So I’m about to turn 37, I left my last relationship a good 2

5 years ago (because he wasn’t ready to settle down and I was), and have been dating– mostly online – ever since, to no avail.

If anyone has them, would you be happy to share your stories of meeting people after 35 (or hey, even after 37!), how you met and how it went? Or stories perhaps of it *not* working out, and how you felt, and what you went on to do that might have been fulfilling in another way. It would be fantastic to read them – thank you!

It was 5 years ago next month. I was 36 and had never been on a date in my entire life (at least one I recognized while the date was occurring, rather than slapping my forehead afterwards). She was someone I knew from a small local activist group; I’d always enjoyed talking to her, but we were both shy, introverted types. We started communicating outside the group after she reached out to me on social media when I posted about returning to my apartment after a massive natural disaster. We started meeting, and spent the summer meeting up in pubs, talking, going to lecture on brutalist architecture, rafting; neither of us was sure if this was friends or something more. (I brought up kids in a fairly early meeting and was relieved when we were on the same page.) After a few months, I finally screwed up the courage to ask „Is this a date? Because I’d like it to be.”

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Two hours ago, UPS delivered the ring I’m using in our wedding. posted by Homeboy Trouble at 2:44 PM on [61 favorites]

We were dating within a few weeks,

My husband was 37 when he met me; I was 33. We met long ago at college, then met again playing pub trivia. We were on rival teams, then his team dissolved and he joined our team. I finally got to ask him where I knew him from, and that’s when we put together how we’d met before. Our son was born in summer 2014.

Also, especially if you went on to have a baby

We met playing trivia because I started a Meetup group for playing trivia. This was soon after my divorce in 2009. This Meetup thing was not immediately successful, but I stuck with it. After months (and months and months) of Hard Work: sticking my neck out, persistently scheduling Meetups, friending relative strangers on Facebook, inviting people I barely knew to happy hours, trying not to feel ego-destroyed when they didn’t reciprocate, just moving on to the next person who might, and oh by the way did I mention I’m an introvert? It was Hard Work. But a group of people coalesced around trivia- a small group of 30-something single people. Playing trivia gave us an opportunity to get to know each other without too much pressure, and that gelled our friendship. Soon we were meeting up for other things, then inviting everyone over for movie nights, and later we started playing D&D together. We all became friends.Then one night, one of these people invited a coworker to play with us, who was awesome. Then, months later, the second person invited this other coworker to play with us because he needed a new team as his last team had dissolved. And that’s how I met my husband (the second time). Because of people who knew people who knew people. And it was because of my hard work that we came together in the first place- because I worked really hard at not just meeting potential dates, but meeting new people in general. We are all still friends, though some of us have moved away and others have married and all that. The Hard Work was good for me, of course. I came out stronger for it, because now I use the same tactics to meet new parent friends. posted by aabbbiee at 3:01 PM on [14 favorites]