Cougar Life dating app: older women hookup younger men

The apps and websites for ‘cougar dating’ is a peculiar niche amongst the hookup platforms. To be short, ‘cougar dating’ is a type of relationship between a man and an older woman. In it, a woman is often dominant, and it’s one of the reasons why some men choose this type of relationship over a normal one, however strange it may be. There are tons of apps just for this purpose, but Cougar Life is one of the older and more popular ones. 

Cougar Life doesn’t bring too much of its own into a standard formula of a dating app — it lets you see possible matches at some distance around you, allows you to make your own profile, and makes you pay to use it. One of the few fairly original elements of this dating app is its purpose. As stated above, it’s supposed to bring together men and women of age (not necessarily ‘old’, mind you, but it all depends on your own preferences).

So, it’s not your standard dating website. Moreover, it isn’t a lot like your average hookup website either. On the usual hookup websites/apps, the men generally make the first move. Here, however, the situation may be a little different. Let’s see how Cougar Life operates at all.

How is the app supposed to work?

If what you want is a standard hookup in your area, then this app is not for you. There are numerous other apps and websites that allow you to find a partner for different purposes. In theory, you can find anyone you want here, but a regular search isn’t this website’s strongest suit. 

You can, of course, find people of younger age here — good thing that the local community is big enough for it — but eventually, you will stumble upon someone who wants to do everything for you and care for you as if you were asked out. It often includes choosing the place of the date for you, paying for you, and see you off to your house. That’s how these ‘cougars’ do it.

If it seems disturbing to you, then you should steer clear from this app. If you don’t find anything wrong with it, or if you like this app for some different reason, then let’s delve further and see how to actually get yourself a date here.

Dashboard

When you’ve signed up and logged in, the first thing you’ll see is a dashboard. Currently, there won’t be too much interesting information for you here, but as soon as you start being active on this website, you’ll find this page fairly useful.

Above, you’ll see a first the new arrivals to the app (or website, if that’s the version you’re using), a little bit below there will be those who have been online recently. Certainly, all the people you’ll see here aren’t randomly chosen, they will be put here according to your preferences. 

On your first visit, the possible matches are bound to be around your age and a little bit older, because:

1. That’s what most users seek anyway;
2. There aren’t as many younger women as there are older ones — the average female age on Cougar Life is about 35 or 36

Seeing it may dissuade you from continuing to use this app, but don’t get discouraged that easily. As mentioned, you can choose whom to see in your recommendations. If you do it correctly, you may not even see the older people in your feed. However, that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to use it as a normal app further on.

Your profile

You can jump into looking for ladies right away, sure. But first, you need to set up your very own profile here. It’s very important — not only will you let other people on Cougar know what you look like and what type of person you are — but you will also make it easier for people who prefer men like you to find you.

The general information

What you need to do once you’ve joined any dating app is a summary of your intentions. Cougar has the whole three chapters of your profile dedicated to describing you and your intentions.

The chapters, as follows, are ‘tagline’, ‘about me’ and ‘I’m looking for’. They are pretty important for a successful hookup since it’s the first thing people look at one they’ve found you on search or elsewhere on Cougar. 

You summary

For instance, a tagline is essentially your slogan for this app, you need to put here a general idea of your intentions. In this chapter, you need to put anything you want — but make it brief. If you want, you can write something that will dissuade certain people from messaging you right away.

Then there is an about me chapter. It speaks for itself — put here whatever you please. But, as with the tagline, you need to make it quite short. Even if you don’t, however, it’s fine. They won’t quite your profile if your ‘about me’ page is longer than 4 lines. But if what you want is a quick hookup, you need to make your bio as simple as possible.

Lastly, you’ll need to tell what you’re looking for. Here, you can put a bit more information than in the chapters above. The reason behind it is simple — your visitors will probably find you via your parameters, but to arrange a date they’ll need to weigh the pros and cons and see if what you want from your relationship coincides with what they want from you.

Your Q&A

On your profile page, there will be a subpage called ‘Q&A’. What it consists is a list of your parameters, the very same that people will put in the search filters in hopes of finding someone like you. 

It’s not as much answering the questions as just putting the most valuable physical parameters, including your age, height, body type, ethnicity, location, and less significant, like hair color and eye color. 

There are also options for education and occupation if you want to show these off. However, most of these parameters aren’t mandatory. You can leave certain parts about yourself out of this, but it may somewhat lessen your chances of getting a date. 

If you don’t put anything there, the chances can be even less than if you put something unpopular in, simply because you refuse to tell things about your persona. It doesn’t inspire much trust into visitors.

Settings

The last page to the right will contain all the settings you need to hookup people here according to your own preferences. 

