From young men looking for no-strings sex to the 92-year-old who lied about his age: older women on the truth about dating in later life

Five women on both sides of the Atlantic reveal what it’s like trying to find a partner in your 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s

‘I know the man for me exists. I am not going to stop looking until I find him’

Stella Ralfini, 78-year-old beauty writer, London (pictured above)

I’ve been single for 10 years, since my partner died. I started dating in my early 70s, and in the past year I’ve been on 10 dates. Initially, I thought it was sex I missed, or companionship, but it’s not that. I want someone to share romantic sunsets and picnics with again. And I want to die in love. I want to die remembering how that felt, because that’s when I felt most alive. I know the man for me exists, and I’m not going to stop looking until I find him.

In my experience, few men are looking for a 78-year-old woman on dating sites and apps. I came off Match.com a few months ago because I look much younger than my age and was accused by two or three men of being AI-generated or using a fake picture.

Men who are much younger than me – in their 50s – did show interest in me, but I’m not interested in them. It’s very important to me to date a man who is in his 70s or late 60s, who’s at the same point I am so we can live out our last years crazily in love.

I’m now taking a new route, and going to face-to-face dating events and dinner dances. But the problem is, I don’t have a big family or grandchildren – just one daughter – and most of the men I meet in their 70s do, and want a similar kind of woman.

One man I met – and felt was a brilliant match – told me after three dates that he would prefer a woman with grandchildren who would be more homey and less glamorous than me. I wear makeup and dress stylishly, in white, turquoise, red and pink, because I’ve realised I’m a person who loves to be admired. I know I sound shallow, but it’s got nothing to do with vanity. It’s got to do with me, recognising that these are my last years, and wanting to live authentically, every day.

I’d like to meet a cheeky chappy with twinkling eyes, a sexy mouth and an open mind – a teddy boy with attitude, who probably smoked cannabis in the 1970s and was very involved in music. There’s this whole hippy-with-a-ponytail vibe that I like.

But there are very few hot men in their 70s, and the minds of many older men seem to have shrunk with age – they’re often not very interesting to talk to. I have a very full life, with lots of hobbies, including swing dancing. But I want passion and I want romance. If I was offered £1m or the promise of falling in love, I’d choose love.

‘Men in their 60s used Polaroids from the 1970s as their profile pictures’

Pauline Tomlin, 61-year-old actor, Leeds

It’s a very barren landscape for me. A lot of men my age are not great at keeping themselves fit and healthy. I don’t know what happens – they seem to be all right in their 40s and 50s, and then they get to their 60s and you’re like: what the hell?

When I do come across an attractive man my age, I often find they’re looking for a much younger woman. I see myself as a young 60, so I could probably date someone younger, but I’m not interested in being fetishised by a much younger man. I’m too mature for that energy.

People keep saying: “Oh, you’re a very vibrant woman, you should go online and meet someone.” I did that briefly and discovered that many of the men in their 60s used old Polaroids of themselves from the 1970s as their profile pictures.

When they contacted me, I constantly got the feeling they were keeping their options open. They didn’t take the time to read my profile and didn’t seem to want to engage in a meaningful conversation. It felt dodgy. I’m old-fashioned. I’d like to date someone I can have a laugh with, walk along the canal with and have coffee with. But these men appeared to be fishing and looking for sex.

I also feel as though some men online saw me as a bit of a curiosity, being Afro-Caribbean. In the past, I occasionally tried dating websites for black people. Not all caucasian men understand the challenges and nuances of living as a black person in this world. You don’t always feel like sitting down at the dinner table and having to explain your experiences of structural racism and its covert impacts and microaggressions every night. It’s exhausting.

In my experience, the majority of the men who use black dating sites like to tell you how beautiful you are, with no real conversational depth. My response is: “Oh, get lost, this is not serious.”

I stopped online dating when a guy I was chatting with became abusive. He said something weird, and I said, “That’s not very nice.” The next thing I knew, he was using expletives. It was quite unnerving.

Face-to-face, men seem reluctant to even approach me. At a party recently, a man was looking at me all night but waited until I was getting into a taxi to ask for my number. He hadn’t said a word to me all evening. So I said no.

I’ll be sad if my love life has to completely die in my 60s. It’s already been several years since I even had a hug. But unless someone of quality comes along, I’m not going to compromise. I won’t be with someone just so I can say, “I’ve got a man”, or because I feel a bit lonely or isolated sometimes. I’m getting on with my life, realising my ambitions and spending time with friends. Recently, I’ve written a play and joined a choir. I still want to rollerskate, learn tap dancing and become huge in my acting career so, if this is the rest of my life, I’m at peace with that.

‘I had missed out on experiences other lesbians have in their youth’

Bonnie March, 84-year-old pensioner, Palm Springs, Florida

I got married in my 20s and had two children. Twenty years later, I entered into my first romantic relationship with another woman. It lasted eight years. Then I was single for maybe 30 years. Being alone didn’t bother me until Covid, when I was 79. In lockdown, I began to feel super lonely.

So I joined Match.com and went on about 20 dates. I felt at sea, and kept asking myself: “What the heck is going on here?” The women I was matching with – who were all aged 75 to 85 – were so old in attitude. Their lives had been very narrowed by their own choices. They seemed to find all kinds of excuses to stay at home and stream Netflix.

Many had pets they treated like their children. Some would refuse to do things because they had to go home and feed their animals. One woman had a parrot, which she introduced me to. She said she wanted me to hold it – I refused. Another had given up travelling because she vomited once after going on a trip. The worst date was with a woman who repeated herself ad nauseam about how connected and important she was in her early life. She was super cheap, too. On another date, I met a woman for lunch. When she gave me a big smile, I discovered she didn’t have any teeth.

