Where to meet available men near you
Photo by Jenifer Morris Photography
Q: For those of us women who would prefer to meet people in real life, where do men of a certain age go? I’m very active and go to lots of things with friends, but we never meet single men. There’s a Meetup group in my city that has happy hours for singles 50-plus. They’re really fun — but 80% women. —Margaret, Texas
A: Available older men, where are you? So many inquiring minds — not just Margaret’s — really want to know.
“My girlfriends and I go to the theater or to a baseball game or to some sort of art event,” Michele, who lives in Washington, D.C., told me in the 2020 episode of “Dating While Gray,” my podcast. “There will be five or six of us attractive, intelligent, sophisticated, ‘got-it-going-on’ kind of people, and we will say, ‘Where are our guy counterparts? Where are they?’”
More recently, Anastasia in Maryland asked, “Why don’t men join the kind of exercise activities where women are? I know a lot of great women in my Pilates and pool aerobics classes, and it seems like it would be a positive way to meet.”
OK, women, I promise you: Available older men exist in the wild. But it might not be so obvious because they’re far outnumbered by available older women. In the older dating pool, there are 5 million more single women 50 to 74 then men in that age range. As we grow even older, the ratio becomes even more lopsided.
Like you, Margaret, my photographer friend Jen found Meetup.com groups and other organized activities to be overwhelmingly female. She participated anyway and eventually met her now-husband in a cycling group. They were friends for a while before their relationship turned into something more — which brings me to my long-game lecture.
Participating in activities we enjoy will at least lead to meeting like-spirited people and, hopefully, friends. If romance develops, all the better.
Monica and Don, for example, were both married when they met briefly at work. A few years later, they ran into each other at a yoga studio/gym. Over a five-year period, they became friends. After the yoga studio closed, they lost touch. Two years after that, now-divorced Monica discovered through a Facebook post that Don’s wife had died. She waited a month and then reached out to say if he needed a friend, she was there. Slowly and steadily, new love blossomed.
Back to Meetup.com, which is also an app: A few years after I interviewed Michele, she reached out to tell me about a group in the D.C. area formed by one of her male high school friends. It’s called 51+ Fit, Active, and Social, and it compiles activities for the more than 2,700 members: hiking, biking, kayaking, dancing and attending museum and theater events.
Anastasia told me that while she walks and hikes, arthritis prevents her from playing pickleball — and that’s too bad. Personal experience tells me a lot of older available men are on the courts.
That includes my friend John in Virginia. He squeezes in play time when he’s not at the paint or hardware store to pick up supplies for home-renovation projects. John also attends his university’s alumni club events and tells me his single male friends do, too.
Here are some other places you just might find older available men:
“When the weather is amenable, I hang out in parks, [one of] which abuts a senior center that shows free movies on Monday and Friday afternoons. I also attend many, many NYC cultural events, many of them free.” —Barry in NYC
“Before I met my new partner, I went to hear live music. My wonderful wife died over 15 years ago. I was already involved in the indie music scene because I’ve hosted house concerts since 2004. So after she died, I went to hear music several times a week just to get out of the house. There were often a lot of single people. I got a handful of dates that way, and even dated someone for about eight months. Going to local music venues can be a great way to meet people, especially smaller venues like music cafés or smaller clubs as well as house concerts, all places where people hang out and talk before and after.” —Ryan, Maryland
Laura Stassi is host of the podcast “Dating While Gray: The Grown-Up’s Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships” and author of Romance Redux: Finding Love in Your Later Years. Send your questions to Laura at newloveafter50@gmail.com.
