Guys: Is 39 to old for OLD? Whoa.

[PlumPrincess]

I will never forget how often I saw something like this in guys' profiles during my brief stint in online dating:

 

Age: 34

Looking for: women who are single

Age: 22-32

 

And sure enough, they'd be messaging 21-year-old (at the time) me. :rolleyes:

 

Not saying women are free of shallowness and silly stipulations when it comes to online dating, but OP asked specifically about age and men. And the answer is yes, lots (I didn't say all) of men in their 30's who are using OLD are trying to meet (significantly younger) women.

I'm on a website where you can put people who message you on the ignore list and - they will see it when they see their message that you did. I've done that a couple of times with very stupid, creepy people. I call it educational measures.

[PlumPrincess]

Yes! Meetup and Eventbrite have quite a few singles mixers as well as activities for anything and everything you might be interested in. Be warned, though, a lot of the OLD shady people attend, so you know...still do both.

I haven't seen shady people yet, but I have indeed seen guys I recognized from the dating site. I spontaneously remember three. Two of them seemed to like me. Those two have never visited my dating profile. (at least I have never seen them. But I can say for sure that they never contacted me!)

[string of letters]

I just saw your post on another thread, and maybe your title should be 'Guys 5'8" and taller, is 39 too old for OLD?'

 

I'm not singling you out, but we tend to think our own criteria involve 'looking for what we want' but others' criteria - when they work against us - are biases, quite possibly very unfair ones. Generally speaking, OLD is easier to handle once you realize this.

 

Is 39 the end of the line for attractive single women?

 

At least you are being honest about your age, and can rest assured in the knowledge that you've kept your integrity. There are stats floating around out there which would suggest that you're, regrettably, competing with a lot of women on OLD who are NOT being honest about their age.

 

A quick anecdote before I talk about an article I read. I'm a 41 year old male. As I got into my 30's, to my mind 36 was the last number that had a 'nice ring to it'. No one taught me this and I don't remember hearing anyone else ever express the same sentiment, it's just a feeling I had.

 

I wouldn't normally think of myself as having much in common with males who would lie about their ages on OLD, but later I was surprised to learn that OLD sites have a large 'spike' in 36 year old males. Long story short, there are spikes at various ages, and they are statistically impossible, but rather they indicate that a lot of people lie about their ages. Apparently, I was not alone in feeling strange about turning 37.

 

For women, the spikes are at 29, 35, and 44 (so, oddly, many women feel the same way about turning 36 that I did about turning 37). If we focus on that, there doesn't seem to be anything especially bad about the way the age of 39 is perceived in Western cultures. Perhaps you would have had similar problems at age 36.

 

The info about the 'age spikes' is from a 2007 Scientific American article, if anyone has seen any more recent studies about how age is perceived on OLD it would be interesting to know about.

Edited August 29, 2013 by string of letters
Typo

[mario_C]

I haven't seen shady people yet, but I have indeed seen guys I recognized from the dating site. I spontaneously remember three. Two of them seemed to like me. Those two have never visited my dating profile. (at least I have never seen them. But I can say for sure that they never contacted me!)

I found my last almost-date on Plenty Of Fish (after the fact, after we hung out at a mixer downtown for hours). So, yes.

[skydiveaddict]

Is 39 the end of the line for attractive single women?

 

no................