Here, on your left, you’ll see the filters by which your possible matches will be presented to you. There are several standard settings, like the place where you want to look for women (at the start, it’s your own city), the minimum and the maximum ages, and the maximum distance at which you want them to appear.

Extensive settings

There are a few more preferences that not many other dating apps can offer you. For instance, you can find here a few brief categories by which you can filter in more people based on their plans or their status, for instance. There is an ‘is online’ category, a ‘new member’ category, a ‘has photos’ category and a few others. 

No need explaining why they are fairly useful, taking also into account that these are somewhat of a rarity for some reason. 

Additionally, there are also a few personal preferences for you to pick from. You’ll find, for instance, options to pick: body-color, eye color, hair color, ethnicity, and language. The last may very well be one of the most important categories on this page overall. 

The first four options will reduce your search results significantly without too much reason behind it (though, of course, it’s everyone’s own business to use them or not), but the language bar is very important when you’re on a trip and want to successfully hookup one of the local women in the country of your arrival.

It’s sometimes too tedious to figure out if a woman you’ve met online speaks English on a good enough level. It sometimes takes her hours to answer you, and the language she’ll use with you may very well be a product of Google Translate. This category, however, allows you to see who speaks English in your vicinity without spending too much time.

Even more extensive settings

As if the filters above weren’t enough, you can find yourself a partner based on their complexion and height. That’s right, next to everything else, you can set the minimum and the maximum height you want your date to be. 

Furthermore, you can pick one out of seven body types, including ‘athletic’, ‘average’, ‘slim’, and ‘muscular’. Unlike many other elements of this website, this feature is, in fact, very helpful. It would be excellent if other dating apps adopted this, but not many ever did. 

It’s actually one of the reasons to stay here, even if you aren’t interested in these ‘cougars’ everyone’s talking about. There are normal women here, and you can filter them based on your own very extensive preferences. 

The search itself

Once you’ve put in all your preferences, you can start looking for possible matches in your area in several different ways. 

For one, there’s a list of them to the right of your settings column. Here, you’ll see how exactly different preferences affect your matches list. And, for your own comfort, you can sort them by various aspects (like popularity, proximity, etc). 

It’s a bit different than what Tinder or other popular dating apps allow you to do. There, you’ll have to, methodically and slowly, go through tons of probable matches by swiping. It’s a useful method if you want to examine a possible partner thoroughly, but not at all if you want to find someone without spending too much time aimlessly.

In Cougar, all the women that suit your qualification will be displayed in a neat list. Unlike in Tinder, you’ll have to access their profiles separately, by opening another page. It may be considered an outdated setback, but, in fact, it’s nice to once in a while have a dating app that doesn’t employ various types of swiping.

The dashboard is another option if you want to find someone for the evening. The dashboard page allows you, as mentioned, to see who joined the app recently and who has just been here. This page isn’t as useful unless you want less competition than usual. 

What can you do once you’ve found someone

First of all, you can’t do anything unless you’ve bought a subscription to the app. It shouldn’t be surprising, however — every modern dating app gives you a price for its services. You can see and browse through the matches, but you can’t message them. 

Once you’ve paid your due, however, you can do either of the following things:

1. You can message them — start a conversation to see if you can arrange a date soon;
2. You can send a ‘flirt’ — it doesn’t differ too much from the regular messages. You know that it’s supposed to be playful and flirty, and it’s more of a valentine card of sorts — you can send them to the people you like, and they can send one back. Essentially, it’s just a message with extra steps;
3. You can send a gift — the thing that no one really does

Of course, it’s not the only three options you’re given. You can enter any profile at any time and see if its owner is worth spending time with. Be aware, however, that this app is quite open in a way. It’s very hard to hide your activity from others — you can’t make your profile disappear or go offline when you’re obviously browsing the website.

And it will also show if you visit someone’s profile. So, if you keep visiting someone’s personal page, they will know it. And if you’ll keep doing it for some time, they may very well message you and ask what you are up to.

Recent activities

Speaking about seeing who did what recently, once you’ve started being thoroughly active on Cougar, you’ll be able to finally put dashboard to some use, since it’s at the bottom of this page that you can see what other users do in regards to you. Here, you’ll be able to track all the new messages, flirts, and updates on your most messaged matches.

It’s pretty helpful if you can’t keep track of everything that happens with you on Cougar yourself. For instance, if you have too many contacts or if you’re too popular for some reason.

Not to worry, however. It’s not the only place where you can access your conversations and your favorite interlocutors. It’s all on the last we’ve yet not touched — the ‘my messages’ page.

