Senior Dating: Love on the Go

 

Life in the Boomer Lane will be writing a series of senior dating articles for seniormatch.com. She will share each of those here first, before the folks at seniormatch publish them. Lucky you. Here goes:

People are fond of telling their single friends who complain about their difficulty in meeting people, “You can meet someone anywhere, even the grocery store!” Until now, this belief had women going to supermarkets in full hair and make up, standing hopefully in the produce section and waiting for Mr Right to come along. But, thanks to the advent of mobile online dating, singles can now go to the supermarket and bring home more than bananas.
Matchmaking is nothing new. It can be dated back to the first time a man was felled by a mammoth and his unfortunate partner was subsequently told by a friend, “Have I got a guy for you!” Over the millennia, matchmaking became a more orderly process, and matchmakers were valued members of society. That was pretty much how things went for hundreds/thousands of years, until technology came along.

It would be impossible to argue the fact that online dating revolutionized the way people meet and formed relationships. Most of us know someone who is involved with online dating, and many of us know people who are now partnered or married as a result. What started back in the mid-1990’s as something many considered weird and scary, is now mainstream.

Until recently, the popular image of an online dater was a person seated in front of their computer screen, wearing pajamas, and staring at endless potential matches, while drinking coffee/eating pizza/petting their dog. But this reality, like every other rapidly changing reality of technology, is changing. Online daters, like mostly everyone else in the general population, live their lives in a mobile way. And dating shouldn’t be any different.

Seniormatch, one of the giants of online dating for those of us who may have been introduced to the world of dating back in the Nixon Administration (hopefully, with a better outcome), premiered in 2001. It went mobile in 2012, and it has never looked back. In the last few months alone, 23% of new sign ups have come from mobile users. Two years ago, that figure was 13%.

And there are predictable differences between stationary users of the service and mobile users. One is the frequency of use. Mobile users use the service 20% more than stationary users. Seniormatch has made the finding-someone-in-the-supermarket myth a reality. Along with the bank, the post office, the dry cleaners. Wherever you are, in whatever time you have, you can be scrolling for potential mates.

Seniormatch  and its mobile technology (m.seniormatch and SeniorMatch App) will get you started. The rest is up to you.