OLD tell me what I'm doing wrong

[Foodorder]

I've been on Match for a month.

I wrote, I think, a consise but interesting profile, including a number of varied interests. I used recent photos, some smiley head and shoulders ones and a full length one doing sport.

I'm 50, youngish looking, I believe, and in decent shape. Not glamorous, but not unattractive, or at least I didn't think so.

I didn't get loads of responses, but those I did were either attractive (unlikely so) men in their 30s or men in their late 50s who'd taken no care with with their appearance or profile at all. From their photos they look like they don't take care of themselves at all, looked much older than men I know irl of similar age, but they'd put no effort into the dating profile either, given no information to start a conversation with. The messages were all "how ru ?" or similar. No effort at all.

I have a wide circle of friends, male and female, and have some options there but tbh for casual dating (after a long time out of the game) I'd rather keep it separate from friends, who are important to me. I'd been led to believe OLD was the answer, but not from this experience.

I suspect at least part of it is that attractive and interesting men my age are able to attract women 10/15/20 years younger, but what's a girl supposed to do? I can over look the appearance but not the lack of effort.

Don’t bother with OLD!

Have a look into some local speed dating events. The men at these will have had to put the effort into actually booking and going out, whereas most of the OLD are at home in their stained sweatpants, wife other end of the sofa, and just want some attention.

Oh God, what exactly happens at speed dating? I thought I was being brave having a go at OLD 😆

There’s an equal(ish!) number of men and women in the room. Normally women choose a table and stay there, then men are on rotation and move onto the next table every xx minutes (normally when a whistle blows or similar).

You get to meet more people in one evening and have the equivalent of a weeks worth of back and forward messaging, as well as getting a real feel for them!

What happens at the "decision making" stage? I have visions of waiting to be picked for a team in PE 😆

Honestly OP I would say you are doing nothing wrong, but keep at it! You won’t fancy, or even like, most of the people you meet. Just like in real life.

I met my (wonderful) partner on tinder in 2017. Back then, a lot of people used it and met people that way in London - do people still use tinder? Maybe one of the lower effort sites re: profiles like tinder or bumble etc might lower your expectations regarding the effort put into profiles (as I didn’t really bother to update mine either!) then you can concentrate purely on the quality of the chat, rather than the profile? Absolutely dismiss the ‘how r u’ messages, but think of it as just widening the pool of people you get the opportunity to talk to. Good luck!

Usually you'll have a card, on which you indicate whether or not you'd like to meet someone again. You hand these to the organiser. If you both want to meet each other, the organiser will let you know.