Seniors swipe right: Florida’s over-60s community try online dating

Herbert Caplan may be 93, but he has learned a thing or two about online dating.

The retired government worker from Delray Beach knows what he wants and knows what to look for. His first question to a potential date: “Is the pic correct?”

Caplan has met too many women who posted photos of themselves when they were younger. He wants someone who is in her 70s or older and does not use a walker or a cane.

The Richmond, Virginia, native and grandfather of four sees himself as a desirable commodity. After all, he still drives at night.

“I’ll find someone, don’t worry,” he said.

South Florida residents age 60 and older have plunged into the online dating world, and the apps are noticing.

Most recently, Chapter2, a dating service for widows and widowers founded in Great Britain, launched in July in Florida, where the site says 6.61% of residents have lost a spouse. And party entrepreneur Andy Rudnick of Boca Raton debuted another new dating site, JEWZZ, in April. It’s available for singles age “18 to 99.”

These new entrants join an assortment of dating sites that South Florida seniors say they are using, some with success, some with exasperation.

The websites and apps ask participants to share traits such as height, marital status, educational level and religion before allowing communication with potential partners. Some sites offer free memberships; paid sites charge fees ranging from less than $10 to $80 a month, with services such as compatibility quizzes, a certain number of matches per day, and texting within the app.

Once they sign on through the app or website, challenges await. Some seniors find the technology confounding. Caplan and several others said they had trouble loading their photos for their profiles, while Virginia Eastwood-Egan, 75, of Highland Beach, said she was unable to change her password.

Marc Weiss, 64, said he had no trouble navigating through Bumble, where he met Michelle Bormann, 60, three years ago. Bormann, a teacher from Hallandale Beach, and Weiss, who lived in Boca Raton at the time, were both divorced and looking for a partner close to their age. They matched in June 2021 and moved in together to Bormann’s condo earlier this year.

“At the beginning, the distance was a challenge, but we both knew there was something there,” said Weiss, the southeast administrative director of the Jewish National Fund-USA. They are now engaged.

But not every online dater can share a success story. Eastwood-Egan tried Bumble but closed down her account after a few years.

“You go through periods of wanting to meet people and periods when it’s not that important,” said Eastwood-Egan, a retired entertainer. “Some of the men are talking to five or six people at a time, then send an excuse and disappear.”

GIVING IT A TRY

These seniors have entered a world that did not exist when they were growing up. It didn’t even exist 30 years ago: Match.com was created in 1995 and is believed to be the first online dating website.

Now, one of six Americans age 50 and older say they have tried online dating, according to a 2023 report from the Pew Research Center.

The younger they are, the more likely they are to give the sites a try: 23% of men and women in their 50s say they have explored online dating. That shrinks to 14% of adults in their 60s and 12% in their 70s and older.

The quality of the online experiences splits by sex. Older women are the most likely to say they had a negative experience, according to Pew.

The negative experiences can be a turnoff to maintaining their accounts. About 45% of men and women say they experienced unwanted behaviors from fellow online daters, such as someone sending sexually explicit content, continuing to contact them after they said to stop or trying to take advantage of them.

Karen Cohen, 78, of Boca Raton, who asked that her maiden name be used for this story to protect her identity, has experienced this attempted scamming.

“In Florida, they lie, they cheat, they want your money,” said Cohen, a native New Yorker and widow for 28 years. “You have to have your guard up. You have to be very savvy. They’re nice to you and then you find out they’re married or have a girlfriend.”

Cohen said she met several men she liked on sites such as Match and SilverSingles, dating one man for six years and another for eight. Right now, she’s “taking a bit of a hiatus,” saying she needs a break from the pressure to find a mate.

In Florida, many women have tried to meet fellow singles in their local communities but quickly became aware of an imbalance: There are so many more women of their age cohort than men. That’s mostly because women live longer. In the United States, life expectancy among men is 74.8, compared with 80.2 for women, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The U.S. Census reported in 2022 that there were 708,005 women age 65 to 69 in Florida, compared with 615,979 men. At age 85 and older, the difference is similarly stark: 349,721 women and 223,293 men.

WHAT TO KNOW BEFORE SETTING UP AN ACCOUNT

Karyn Rosenberg, a grief therapist in Boca Raton, said many of her clients who are widowed or divorced see this imbalance in their neighborhoods and wonder whether to begin dating online.

Here are some key points she shares with them:

Make sure you are emotionally ready. “Know that dating is not a replacement for the spouse you lost,” she said. And get ready to be vulnerable. “There’s a lot of anxiety and trepidation about plunging in,” she said. “Figure out what it means to disclose details about yourself.”

Take precautions. Don’t share your address or financial information on the website or app. And “when you’re ready to meet in person, meet in a public place,” she said.

Have a child or grandchild or young friend help to create your account and monitor it. “Some seniors get nervous because they are not computer-savvy,” she said. “If adult children can assist the set-up process, it can alleviate some of the anxiety.”

‘VERY GRATEFUL’

The daughter of Janet Wexler, 85, a widow from Boca Raton, helped her establish her Match account three years ago. She had been using it only a week when she heard from Sam Schleider, a Delray Beach Holocaust survivor.

They had their first date at a luncheonette at Schleider’s condo community, accompanied by his aide. They have been dating ever since. He’s 87 and a retired business owner and cancer survivor who still visits local schools to tell the story of his family’s journey from Poland to Italy to the United States.

They see each other a few times a week, and Schleider sleeps over at Wexler’s place twice a week. Wexler said the couple would never have met if it weren’t for online dating.

“He calls me every single morning,” she said. “We’re both very grateful to have each other.”