Dear Clueless: The Audition Doesn’t Have to Feel Like One

Question: I’m so over dating apps and the disappointment they bring. I’m now a young 68 but have tried them at different stages of my life…. It would be nice to have that “someone” to enjoy the special parts of life, but am so nervous about the audition part of it. Clueless.

Dear Clueless,

“The audition part of it.” I want to start there, because it’s the truest four words I’ve read in a while, and I don’t think you should breeze past your own line without me making you sit with it for a second. You’ve named something most people your age feel but rarely say out loud: that dating after 60 doesn’t feel like meeting someone. It feels like performing for someone. Sitting across a table, doing your best impression of an interesting, easygoing, well-adjusted person, while quietly wondering whether you’re passing or failing a test nobody agreed to give you.

No wonder you’re exhausted. You’ve been auditioning, on and off, for decades.

Let’s be honest about what dating apps actually do to that feeling, because I don’t think they invented it, but they’ve certainly made it worse. An app turns a person into a profile, a profile into a swipe, and a swipe into a verdict rendered in about one and a half seconds by a stranger who knows nothing about you beyond four photos and a bio you agonised over for an hour. That is not how anyone builds genuine connection. It’s how you build low-grade rejection fatigue, dressed up as a numbers game. Of course you’re over it. I’d be worried about you if you weren’t.

Here’s what I actually want to say to you, though, because sympathy alone isn’t much use to a person who’s asked for help.

You are not nervous about dating. You’re nervous about auditioning, and those are two entirely different things, even though they’ve become tangled together for you. Dating, at its best, is two people getting curious about each other. Auditioning is one person trying to prove their worth to a panel. If every date has started to feel like the second thing, it’s worth asking honestly whether the apps themselves are the problem, rather than dating in general – because a well-designed matching algorithm optimised for quick decisions is, almost by definition, an audition machine. It rewards a good headshot and a punchy bio over the qualities that actually make someone worth loving at 68: steadiness, humour that reveals itself slowly, the particular way someone listens.

So my first, most practical suggestion is this: stop auditioning in rooms built for auditions. If apps have become synonymous with performance and disappointment for you, it’s entirely reasonable to step away from them for a while, not as a failure, but as a redirection. The people who find genuine connection later in life overwhelmingly find it through repeated, ordinary contact – a class you attend weekly, a volunteering shift, a walking group, a friend of a friend you keep bumping into. None of that requires you to compress yourself into a profile or perform your best self in the first ninety seconds. It lets someone get to know you the slow, unglamorous, considerably more human way, which is also, not coincidentally, the way that tends to actually last.

And if you do go back to the apps one day, because sometimes we do, try shifting what “success” even means while you’re on them. Not a relationship. Not even a second date. Just: did I have one honest conversation today. That’s a target you can hit regardless of outcome, and it quietly strips the audition energy out of the whole exercise, because you’re no longer measuring yourself against whether you were chosen.

One more thing, and then I’ll let you go. You used the word “someone” in your letter with a kind of wistfulness I recognise – someone to enjoy the special parts of life with. I don’t think that wish is naive, and I don’t think 68 has any bearing on whether it’s still available to you. But I’d gently push back on the idea that finding them requires you to keep auditioning until one panel finally says yes. It requires you to keep showing up, as exactly who you already are, in rooms where being that person is enough. That’s a very different, much kinder task than the one you’ve been exhausting yourself with.

You’re not clueless. You’re just tired of trying out for a part you never needed to read for in the first place.

Warmly,
Bess

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