Prime Time (39 page)

In conclusion, hormone replacement therapy is a very individual matter—as are many of the current sexual-enhancement drugs—so please make sure you have a doctor who is knowledgeable, experienced, and up to date on the newest research when it comes to hormone therapy. And if you are still interested in making sexuality a part of your Third Act, why not consider paying a visit or two to a sex therapist with your partner—just for a little tune-up to your largest sex organ: your brain!

CHAPTER 15

Meeting New People When You’re Looking for Love

Love is everything it’s cracked up to be.… It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

—ERICA JONG

I
N THE NEW WORLD OF SERIOUS LONGEVITY, “TILL DEATH DO US part” has become profoundly challenging. Centuries ago, when that phrase was embedded in the marriage vows, we didn’t live eighty, ninety, even one hundred years. Face it: It is hard to find a mate who is not only right for us in the early, family-building years but still pleasingly appropriate for our middle and autumn decades. As I said in a previous chapter, I am a believer in the value of long-term commitment, but—as is true for many others, too—it hasn’t worked for me. This, then, is a chapter about ways to find new love.

Dr. Gloria Steiner is a friend of mine from Atlanta. When Gloria was fifty, her husband of thirty years told her that he was homosexual and wanted a divorce.

“I’m not at all judgmental—it wasn’t that,” Gloria told me. “I am still very fond of him, I respect him, and I’m glad he still lives close by. But I thought I would be with him forever. There was all that history—lost. That’s what made me sad. The loss. My sense of self before that was entirely different from my sense of self afterward. I was knocked off-kilter and was trying to come back to center. That took a while.”

“How did you do it?” I asked.

“About a year and a half after the divorce, I got into dancing and music. I adore music. Any kind of music. It became my salve and I lost myself in music, dancing.”

“How? Did you go to, like, Arthur Murray’s or—”

“No, no. I just went to a salsa place. I found people who loved to dance and I hung out with them and that made me feel alive.”

“And did you have actual dates?”

“Yes, but not many fix-ups. Mainly, I would go to the symphony and somebody would sit down next to me and we would get to talking, and we would have a common interest and we would go out.”

“So when you went dancing or to the symphony, you’d go alone?”

“A lot of times, yes. That is why I loved living in Atlanta. I never minded being alone. I have a lot of friends getting divorced who just can’t stand being alone. Just the thought of being alone makes them feel as though the whole world is looking at them.”

“I felt exactly that way for two years following the end of my second marriage, as though I were a leper,” I confessed to Gloria. “So for thirteen years you were single and dating?”

“Yes, but the dating part was uncomfortable for me. It was so different after thirty years of being married. And you are searching for your identity. You go out in these situations and you say to yourself, ‘Is this what my identity is now as a single woman? I don’t want this to be my identity. How do I work on a new identity?’ The thing I missed the most of anything about dating were the hugs. Hugs are so important, but once you encourage that, you encourage more than you want. They think you’re asking for the whole kit and caboodle. You can’t just ask for a good hug. So I got my hugs from my kids and got massages for the touching.”

When I met Gloria she was with an attractive man named Scott who I assumed was her husband. I was wrong. She and Scott have been lovers for almost four years, although they’ve known each other for ten or fifteen years. Scott and his wife had moved into Gloria’s building, and they would invite each other over for dinner. When Scott’s wife died of pancreatic cancer, Scott and Gloria got together.

“Do you live together?” I asked her.

“No, I live here on the twelfth floor, and he lives upstairs on the sixteenth.”

“Would you ever want to live with anybody, with your ex-husband or Scott or anyone else, again?”

“You know, I say no … but who knows? I really don’t. We spend a lot of time together, but it’s when we want to be together. It is really nice having your own space.”

“I guess he knows how to hug.”

“Oh, yes. He is wonderful.”

Clearly, getting out and about in situations where you are apt to meet like-minded people, the way Gloria did, is a good idea. So is telling everyone you know, including your children, that you’re looking to date.

Younger women and men who want to meet someone go to bars or clubs. I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that, and I doubt most older women would either . . . or men, for that matter. That is a main reason why online dating has become such an important part of socializing in the Third Act. Frankly, I was stunned when a close friend of mine in Atlanta told me she’d been to a lunch with ten or so female corporate executives and that a number of them were dating or had married men they’d met online. With Internet services such as
Match.com
, PerfectMatch, and eHarmony, you can find out more about someone in a short amount of time because the process makes it so efficient. You can initiate, move things to the next step, or back out, all the while remaining invisible until you want to present yourself.

Mary Madden was sixty-two when I interviewed her in her attractive but not extravagant home in Atlanta. She had been divorced for fifteen years, and though she knew many people in Atlanta, she had never happened to meet anyone to date, nor been introduced to anyone. She had been a technology entrepreneur who started her own business and took it public; she now works with a turnaround firm, where she helps companies facing bankruptcy run more efficiently.

A few years before I met her, at age fifty-nine, Mary had gone on both eHarmony and
Match.com
, using them simultaneously. She explained, “A friend of mine who has her own business went on
Match.com
and met someone she then married. She told me, ‘You are going to have to go through seventeen or eighteen guys. So prepare yourself. It’s like making sales calls.’ She’s a salesperson and she was absolutely right. I corresponded briefly with seventeen men before I met the man I am with now.”

I learned from Mary that to start, you sign up for an account with one or more of the companies. She said they are not expensive and that one, the Right Stuff, is free if you can prove you attended an Ivy League school. Once you have opened the account, you are asked to fill out a questionnaire describing yourself. You may also decide to write an optional essay that goes into more depth about you as a person. For example, what are your likes and dislikes? What do you want out of life? Are exercise and staying fit important? Do you enjoy travel? Do you like spending time with your children and grandchildren … or not? (If a man wants to be with his grandkids every weekend and you don’t like kids, you may not want to waste your time developing a relationship with him.) Are you an avid reader?

