Reinventing the Senior First Date

Really? After all your years of experience and adventure, your idea of a senior first date is to look up restaurants in the local yellow pages?

First of all, who uses yellow pages anymore? The new yellow pages are called Google, Bing or Yahoo. Despite the weird names, embrace them. They are the new dating coach for old coots like us.

Secondly, you may be retired, but does that mean your creativity and sense of adventure are also retired? Do you want to live it up or wind things down? The choice is yours.

It’s been years or perhaps even decades since you last went out on a date, so out of sheer nervousness, who could blame you for staying in your comfort zone?

After all, we are the “been there, done that” generation, so if we date someone of the same vintage, a nice quiet dinner out will do nicely. Right?

Perhaps, but in this new age of over 50 dating, does the dinner date still have to serve as an audition?

Once upon a time, an introductory dinner date used to help us ascertain if there would be a second date. The quiet time served us well, helping us to get to know each other. We either clicked or we didn’t.

50 first dates?

But that was when time was an ally. Who has the time or energy for 50 first dates these days?

The old reliable dinner date used to be time well spent, but for the dating over 50 crowd, it has become passe, yet another victim of technology.

So if your goal is to find the last love of your life, it’s time to retire the dinner date as your primary prospecting tool.

Instead, to better serve our golden years, let’s put the dinner date where it belongs – a regular outing as boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife.

“We can gather information that

will help us create a fun first date.”

With that done, let’s focus on these two things:

Is there a better prospecting tool to enable us to engage with a mature lady or gent at arm’s length and help us determine if we would like or not like to meet him or her in person?

Since the first date is no longer needed to introduce each other, how do we instead use it to impress him or her into a second date and beyond?

By putting the audition part of dating in advance of meeting in person, here’s what we accomplish:

• No more bad first dates

By gathering the information we need to determine we would like to go on a date with this person, we greatly reduce the likeliness of one or several bad first dates.

• Focus on impressing

We can gather information that will help us create a fun first date that will knock his or her socks off and guarantee a second date or beyond.

• Avoid that awful moment

We can virtually eliminate the awkward and unpleasant task of initiating or hearing a post-first date rejection in person.

So how exactly do we go from shy and awkward to a dating diva or Don Juan? These strategies will be revealed in part two, which comes out Monday!