3 Methods for Finding Love After 35, 40, and 50

More and more singles have professional careers.  More men and women are pursuing interesting, fulfilling, and rewarding professional lives.  In the 21^st century it seems that everyone is more busy with great demands placed on their time schedules.  When professionals are working longer hours on the job, combining that with jockeying for position on the freeway with the daily commute, how are single professionals supposed to find ways to meet other available singles and find love at midlife?

1. Singles Bars

While everyone invariably knows a happily married couple who did meet at a classy bar, bars are problematic.  When you work in a downtown metropolitan city like New York, Boston, or San Francisco, where the public transit is excellent, and you can just hop onto the transit system to get safely home afterwards, a bar is fine for socializing in your 20s, 30s, and even early 40s. Some singles in their 50s, it can still be appropriate to bop over for drinks with colleagues after work on a Friday night Happy Hour or for business interactions.

But what if you are one of the millions of singles who works in an office park and must drive to get to and from work?  To pursue meeting singles at the popular bars or pubs, even the GastroPubs popular now, could be problematic, and you might run the risk of a DUI ticket. After 55, if you’re hanging out at a bar and it’s not with colleagues, you can start to come across as a Bar Fly, and you certainly want to avoid that. Really, after about age 45, frequenting bars for a social scene reads incongruency for someone looking for a relationship who has maturity and social skills.

We can all envision a few exceptions:

1. those wonderful well-light hotels bars you might grab a drink at while traveling on alone on business
2. that classy sophisticated restaurant bar which feels so swanky and comfortable, it’s like this venue is your own country club minus the membership fees
3. those warm sports bars which draw out the locals to cheer on The Team during some Sports’ playoff seasons

Just, after a certain age and time of day, the Singles Bars really are the crowd for singles 44 and under if you’re looking for a potential life partner and not tonight’s hookup, right?

3. Social Groups

There used to be associations, groups, and clubs. Now we have way more of our groups online at Facebook. However, just as in online dating, to build all kinds of relationships, you really do want to take it offline at some point and meet and mingle in person. There used to be thriving Singles Clubs in the UK, US, and Canada. Likely Australia, too, just my clients there haven’t reminisced about that so much. Singles groups often formed to meet to engage in certain seasonal sports like Tennis in the summertime, and Alpine Skiing in the winter months. They would often rent courts under the association or do a shared-rental on a Ski Cottage during snow season. In between the major seasons, they would host monthly membership mixers with wine and cheese. You knew that people were willing to put the big S for Single brand on themselves to self-identify, and by their membership in the club, they were relatively looking for a love relationship and not just hookups. Most clubs frown on hookup artists plowing through the opposite sex membership roster and burning the playing field. It leaves the membership feeling poorly about their membership in the club. So, social mores enforced moving slowly between members.

Within this category, I’d include Christian (all of them, LDS, Catholic, Evangelical, Non-Denominational, everyone) Singles Ministries. Even if your church doesn’t have one, if you do a search online for your city and region, you can still turn up quite a number of singles ministry groups out there.

I’m also including the Jewish Singles groups. Typically I located about 1 major one per county, often more closely associated with the local JCC than a particular temple. These are very good as well. Just they are often like a farm. It can take months to even a few years of membership, depending upon your age cluster, to sow the seeds of simply being known, and allowing for attraction to develop slowly. For the singles and actively looking age group in their 30s and even early 40s, the dating, courting, and mate selection pace can work fairly fast.

For the Over 50 singles where at least 1 of the 2 of you already had kids and perhaps now grandkids, the move to courtship-unto-marriage can progress more slowly. Sometimes singles after 50 just aren’t looking to get married, only pair off with some exclusivity and longevity commitment.

In this category, I’m also including all of the Singles/Social Activity Groups which comprise so much of Meetup. It really is worth your checking out. Over there, I just generally prefer free-$5 entrance fees for you to first sample a group and even see if it’s for you and meets your needs. Some will require what is almost a cover charge of $15-25 dollars. Those I am way less inclined to recommend unless you have a friend who has been before and has vetted its worthiness of your dollars and investment. That’s a small workshop fee, not an indiscriminate Taco Tuesdays for who shows up fee. I prefer a no-host bar so you can drink/not drink as you choose and pay only for what you actually ate, which might be half of 1 appetizer while the others are trying to make this early evening event into their 3 course dinner.

3. Online Dating Sites

A great advantage 21^st century singles have now is the internet:  Online Dating sites.  Online Dating sites have been around since the early days of the internet, since 1995 or so.  However, in the early days, Internet Dating was still an unusual way for singles to meet.  And the many couples who met and married through the Online Dating sites, often found they needed to create a more socially acceptable story of how they met.  But that is no longer.  Online Dating is now totally mainstream.

Busy professional singles can readily, easily, and efficiently meet other singles online.  Part of what makes internet dating so efficient for busy singles is you can search for criteria, values, and lifestyles which match and compliment your own well.  While you do want to go a lot of dates to practice and refine your dating and relationship skills, you don’t want to needlessly waste your time on dates with people that are completely wrong for you.  Then you enjoy First Dates that are great and avoid ones which are duds.

Pick an Online Dating site which has plenty of singles in your region and post your profile.  You can get posted and started towards meeting your perfect match first date.

Of course, as a recognized Online Dating Expert and Author, I have a tone of free internet dating advice articles as well as my books to help you more particularly in the Online Dating Arena when you’re looking to find the one just right for you online.

Happy Dating and Relationships,

April Braswell

Las Vegas Online Dating Expert

Follow and Engage with April on Twitter: @AprilBraswell