WHAT ?? No confused wording like "Agnostic Atheist"? "Spiritual"?

@twill

No confusing choices on Fitness Singles:

Agnostic
Atheist
Bhai
Catholic
Christian
Christian, Orthodox
Christian, Other
Jewish
Mormon
Muslim/Islam
Protestant
Scientologist
Spiritual, but not religious
Other
Rather not say.

@LiterateHiker They left a few out....but I'll be damned if I know what they are !

Sorry to hear that. I hope you are proven wrong. We all deserve love, at least those of us that are not wicked... Besides your high standards, I suspect that where you live is also a strongly negative factor in finding a compatible partner. Iowa is not much better, but ND has to be worse for that.

@TomMcGiverin Thanks. ND is very black (religious) so I long ago accepted the great likelihood of living my remaining years alone. Those worth my time. . . Still have a mother living in town and see her almost every day (I fix things and she provides food and a how are you doing? (very nice)) and I have one friend in town that I talk to on the phone every once and a while but at current age/health demographics, I anticipate spending a few decades with only myself and possibly a few distant (more then just miles) I talk to (respond to comments such as this) on this website.

I have encountered a quality mind that exceeds my standards on this website but replies and likes have gone dark so I am back to the reality of living each day without a prospect of sharing life with an equivalent or better mind.

Lots of hobbies and projects to keep me busy till the last days so. . . ~sarcastic~ life is good.

@NoMagicCookie I can relate. I hope things improve, for both of us..

Best advice on this post!

@Redheadedgammy Thank you!

Nothing more attractive to women than a recognized hero.

@TomMcGiverin I was also a stunning looking young man then too. We fell in love at first sight and stayed with me for the remaining 25 years of her life.
Now I'm here hoping to bump into another enlightened lady, but so far no practical success, but I have at least communicated to some wonderful people who are sadly too far away for romance.

@Sofabeast Same with me as far as Agostic.com. Met some cool women on here, but they all live at least several hundred miles away. I'm not willing to date LD or move and neither are they. So it's pretty hopeless in that sense.

I have a married friend who goes to a lot of meetings like that around here. He used to keep pushing me to go with him so I could meet women, but after a while even he started to realize the meetings usually had very few women there, mainly sausage fests, and the women who were there were usually coupled with a guy that was with them there.

Same thing with a grief support group I attended for several months after I was widowed, mainly to see if there were any women worth meeting, since my wife had dementia for several years before she died, so I had already done most of my grieving by then. When the group had its monthly gathering at a restaurant to socialize, I quickly realized that almost everyone there was already coupled up, along with the fact that almost all the people there were older than my dating age group. So I gave up on that too and quit attending. Dating over 50 really amounts to going out and doing the research, like I did, on the different ways of meeting people. After a year or so of research, it became clear that the best and most efficient way to meet single women my age would be dating sites, of which Match was the best. Your mileage may vary depending on where you live and what your dating age group is.

Just out of curiosity, which dating site did you use? I've tried Match and Our Time and neither one seems to have many non-believers in my age group. It also seems like most of the women my age from my area on there want a fellow believer. Of course, I'm an older generation than you and I live in Bible Belt Iowa while you live in liberal, blue, Washington state.

I agree that older adults are more willing to come out of the closet and identify as non-believers. When you're young there's more personal desire to fit in and go with the flow socially with the rest of your age group. People tend to be more secure about who they are and willing to buck the flow when they are older and have a support network already in place.

@TomMcGiverin I used seniorpeoplemeet.com .

I was a bit young to be on a senior site (I was 35 at the time). But I liked it better than any of the other sites. (I had NO luck on the well-known sites, BTW.) Of course there were some pushy jerks (despite popular myth, this condition is not limited by age).

Again, though, I can't promise you a positive experience. As with any other dating site, men outnumber women.

@TomMcGiverin Interesting. Did it work in the other direction as well? That is, was my profile on SeniorPeople also displayed on Our Time?

Not that it matters, I suppose....that was some years back. I met my husband there, and cancelled my membership after our second date.

@AmyTheBruce I think it went both ways. That's impressive that you knew after only two dates that he was the one for you. You're more decisive than most people. In my experience with online dating, timing ends up being extremely important, at least for men, because normally the men do all the pursuing and initial messaging in the dating game. And it also appears that most women do not want to do parallel dating, which is dating, or continuing to see more than one man at a time. Most women seem to want to meet multiple men at one time, then settle on just one man to see again for another time or two to help them decide whether to keep seeing them exclusively or instead open themselves back up to seeing and meeting other men. So, if a man initially messages a woman after she has already had first meetings with several men and already decided to see one or two of them another time to decide if they are a keeper or not, that man doing his initial message to her has probably already missed the bus for good. The woman by then will probably have already decided to ignore any new prospects messaging her, and instead is focused on choosing among her current pool of prospects that she has already traded messages with. She may decide later that none of her current pool are keepers and is now ready to go back to square one and look at new prospects that are messaging her.

But that doesn't happen very often, I suspect, and even when it does, the men whose messages have been gathering dust will probably have moved on or given up on the idea of messaging her with a confirmation that they are still interested in her.

But by then, the newer guy in the competition has a message that's been sitting in her inbox for at least a week or maybe a few weeks that she's hasn't bothered to read. Does anyone honestly think she is going to read these dated messages and bother to respond to them on the assumption that the guys are still available and interested in meeting her? Probably not, because doing so would put her more into the position of being a pursuer, which most women avoid like the plague, as it risks rejection and gives up their privilege of being the decider while the guys message her and she sits back to choose. I have had many women confirm that this is how it usually plays out and that they will not respond to an old initial message from a guy that messaged her while she was actively going on dates and in the middle of her screening and dating process. And one more issue that is compounding the dilemma that guys are put in, is that if they guy chooses to follow up on his initial message to the woman, which came too late to make it into her initial group of prospects of which she made her initial cut of who to meet and who to reject, is that if he sends her a follow up message, say a week or a couple weeks later to say he is still interested in hearing from her, then he risks looking needy or desperate. It's a no win situation either way if you miss the initial screening period.

So, for a man who is pursuing, you had better be one of the first guys messaging a woman on a dating site once she joins or resumes being active on the site after taking a break from meeting new men and dating from the site, or you will be ignored and left in the dust. Does anyone have any alternative views on this, esp. women who have been in the sorting process of meeting the initial crop of guys that message them and make their initial cut of who they choose to meet and try dating one or a couple of them to decide whether to keep going out with them or reject the whole bunch and start over with new prospects?

@Lind Unfortunately for me, I've found that "always being there for someone" has meant no one is there for me. Funny how that works. If it ever works differently, I might have found that partner I've always wanted. But for now, I've reached that point where being alone is far better than being with the wrong person.

@Normanbites Being alone IS far better than being with someone who is wrong for you. I have found that I am the happiest when I am not in an emotional relationship with anyone. Be happy.