Your messages

As with other dating apps, this one is heavily inspired by the popular messengers, hence the abundance of familiar features when it comes to talking to people. The messages page bar itself will let you know how many new messages you’ve got

But you’ll not only see the recent dialogues you’ve had with different users you’ve got but also other types of activity you undertook. The comment, the flirts, the messages are all here, you can also see the private photos you were given access to.

Additionally, there are two pages that allow you to see all the things you have received from recent to later (inbox), and also all the things you’ve sent to different people (sent). 

This section of the app isn’t exactly your average messenger, it’s frankly more like email. Whether it’s more comfortable to access your messages in this fashion or not is up to you to decide. It’s still fairly easy to keep tabs on what you were doing before and to continue the conversations you’ve put on hold.

The overall simplicity

The same goes for virtually any other part of this app — it’s pretty easy to wrap your head around it. Other apps and websites, like Tinder, Badoo, MeetMe, and so forth can sometimes be confusing. Not only do they almost always adopt the peculiar design ideas, but the features they take from one another are themselves changed so that you can’t figure out where to find your profile or the people you’ve written to recently.

Cougar, on the other hand, is pretty simple. The design of the pages may suffer from the app being too straight-forward (you can see there is a lot of links and bars), making it look pretty old-fashioned. However, it can only affect your experience in a good way. 

The fact, that developers made it obvious where you could find certain features and important information, is commendable. After all, if you want to find a partner without too much effort, you’ll need to do it quick. And in that, the simplicity and the extensiveness of the filters will help you.

Compared to other apps

Of course, you can’t give an app a proper review without comparing it to other apps of similar purpose. As you recall, it’s been done in this article already, in passing. But it’s very important to see if it’s better to use this app instead of its rivals.

It’s fairly important because you can’t use it or even see if you really like it unless you pay for it. And the same goes for virtually any other dating app — they all make you empty your wallet a bit to be able to hookup people on their turf. 

Of course, even before paying up you can see the hints of how comfortable it’ll be for you to hookup someone here. For instance, you get to see what kind of people use the app before you get to interact with them. With Cougar, it’s mostly older ladies who really tend to write to you first. You can see it if you look at their profile, specifically — their taglines and what they want on this app.

The three most valuable parts of a good dating app, as deduced from countless reviews, are:

-How comfortable your search is;

-How quick your search is;

-How many useful features the developers give you for your money

The first two are fairly understandable. If you aim to find company on your numerous trips abroad — you’ll definitely need haste and comfort during your search. Trying over and over again to go through the search process only to find it fruitless afterward is very frustrating. 

Tinder, for instance, allow you to find partners fairly easily — swiping is a very simple concept, and it allows for quick matches (that’s why the majority of the apps use it). But the problem with Tinder is its lack of filters. You can’t find people according to their knowledge of English or interests (both very important).

Cougar, however, is both fast and comfortable in its search. The search page is right next to the filter page — you can put in new categories and see how they affect your search. It’s very satisfying, albeit crude looking. 

The features of Cougar

And Cougar also gives you a fair number of useful features even before you pay up. Sure, you can’t use them properly before you become a full-fledged user, but the fact remains. There are no ‘rewinds’, ‘super-likes’, ‘radars’, and other fairly useless features in Cougar.

The opportunity to properly monitor your messages, search the users properly and see them as they are, not to mention the ability to filter them very extensively, actually pays off much better than what other apps give you for your cash.

In conclusion

Cougar Life isn’t for everyone. It’s a specific dating app for those who want to date the older women, specifically. However, nobody forbids anyone to use it for their own purpose, especially since there are tons of people who aren’t there to hookup these ‘cougars’.

It’s even more tempting to use it as you see fit despite its original purpose when you see how comfortable the searching process is. You can search based on a very long list of preferences and filters. And when you apply a lot of them, it doesn’t make the search harder. Moreover, you can look at the potential matches not one at the time, but all at once. They are arranged in a neat list according to the preferences you chose.

The design and how the things are run on Cougar may look old-fashioned, but it is definitely convenient to look for people on this app, lots more convenient than doing the same thing on most of the popular apps like Badoo, Tinder, and so forth. However, you’ll still need to see how many people of your choice are using this app in your location or the locations you may be visiting in the near future. 

Fortunately, you can still do it without paying. If there aren’t many non-cougar options, then you might consider not buying a full version of this app just yet.

That’s pretty much it for Cougar Life. Hopefully, you’ve learned something new from this review. But if it wasn’t very helpful, maybe you need to look closely at another dating app. Fortunately, there are more app reviews on this very blog. And if you want to know if dating through the apps is even worth it, click on this video to figure it out: