Senior FriendFinder is another site in the humongous FriendFinder network. If you've joined any others of their sites before, you'll feel right at home. The setup is exactly the same.
Here, standard (non-paying) members can do very little, not even view profiles. But they can chat, and it appears to me that the chatrooms are the center of life here. Annoyingly, there’s no way to “whisper” in chat. You can use FriendFinder's instant messenger program, but you have to download it, and then get it working (where I failed). I fell back to good old reliable Yahoo.
Also, I know it’s better security-wise, but all the FriendFinder sites make you enter your user/pass every single time, and if you have as sucky a memory as I do, it’s a pain in the ass.
First, I interviewed D.C., a 50-year-old hetero man in Calgary, Canada, who has a member for 1.5
years. He says, “I was looking for a diversion. Someone to chat with, someone to tell my
troubles to, and maybe find someone into cybersex, someone around my own age who didn't care that I had a spare tire. [DD: And did you find someone for cybersex?] Actually, yes I did, not once but many times. The site in all is pretty good." [DD: I notice you're pretty young to be on a seniors' site.] "No, I’m not a senior, but I have fun chatting here. A lot of the ladies here are in their 50s and early 60s, so we get along, and getting to know what one likes and doesn't is fun.” Knowing that D.C. is married (says so right in his profile), I asked him if his wife knows that he spends time on SFF. “Yes, my wife knows I'm here, but she does not know about the cybersex.”
His only complaint about the site was that he believed standard members should be able to view the profiles of people in their friendship network. But as a standard (i.e. non-paying) member, he’s probably not going to have much pull over there at AFF.
Then I interviewed E.B., a 54-year-old hetero woman in OH. She says, “I was looking for something else on the computer and the ad just popped up. I went on there primarily to do a little investigation of online dating for people over 50." And then she got sucked in. How far in? "I’m on the site usually from eight to ten hours a day. I’ve met some very interesting people in the chatroom.” She tells me that the chatroom is generally used for light conversation, and when people are interested in each other and want to get more serious, they take their interaction to the phone or to email. [DD: How is SFF different from other dating sites?] "The rules are different. On a lot of chat sites you can swear, berate people--that doesn’t happen at SFF. They learn how to successfully reword things.” She also says that SFF organizes big get-togethers, usually at a hotel in Las Vegas.
E.B. has a long-distance lover (she refers to herself as his cyber-wife), whom she met on the site, but since he’s married, they are keeping quiet about their involvement, even among other site members. She says the two people who had an inkling about it already started giving her a hard time. “There’s a group of women who insist that nobody married should be on the website. But with 280,000 people on the site, no one can say they know why people are there. No one should be judgmental. There are a lot of people there who are looking for pen-pals, activity partners, and so on.” E.B. tells me that SFF is an entire sub-culture of its own, with some people having been there for ten to fifteen years.
Seems like a good place if you're over 50 and interested in having fun, but my perception is that there's an inordinate number of cheating husbands on here, perhaps because of the age bracket. So I'm not so sure about the site's usefulness if you're a woman seeking out a guy for yourself. If you've been there, and want to comment, email me! Visit Site
