away from the house. There is plenty about yourself that can stay yours for a while.
• Your contact details are protected here. Other members cannot see your email address or your telephone number, so if you stop replying to somebody inside your account, they have no other way of reaching you. That protection disappears the moment you move to WhatsApp, which is worth remembering when somebody is in a hurry to do exactly that.
• Never discuss your finances and never share bank details, a card number or a photograph of your DNI with another member. Nobody you meet through a dating site has any reason to need them. The only time you will enter payment details is when you upgrade your own account, and that happens in your account settings, never in a chat.
• Never send money. Not to somebody you have been talking to for a week, and not to somebody you have been talking to for eight months and have come to trust. That trust is how a romance scam is built: the friendship is the setup and the request is the point of it. Read our article on dating scammers for what the pattern looks like and how to report it.
• Be wary of anybody declaring strong feelings very early, especially before you have spoken on the telephone or seen each other's face. Real affection takes longer than that, and people in a hurry are usually in a hurry for a reason.
• Do not let anybody push you into sending more photographs or more information than you want to. No is a complete sentence, and anyone worth meeting takes it well.
• Do not be talked into meeting before you are ready either. You set the pace. If somebody keeps pressing, that tells you something useful about them.
• If you are not certain somebody is who they say they are, suggest a video call, or ask for a recent photograph and take it with you when you meet.
• Read your messages back before you send them. Dry humour without a face or a tone of voice attached lands very differently on a screen, and it saves a good deal of confusion to keep things warm and plain at the start.

Meeting in person

This is the good part, and it is also the part where a little planning goes a long way. Most Argentines already do this instinctively. Surveys of people meeting somebody from an app here found around eight in ten plan their way home before they leave, and well over half tell a friend or a relative first. That is exactly right, and it applies just as much at sixty-five as at thirty.

• Meet somewhere public with other people in sight and earshot. A café, a confitería, the plaza, a busy corner of the parque. Not a house, not yours and not theirs, however pleasant they have seemed.
• Daytime is easier than evening for a first meeting. The merienda, around five or six, is close to ideal: it is light, it is short by nature, and nobody has to invent a reason to leave.
• Tell somebody the details. Who you are meeting, exactly where, what time and roughly when you expect to be home. Send them the person's profile if you like. There is nothing embarrassing about this. People half your age do the same thing every weekend.
• Take your telephone, charged, and keep whoever is expecting to hear from you in the loop. Some people arrange a phrase beforehand so they can report in without it being obvious. A message saying the medialunas are good might mean all is well, and one about the coffee being terrible might mean ring me with an emergency.
• Arrange your own way there and back. Do not depend on a lift. Have the colectivo worked out, or a remis number saved, or the app already set up, so that leaving early is simple rather than awkward. Your SUBE discount as a jubilado or pensionado is there to be used.
• Do not share a taxi or a remis at the end. If you cannot avoid it, be dropped off last so your address stays yours, and if they argue the point, do not share it at all.
• Keep your wits about you with the drink. A glass is fine. Keep it with you, and if you have the faintest suspicion that a drink or a plate has been interfered with, leave it and tell a member of staff straight away.
• Keep your bag and your telephone where you can see them, as you would anywhere.
• Trust yourself on the day as well. If something does not sit right, make your excuses and go. You may end a meeting whenever you like and you do not need a reason. If your date takes it badly, ask a member of staff or somebody nearby for help. In an emergency, ring 911.
• If you need a way out, the old trick still works. Go to the bathroom, ring a friend, and ask them to call you back in five minutes with something urgent.
• Do not hand over your address, and think twice before agreeing to be collected from home, until you have met more than once.

If something goes wrong

If you have sent money or shared bank details, ring your bank first and then make the denuncia. Where you make it depends on your province, and the routes are set out in our article on dating scammers.

For support rather than reporting, ring 149. That is CENAVID, the national victim assistance service. It is free, it runs at any hour every day of the year, and it offers legal advice, psychological support and a free lawyer if you need one. It exists precisely for this, and there is no reason to sit with it alone.

And tell us. Use the "Report profile" link at the bottom of anybody's profile. It is confidential, they are never told, and we would far rather look into ten hunches that come to nothing than miss the one that mattered.

Then enjoy it

Most first meetings are perfectly pleasant and a good number are genuinely good fun. Remember that the person across the table is very likely as nervous as you are, and probably has not done this in years either. Be kind to them, be kind to yourself, and let the afternoon be what it is.

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