Trying to Make Friends After 60? Borrow This Trick from Online Dating

Nearly every woman I work with wants the same thing. She is looking for like-minded women and has no idea where they are.

One of my clients put it to me this way: “Are we all just sitting in our own little globes, wishing for a friend?”

The most useful thing I know about finding your people comes from an online dating profile, which is not where I expected to find it.

What My Friend Told Me About My Dating Profile

After my divorce, I put up a profile on a dating site. A guy friend of mine was on it too and offered to read mine and tell me what a man would make of it.

He told me it was only half written. It described me. But there was nothing in it about who I was looking for.

He said a guy reads your profile and works out whether he checks most of your boxes. If you never say what the boxes are, he has nothing to check.

So I wrote the second half.

Someone who votes the way I do. Someone who only drinks once or twice a week. No drugs. No polyamory, though you do you. Enough education to match my own. Someone who has been married and has children, so he’d understand the life I was living.

Writing down what I wanted in a man felt wonderful. Until then the whole thing had been about whether I was good enough for whoever read it. Now I was the one deciding.

Then I went on dates. There was a photojournalist who covered wars and wrote about people living deep in the Amazon. I dubbed him Indiana Jones. He was, I am sorry to report, a terrible kisser.

Then there was the artist. I arrived at the restaurant and spotted him waiting in a booth. I knew before I even sat down we weren’t a match. But by the time I got home, there was a message from him about how great our connection had been. Were we sitting at the same table?

Every one of those dinners taught me something. Some of what I’d written down mattered more than I thought. And a few things I hadn’t thought to write down turned out to be what I cared about most.

Making Friends in Retirement Is the Same Assignment

It comes down to the same two questions my profile addressed. Who are you now, including how you show up as a friend? And who are you looking for?

Almost all the advice about making friends after 60 is logistics. Join the class. Introduce yourself. All of it assumes the only thing between you and a friend is opportunity.

When we retire, we lose daily contact with our colleagues and find ourselves in need of friends. What we don’t notice is what we’re also getting, which is a fresh start. A chance to build friendships in better ways, without repeating the mistakes we’ve made before.

If you’ve always been the one who organizes everything, you can decide not to be that person this time. If you want to text a couple of times a week and she wants to text daily, you get to say so at the start instead of two years in.

Write Both Halves

The first half is who you are now. It’s tempting to treat that one as settled, and it isn’t. If you spent 30 years introducing yourself by what you did for a living, who you are now is a real question.

It’s the question my free guide, Who Am I Now?, is built around. (You’ll find the link to it at the end.)

The second half is who you’re looking for. It covers more ground than it looks. We all say we want like-minded women, and almost none of us have said out loud what we mean.

Shared values are part of it. So is how she does friendship. Does she take the initiative? Does she listen, or does she only want to be heard?

Until you know, it’s hard to recognize a good match when she’s sitting across the table from you.

Look at What You Bring

Writing the first half means looking at your friendship habits too. Some are worth carrying forward. Others may be ready for retirement.

I work with a woman who is the one everyone wants at the table. She organizes, she drives, she remembers. A friend finally told her what it was costing. She makes everyone feel like they’re her closest person, so they’re all surprised to learn they aren’t.

What she said to me was: “I don’t want to be the ringleader. The camp counselor.”

Before you go looking for your people, decide what you want them to get when they get you.

Someone Has to Go First

This is the most important thing I hope you take away.

If we don’t tell people what’s really going on with us, the friendship stays on the surface. You can have coffee with a woman for three years and still be acquaintances, because neither of you has said anything that felt risky.

Another woman I work with was asked to step down from a volunteer position she held for years. They still wanted her there. She had done the job so well it no longer needed doing. It devastated her.

She could have hidden that. Instead she told two women in the group how much it hurt. Not hinting. She said it was killing her.

One of them put a hand on her shoulder and told her about nearly dying, twice. The other told her they loved her and to stop putting herself down.

Once she admitted the pain, she told me, everything else opened up. She came away feeling genuinely connected to those women.

Depth doesn’t arrive with time. It arrives when somebody goes first.

That willingness is part of who you are, too. If you want friends who talk about what actually matters, you have to be willing to start those conversations.

What I’d Ask You to Try

Take 15 minutes and write both halves.

Start with you. What you value, and which of those you’d want a friend to share. How much time with people leaves you full, and how much leaves you depleted. What you actually like doing. How open you want a friendship to be.

Then the harder part of that half, which is how you want to show up differently so history stops repeating itself. Are you the one who always invites, or the one who waits to be asked? Do you do more for your friends than they do for you? Do you go quiet when things are hard, then reappear once you’re fine? Write down one thing you’d like to do differently this time.

Then the wish list. Be specific. Someone who asks about your life and listens to the answer. Someone who takes her turn, sharing as well as listening. Someone who can talk about something besides the grandchildren and everyone’s health. Someone whose politics don’t make your jaw tighten. Someone who wants to see you about as often as you want to see her.

Nobody sees this but you. It works more like a metal detector at the beach. Once you know what you’re listening for, it beeps when you get close.

The woman who didn’t want to be the camp counselor wrote both halves with me. She started a book club and got specific about who she wanted in it: professional women over 60 who come for a real conversation. She’s meeting people through a painting class too, and a women’s organization, and friends of friends.

She’s making new friends. And she’s doing it as someone who gives a little less than she used to.

Where to Start with Who You Are Now

Years ago, my friend told me my dating profile was only half written. In retirement, the half about who you are now may need rewriting too.

The role that carried your identity for 30 years is gone, and so are most of the people who came with it. Which leaves the question, Who are you now? It’s hard to say what you’re looking for in a friend until you can answer that.

I made a free fillable guide called Who Am I Now? Five reflections to help you work it out: where you are in this transition, which old roles still shape how you show up, what you loved doing when you were eight or nine, how you want to feel in this chapter, and who you’re becoming.

Knowing that changes more than your friendships. It tells you what to say yes to, how to spend an open afternoon, and which parts of your old life you want to carry forward.

One woman told me the guide was like shaking the cobwebs out of her head. Hard to answer, but really helpful.

Start the free Who Am I Now? guide

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Which is harder for you to write, who you are now or who you’re looking for? And what’s one thing you’d put on your wish list for a friend?