A Real Story

My daughter set up my first profile in 2022, right after my divorce finalized, and I let her pick the app because I didn’t know Bumble from Tinder. That was a mistake — I got matched with men in their thirties looking for something my daughter had to explain to me in very careful language. I deleted it the same week and went looking on my own.

I tried OurTime next because the commercials made it look like church potluck energy, which is honestly what I wanted. The pool was better age-wise, but half the profiles hadn’t been touched since whenever the person joined — one man’s photo still had a MySpace-style filter on it. I matched with three people in two weeks and two never responded to a single message. It felt like shouting into a mostly empty room.

What actually worked was Match, oddly enough, mostly because of the long-form profile questions. I could tell within thirty seconds of reading someone’s answers whether they had any interests beyond fishing and complaining about their ex. I started a real conversation with a retired electrician named Gary who wrote three full paragraphs about restoring an old Ford truck, typos and all, and it read like an actual person instead of a résumé. We talked for six weeks before meeting at a diner, and he showed up twenty minutes early with a folder of vintage truck photos to show me, which should have felt insane and instead felt like the most honest first date I’d had in thirty years.

We’ve been together fourteen months now. My advice to anyone starting this at our age: skip the app with the flashiest ad and pick the one that makes people actually write something. The paragraph tells you more than the photo ever will.