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By Eric Spitznagel, AARP, February 2025
Skeptical About Dating Apps at Your Age? These Stories May Change Your Mind
Three older couples prove that you can find true love in the algorithm.
Barbara Norton, 80, didn’t have a lot of hope that she’d fall in love again.
She’s already been married three times. The first ended in divorce; the last two left her widowed. At 79, she was lonely and unsure if she’d ever find another partner.
“Last year, I took a crazy chance and signed up for a dating app,” Barbara says. She opted for Match.com, one of around 1,500 dating sites or apps catering to single adults worldwide.
With names like Bumble, eHarmony, Coffee Meets Bagel and OKCupid, 37 percent of U.S. adults say they’ve used one of these sites to find a partner. But older adults tend to be more cautious. Just 17 percent (or one in six) Americans over 50 say they’ve used a dating site, according to 2023 Pew Research study. Some stay away because they feel dating apps cater to younger generations and endorse hook-up culture. For over half of singles over 50, online dating just doesn’t seem safe. (AARP has covered how to avoid romance scams.)
Barbara was determined to try anyway. So in November 2023, the retired respiratory therapist from San Ramon, California, created an account on Match. “I wasn’t optimistic,” she says. But within just a few weeks, she met Bob Auguste, 87, a widower from Truckee, California, whom she immediately connected with.
They married in August 2024, and according to Barbara, “It turned out to be the best thing that’s ever happened in my life.”
‘You can take it as slow as you want’
In 2003, Candace Leslie Cima was 56 and still mourning the death of her husband a year earlier. “Dating was the last thing on my mind,” she says. “But then one of my best friends sent me a full-page article from USA Today that was all about dating sites, and in the middle of it, she wrote, ‘Time to get on with your life.’”
The now-77-year-old from Ithaca, New York, wasn’t convinced. “My feeling was, if you can't find a date and you have to go on an app, there must be something wrong with you,” she says.
Candace tried anyway, and stumbled onto the profile of Greg Rudgers, just one year younger than her. They exchanged a few emails, and then texts and a few phone calls, but Candace was in no hurry to meet him in person. “It felt scary,” she says. “But the great thing about a dating website is you can take it as slow as you want.”
Greg, now 76, invited her to come see him conduct a symphony at Ithaca College. “I told her, if you don't like what you see, you just walk out,” he says. “I also look better in a tuxedo than a golf shirt and slacks.”
Candace agreed to attend, but soon realized it can be difficult to size up a conductor who spends most of a performance facing the orchestra. “I’m sitting there the entire time thinking, ‘Come on, Greg, turn around!’” she remembers. After the last bow, Candace mustered the courage to walk up and introduce herself.
Greg was blown away by Candace. He was so impressed that he blew off a college professor friend he’d also invited to the concert. “He told me later, ‘You disappeared.’ And I said, ‘Well, did you see her?’ He couldn’t argue with that. ‘Yeah, yeah, you're right.’”
Their first date led to a second, and then a third and fourth. Three years later, in 2006, they got married. And 22 years after that first email exchange, they’re still together. “We couldn’t be happier,” Candace says.
Greg, who’s now a retired music teacher, still believes that the reason they connected on a dating site, and why their relationship continues to thrive, was their honesty. “In my Match profile, I wrote that I was having a perfectly fine, wonderful life, but it’d be nice to have somebody to share it with,” he says. “And that was the truth.”
‘People our age have … a higher level of self-awareness’
Nineteen years ago, a recently widowed Karen Hurwitt had all the perfect excuses for why she shouldn’t try dating again. “I've got this career going, and my kid needs to be shuttled between soccer practices, and I just don't have time,” she says. Although she was just in her mid 30s, Hurwitt was “convinced that I’d never find love again.”
When her girlfriends suggested online dating during a dinner party at her home in Charlotte, Vermont, Karen immediately rejected it. But after a few glasses of wine, her friends lured her to the computer and helped her compose a rough draft for her dating app profile.
When she posted it the next morning, her inbox was flooded with responses. A few dates went nowhere, but then she got a message from Dave Hurwitt, a recent divorcee around her same age, with two young children of his own. “The thing that really won me over was that everything in his email was spelled correctly,” says Karen, who’s now 54. “I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is gorgeous and he knows how to spell?’”
“I should’ve proposed right there and then,” Dave, now 55, quips.
Dave feels like it was easier to write a dating profile as a middle-aged divorcee than when he was 20 years younger. “We have more clarity about who we are and what we’re looking for in a partner,” he says.
“One of the keys is authenticity,” Karen adds. “Don’t try to script something that makes you look more appealing. Just be true to who you are, and that’ll come through.”
Karen agreed to a date after confessing to him that her life was complicated; she was raising a kid alone and still grieving her late husband. “She said, ‘I’ll give you five minutes. And if we don’t feel it, let's just call it a night and go home,’” Dave remembers. “We went out on a Monday night, and three and a half hours later, we were still talking.”
“I had to call the babysitter twice and promise that I wasn't abandoning my child,” Karen recalls with a laugh.
They were married the following year and have been together ever since. In fact, their respective dating app profiles “complemented each other so well that we ended up reprinting them, word for word, in our wedding program,” Dave says.
“It's uncanny how similar our profiles were,” Karen agrees.
‘Don’t stay at home and let life pass you by — take a chance’
Barbara Norton had every reason to give up on dating apps when her account was hacked just weeks after she’d signed up. “Somebody contacted about a hundred men using my picture,” she says with a heavy sigh. It scared her, but the problem was easy enough to fix — she changed her password, and the dating app's reps helped her secure her account — and above all, she “wasn’t going to let the hackers win.”
She’s glad she did. Not long after the hacking incident, she stumbled upon Bob Auguste’s profile. He had an impressive Hollywood track record — he cofounded a company that created a camera stabilizer called the steadicam and won three technical Oscars — but more impressive to Barbara was his profile picture, which included Bob posing with his adult daughter.
“The fact that he had such a close bond with his daughter really attracted me to him,” she says. “I just got the feeling that he was a pretty safe individual.”
They agreed to meet for lunch, and instantly felt not just an attraction but the comfort of a kindred spirit. “I’d lost two husbands, he’d lost a wife, so we both understood the grief that the other person had gone through,” Barbara says. “We had kids that were very similar ages. It was just absolutely perfect.”
Their wedding this past summer was “magical” — a word they both use. It was an outdoor wedding at Bob’s house in Truckee (where they now both live together), and it was also the first time their adult children met each other. Barbara had a hip replacement two months before their nuptials, and she walked down the aisle with crutches, which Bob’s daughters decorated with roses.
They have no intention of slowing down anytime soon. Next month, they’re taking a cruise out of New Orleans, and they’ll visit Hawai‘i in December. For their first anniversary next summer, they’re going to Greenland.
Barbara remains grateful that she took the leap into online dating, despite her reservations. She remembers her time working as a respiratory therapist, where she often met widows or widowers who felt like they’d spend the rest of their lives alone.
“I’d always tell them, don’t give up,” she says. “Don’t let life pass you by. Take a chance. It’s scary out there, but it’s worth it.” She laughs, before turning to Bob and gently squeezing his hand. “I’m glad I took my own advice.”
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