Good evening, Queens. I'm about to start dating again after three years of glorious voluntary celibacy, and I'm wondering: would I be doing myself a disservice by skipping OLD altogether?

Or would I be saving myself a lot of exasperation?

On one hand, I'm in no hurry, and I've found that meeting guys in real life makes it easier to vet them AND easier to get asked on real dates without having to spell out my expectations. Like, if you chat with someone for ten minutes at the farmer's market or the library or something, the next logical default step is "so hey, do you want to go to dinner/to the art gallery/to XYZ event?" They can't screw it up unless they try. There is no farmer's market-->"hey u up wyd haha" pipeline.

On the other hand, I live in a small town. Literally all the men here seem to be honorable and respectable, but they're also way older, not very well-read, and pretty meh-looking.

(There are younger guys than the farmers, but they fall into one of two categories. The local Crossfit guys are very good-looking, very fit, and desperately insecure and RPish in a contrived, unnatural way. Like, you can tell they're faking their aLpHa vibes and reading straight from the playbook. The local Toastmasters guys tend to be very earnest, try-hard, recently divorced middle-management types who want to explain Bitcoin to me in a very simplistic manner and who want a Girl Friday bang-accountant in their lives to "whip them into shape", read as "do their admin work for free and prepare snacks and suck their mediocre middle-management dicks." )

I'm super-good at real life, but I'm afraid of online dating. It sounds overwhelmingly un-fun. I don't want to limit my dating pool to pleasant 40-something farmers (not that I wouldn't love a pleasant 40-something farmer who's okay financially, reads books, and lifts weights), but to be honest, I think I'd suck at OLD. I'm objectively great-looking and in really good shape, but I'm also 36. I don't like the things that signify "fun" on OLD; I like books, gardening, sculpting, hiking, studying folklore and obscure sociocultural shit, and....well, a lot of other mommish solitary hobbies. I don't know the cliche OLD tropes to avoid (I'm learning, though!). Basically, I'm afraid I'd attract three tyoes of dudes: milf porn aficionados, extremely LV older M who can't even pretend to aspire to 22-year-old cuties, and pedantic dorks like Nathan the Knowledgemaster, Lorde of the Bookes (and also of sad polyamory).

Bottom line: should I craft an OLD profile, start hanging out in the closest big city, or both? Anyone got any general tips for phrasing OLD stuff?