About MidlifeInsider

Who this is for

The reader here is somewhere between forty and sixty. They are often divorced, often widowed, often a parent, and often coming back to dating after a gap of ten years or more. Most sites in this category are written for people in their twenties and say so by accident, in the assumptions they make about how you meet someone, what you want from it, and how much time you have.

There is no single topic here. Three situations are covered because they are usually the same person: dating after forty or fifty, dating after a divorce or a bereavement, and dating when you have children. Splitting those into three sites would make three sites that each describe half a life.

What is on the site

• App pages. One page for every mainstream dating app, each written from this reader’s point of view rather than copied from an app store listing. What the design is built for and what it assumes about you, what the interface asks of somebody who did not grow up with a phone, and what it does with your time and your privacy.
• The starting over guides. What it is actually like to date again after a long relationship ended, and what has changed in the years since you last did it.
• The guides about children. Time limits, honesty with a new person, custody schedules, and the introduction question, which has a clearer answer than most people want to hear.
• The fraud pages. This is the part that matters most. Adults aged 40 to 69 are the most likely to report losing money to this kind of fraud, and it is the subject most dating sites avoid, because writing about it honestly means admitting that the risk exists.

Who writes it

Everything on this site is published under the name Ruth Calloway, which is a working name used by the people who research and write here rather than the legal name of one person.

That is stated plainly because inventing a biography would be a lie, and a site that lies about its author cannot be trusted about anything else. There is no invented career history, no invented employer, and no invented qualification anywhere on this site. The author page describes what the work covers and how it is researched, and nothing about a personal life that does not exist.

The standards every page is held to

• No claim that anything was tested. There is no test result on this site because no controlled test has been run. What is described is the app as it presents itself to a new user, what its own documentation says, and what the people using it report publicly. The research method is set out in full.
• No prices and no member numbers. Both change constantly and a stale figure is a false figure. Paywalls are described by their structure instead, which does not go stale.
• No verdicts on companies. Criticism stays on product design, which anyone can check by installing the app. Nothing here calls a company a scam, and nothing here accuses a named business of dishonesty.
• Government figures, quoted accurately. Agency reports are citable and dated, so the fraud pages use them and attribute them. Nothing else numeric is invented.
• Corrections, in the open. If a page is wrong, it is fixed and the fix is noted. Apps change, and a site that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.

How the site is paid for

If affiliate links are added here, this site will earn a commission when somebody signs up to an app after following one. That is the planned business model, and it is disclosed in full on the affiliate disclosure page. None is live at the time of writing.

What it would not buy is a place in a list or a kinder sentence. No app can pay to be ranked higher, no app can pay to have a weakness left out, and there is no sponsored content on this site. Where an app is a poor fit for this reader, the page says so, and that is the reason the pages are worth reading.

Contact

Corrections, questions and complaints all go to [email protected]. The contact page explains what can be answered and what cannot.