Over 60 Dating in Australia: The Decade Everything Gets Decided

Your sixties in Australia are oddly front-loaded with enormous decisions. When to actually stop. What to do about super. Whether to sell the family home, and if so where on earth you go instead. Most people spend a couple of years working through all of it, and somewhere in the middle of that they realise they would quite like somebody to talk it over with.

That is a perfectly good reason to start dating, and a far more common one than the sites usually admit.

Sorting the Big Things Out, Alone

The financial decisions in this decade are genuinely consequential, and making them on your own is harder than making them with someone. Not because you need rescuing, but because there is nobody to think out loud with at ten o'clock at night.

Worth saying plainly: get proper advice on the money side from somebody qualified, particularly if a new relationship might affect your situation. Rules around income, assets and living arrangements have real consequences at this age, and they are not something to work out from a forum post or from what your brother-in-law reckons. Sort the facts out separately, then you can be relaxed about the relationship rather than anxious about it.

Downsizing, and Where You End Up

Selling the family home is one of the biggest emotional events of this decade, and it reshapes your dating life whether you planned for it or not.

Move to the coast or a regional town and the pool shrinks but the pace suits you. Move to an apartment closer to the city and you swap the garden for being near everything. Stay put and you keep the neighbours you have had for thirty years and the four bedrooms nobody sleeps in.

Whatever you are doing, mention it. Somebody midway through the same decision will find it enormously interesting, and somebody who did it three years ago will have opinions you actually want to hear. It is also a far better conversation starter than anything you could invent.

The Long Goodbye to Work

Very few Australians stop dead at a set date any more. It is more often a slow taper: fewer days, a bit of consulting, helping out someone else's business. That taper is when a lot of people notice how much of their social life was work, and how quiet it gets when the taper finishes.

Filling that space deliberately, rather than waiting for it to fill itself, is what separates people who enjoy this decade from people who find it flat. Dating is one way in, and a rather sociable one.

What Meeting Somebody Looks Like Now

Straightforward and low-key. Message for a few days, then meet somewhere public in daylight. A coffee, a walk somewhere pleasant, a beer in a beer garden if that is more your thing. An hour is plenty for a first go, and if it is good you will both know.

The pleasant surprise for most people is how uncomplicated it is at this age. Everybody has done the game-playing and nobody has the appetite for it, so things move quickly and honestly in a way they never did at thirty.

Getting Started

Have a look for nothing first, and write something that sounds like you rather than an application. Senior dating covers the years just after this one, mature dating the whole span, and dating over 50 the decade before.

Big decisions are better with somebody to talk them over with. Join free.