I decided to join the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, a queer and lesbian relationship coaching website for self-identifying women and non-binary people who love women. There are different levels of being out, and I had not come out in my local community. My coach helped me to think about how I could be brave enough to be who I am, how I could find the courage to say to anyone who had a problem with me: I don’t need you in my life.

That freed something inside me. I realised I had missed out on some of the experiences other lesbians have in their youth. When one of the women I dated told me I didn’t act like I was in my 80s and suggested I lower the age range of the women I was looking for to 65 to 75, I decided to take her advice. The very first woman I met was Cheryl, who was 68.

We met for lunch initially. There was a lot of laughter and a sense of ease. A few weeks later, we went to a blues festival together and stayed up until one or two o’clock in the morning just talking. We shared our life stories and realised we had a lot in common. She is a world traveller and an energetic, sports-oriented person, like I am. And we just clicked.

‘It wasn’t my first choice to get together with an older woman, after losing my previous partner’

Cheryl Ford, 71-year-old pensioner, Palm Springs

I knew within a couple of months that I wanted to marry Bonnie. It was so exciting. It felt like the first time I fell in love. All the same sort of butterflies, the same feeling of not being able to concentrate – we couldn’t stand to be apart. Unlike Bonnie, I came out of the closet when I was 19. I had a 25-year-marriage with an older woman, who died in 2017.

I spent months dating women before I met Bonnie. Coincidentally, the craziest date was with a woman who talked constantly about her parrot. Sex didn’t seem to be high on the list of things the women I met were interested in, and sex was important to me. A lot of them had come out later in life and were mothers. I had never been with a woman who had kids, and that was a challenge.

One woman told me she couldn’t wait to have grandchildren and was planning to install a pool in her house for them. I was nonplussed. I wanted to meet someone who was relatively unencumbered and looking for an adventure. One of my key tests was: can we vacation together? Because I love to travel.

It wasn’t my first choice to get together with an older woman like Bonnie, after losing my previous partner. But at the same time, it didn’t scare me to think Bonnie might die first. I knew I had been through such a loss already, and that I could get through it again.

An advantage of dating when you are retired is you can take lots of vacations. Bonnie hadn’t travelled much until she met me, but there are now so many beautiful places all over the world that we have been to and shared together, and still more we are planning to visit. Sexually, our desire for each other aligned as well.

About a year after we met, we went to Paris, because Bonnie told me she had always wanted to go there and walk around in a red beret, carrying a baguette, with her lover on her arm. When we got to the top of the Eiffel Tower, I proposed.

We had a full-on wedding with 100 guests – we both dressed in white and walked down the aisle to Elvis Presley singing Can’t Help Falling in Love. Many of our guests had tears in their eyes. Lots of our friends had lived through the years when gay marriage wasn’t legal. When we walked into the reception room after the ceremony, everyone stood up and applauded for five minutes. We felt this overwhelming amount of support, and when Bonnie cried, I cried, too. They were tears of joy.

‘I prefer younger men – older ones are more likely to hog the conversation’

D’yan Forest, 91-year-old comedian, New York

I’ve dated 40 or 50 men over the past 30 years – so many, I’ve lost count. I do online dating and I’m what people now call bisexual. What’s important to me is to meet someone who is bright, has a sense of humour and loves to travel. It doesn’t bother me what sex that person is. What matters is we have fun together.

Dating has gotten harder as I’ve gotten older. When I was young, it was easy to meet people. I got married – and divorced – in my 20s. I went on to have two other serious relationships, including one that lasted 25 years, and started dating again in my 60s.

I don’t like being in my apartment at night, alone. So I’ll find an interesting person online and invite them out for a coffee – and nine out of 10 times, I’ll never hear from them again. I think these people don’t want to meet anybody. They just like surfing around on the internet. They get a kick out of it.

The few people I did meet were nebbishes – that’s Yiddish for losers and jerks. Some of them were my age and some were younger, one or two even as young as 28 or 30. I’d meet them in a bar, we’d have a good time, and then I’d never see them again.

I prefer younger men, because I find the older men are, the more likely they are to hog the whole conversation. Especially men who are 65 or older, they just talk about themselves. They don’t even realise they haven’t asked you one question, and that’s when my eyes glaze over. With women, there’s more back-and-forth talking.

One match came through on Bumble recently, with a man who said he was 87. When I met him for a hamburger, he admitted he was 92. He talked about how he was rich and famous. Then he said he wasn’t like regular older guys. “I don’t just hold it for two minutes. I can hold it for two hours because I have balloons.” I realised he was talking about inflating his penis. He said his previous girlfriend had loved it – until she died. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could. Another guy kept planning dates with me and then saying he was busy. We were in touch for three months. Then he ghosted me.

I have spoken about my dating experiences on stage at comedy clubs, and there are young guys who want to date me after seeing me perform. But they just want an hour of sex, they don’t want a relationship. I discovered this a couple of years ago, when I agreed to have sex with one. He was in his 40s. I thought it would lead to something. Then I realised: it’s not serious.

Other women my age tell me they don’t have sex any more, even with their husbands. I guess I’m different. For me, sex is part of life, although I haven’t had it for a while now. I’m still looking for sex, but not with just anybody. I want to at least have some kind of relationship.

I have no children and most of my family are dead. I travel a lot and I keep hoping I might meet someone in Paris or London or on an plane. I’m not looking to get married or even fall in love. I just want to find a companion who likes me and wants to have fun. It’s a lonely world. But you’ve got to have hope