A reader once told me she’d rather get a colonoscopy than open a dating app again. I laughed, because I understood exactly what she meant, and then I told her the thing I tell most people who say some version of the same thing: the app isn’t the hard part. The hard part happened decades before you ever downloaded it.

Let’s be honest about what actually makes dating after 60 feel so much harder than dating at 25. It’s not the technology, although plenty of people blame the technology. It’s that you’re doing it with a fully formed adult life already built around you – routines, a house arranged just so, possibly children who have opinions, and, for many people, the accumulated evidence of one relationship (or several) that didn’t work out. At 25, a bad date is a mildly annoying Tuesday. At 65, it can feel like proof that you’ve somehow missed your window. You haven’t. But I understand why it feels that way.

The work happens before the first date

Dating and relationship coach Debbie Rivers, who has spent eleven years working with singles, makes a point I want you to actually sit with rather than skim past: before you touch a dating app or accept a single set-up, the real work is internal. “You need to look at yourself first, as well as have self-compassion,” she says. Not as a platitude – as an actual sequencing issue. If you go looking for love while still carrying the belief that you’re too old, too set in your ways, or somehow past your usefulness to a partner, you will find a way to prove yourself right. Self-doubt is remarkably good at that.

Love and happiness coach Leisa Q puts a similar idea slightly differently, and I think her framing is the more useful one for anyone who’s spent decades in a long marriage or partnership: “If you have spent most of your adult life in a relationship, it is easy to fall into the trap of doing what makes the other person happy, almost to the point where you no longer know what makes you happy.” That’s not a criticism of long marriages – it’s simply what happens when two people build a life together for thirty or forty years. Rediscovering your own preferences, not your ex-partner’s, not your children’s, is not a self-indulgent detour before dating again. It is, according to both of these experts, the actual precondition for it.

Confidence, not appearance, is the thing that travels

Here’s a fact I wish more people over 60 believed: confidence reads as more attractive than a smooth face or a flat stomach, at every single age, and particularly at this one. Rivers is blunt about it: “None of us look like we used to, everyone is ageing, and people are so much more than how they look.” The person swiping past your profile photo is doing so from inside their own ageing body, harbouring their own private worry about their neck or their knees. Nobody in this dating pool is 28. Everybody already knows that. Stop dating as though you’re the only one who noticed you got older.

What actually works, according to the people who do this for a living

Strip away the platitudes and the advice from Rivers and Leisa Q converges on a few genuinely practical points:

Treat it as a numbers game, not a soulmate lottery. Leisa Q is refreshingly clear that apps and social groups should be seen as “a way of meeting new people for companionship, not as the way they will meet the new love of their life” – the actual romance more often grows out of a wider web of connections those first meetings lead to, rather than arriving fully formed from a single match.

Be honest, particularly about age. Rivers has heard every excuse for a small dishonesty on a profile, and her verdict is consistent: it is nearly always the reason a second date doesn’t happen, not the age itself. “People value honesty,” she says, “and one of the biggest reasons people don’t get a second date is because of small white lies.”

Widen your net. Both experts flag the same statistical trap: on many dating apps, a small fraction of profiles receive the overwhelming majority of interest, leaving everyone else – including plenty of lovely, genuine people – overlooked. A two-dimensional photo tells you very little. Rivers puts it well: swipe past someone’s photo and you might be dismissing “amazing” people you’d have adored in person.

Pursue what actually makes you happy, and let the rest follow. Leisa Q’s closing line on this is the one I’d want stitched into a cushion: “When we learn to be happy on our own and love ourselves, this is when we will naturally draw people into our social sphere that match our vibration. As they say, like attracts like.” Join the thing you actually want to join — not the thing you think will maximise your dating prospects. The people worth meeting tend to be doing the same.

The bottom line

None of this requires you to become someone you’re not, or to pretend the nerves aren’t real – Rivers is careful to point out that “everyone feels nervous about dating, no matter what their age,” which is worth remembering the next time you’re convinced your particular anxiety is somehow age-specific. It isn’t. What changes after 60 isn’t your capacity for love. It’s simply that you’re bringing more self-knowledge to the table than you had the first time around – which, used well, is an advantage, not a disadvantage.

It is never too late. It is, if anything, one of the better times to try.

Have a question for Bess? Write to her at community@startsat60.com with “Dear Bess” in the subject line.