Past the “Perfect Kind of Age”? Styling Selves and Relationships in Over-50s Dating Advertisements

Dating ads are a revealing site for analyzing age-identity negotiations. Through a distributional survey and qualitative analyses of older people's ads, this paper shows how advertisers respond to, and negotiate, normative constraints on their communicative task in this genre. Older people's dating ads tend to express restrained, modest, and nonsexual relational goals. Their references to age often are mitigated. Appearance is given less emphasis and is represented less evaluatively than in text written by younger advertisers. However, several instances stretch the boundaries of the dating ad genre. They find ways to comment on, and sometimes undermine, the ageist assumptions that restrict older people's relational and lifestyle ambitions.