Mary told me, “I put down that I read a lot and I listed all the things I read, and one guy sent me a response saying, ‘Well, the last thing I read was my automotive manual. But I am in south Georgia and I am an auto mechanic and I would really like to meet you.’ So, saying no to that one was easy.”

Mary also mentioned that a Jewish friend of hers from Los Angeles who had used JDate, the Jewish dating site, told her that her personal essay was too serious. “So I rewrote it to make it less serious,” Mary said. “I put in that I have been responsible for people all my life and right now I really do not want to be responsible. I just want to have a good time. This is actually what caught the eye of the man I ended up being with. He liked that. He is pretty independent. He doesn’t really want somebody taking care of him. Although we do take care of each other. I get him bananas and little stuff.”

Not all people post a picture. A friend of Mary’s has a business in Atlanta and felt she couldn’t let people know that she was looking to date online, so she never posted a picture of herself. “Yet she ended up meeting a highly placed corporate executive,” Mary told me, “and they have been together the last couple of months.” Since she didn’t share her friend’s concern, Mary did post a photo of herself along with the questionnaire; but after the JDate friend said the photo was also too serious, Mary got a professional portrait taken.

In her book
Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love, and the Sensual Years,
the sociologist Dr. Pepper Schwartz says that you can decide when to post your picture. You can do it right away, or you may want to wait until you feel there are a few men who seem compatible and then ask them if they want to see your photo. “A crisp, clear, recent picture showing your face and body type is the safest, most honest way to proceed. But make sure it shows off your best attributes,” Pepper says. “If you are voluptuous, why waste your time (and the man’s) if he prefers slender, small-breasted women?” Pepper adds, “Likewise, you need to see a clear picture of any guy you are considering meeting. Men in sunglasses, or with blurry pics, or pics that don’t indicate their body type should be avoided.”
¹

If there seems to be an interest on both your parts from the posting and emails, the next step is a phone call to see if the man’s voice and attitude seem right for you. If there’s no phone chemistry, you probably won’t want to extend it into a meeting. Whatever you do, do not give out your phone number. The guy may turn out to be a real pain, and you’d have to change your number to get rid of him.

The man Mary has spent the last two and a half years with never even posted a profile, but he read Mary’s and emailed her out of the blue. “It was interesting,” Mary said, smiling as she remembered. “He said, ‘Reading your profile is like sitting in a movie theater in Connecticut watching
Bull Durham
and being the only one laughing.’ And I am going, ‘This is the weirdest thing I’ve gotten.’ And I don’t know why I answered, but I did. We emailed back and forth for a while, and then we met for a glass of wine and eventually started dating. But I did all these things—like, I called my friends and said, ‘I am meeting this guy for a glass of wine.’ I called when I came back home; I said, ‘I am back home.’ And I think I did the same thing on the second date.”

I asked Mary what they had in common. “He is very cultured,” she replied. “He belongs to the High Museum, he goes to the opera, to the ballet. And, like I said, he’s very independent.”

“And are you planning on getting married?” I asked. Mary explained that he’s been married three times, so no. “But he wants me to live with him. He lives in a condo downtown that he has a mortgage on. I own this house. I love this house. He is not here half the time because he travels all over the world selling agricultural equipment. I keep saying to myself, ‘Why would I want to live in a place I don’t like when he’s not even here?’ I’ve grown to like having my own space.”

I have spoken with a number of women and men who feel it can be good to extend the emailing and phone calling for weeks, even months, so that you really get to know the person before moving to the dating phase. However long you wait, be sure that you feel there is a real potential for compatibility before arranging a meeting. Like Mary, when you do meet, do it in a safe, public place and tell someone what you’re doing and where you will be, and carry a cellphone with you. Don’t commit to spending more than thirty minutes or so the first time. If he’s a dud, you don’t want to get stuck. And, under those circumstances in particular, offer to split the tab with him.

Out of the seventeen men she exchanged emails and phone calls with, Mary met only four of them face-to-face. I asked her if it was clear to her right away that they weren’t right. “Oh yes,” she said. “There was one guy I met twice. He told me he was going to join the Peace Corps, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s got nothing to do with me!’ But he was the only one I met more than once. When I look back on it, I feel like it really wasn’t going to work out with any of those guys.”

“How long did you date the man you’re with before you had sex?”

“Probably about three weeks.”

“And was it hard? I mean, in terms of you having been single for—”

“No, it wasn’t,” Mary said with certainty. “We went to Friday night at the High, where the museum has martinis and a jazz band and you can look at art. Then we went to eat. It was just a very nice evening and … no, it was not hard.”

If and when the time comes that you want to have sex with your new friend, be sure to be prepared with condoms and lubrication. If he resists using a condom, he’s probably not for you.

It can be tough when you think the first date went well but he doesn’t call again. Keep in mind that older men, far more than most older women, are looking for a serious, long-term commitment. “A perfectly nice date may not result in a follow-up if they don’t sense that you are exactly what they are looking for,” cautions Dr. Pepper Schwartz. “A quick rejection doesn’t feel good—but it’s the style of dating these days. People take their best guess right away.… If that’s their decision, there’s nothing to be done about it.… If he’s not calling, he’s not for you.”
²

When and if a relationship does develop, be sure that the two of you have a clear understanding of what each expects out of it: Do you want a completely monogamous commitment, or to continue seeing other people? Do you envision getting together once or twice a month or more regularly but without moving in together? And if he won’t give you a home phone number or allow you to meet his children and friends, beware: He may be married.