Seniors take to online dating

Young people don't have an exclusive on online dating. Some older people I know who shall remain nameless (Dad) have looked for and found dates online too. Sometimes they are seeking "short-term relationships" which to me, sounds like they only want to use someone for their body, but seniors are probably thinking more along the romantic line. Who knows. Here's a little story for you to peruse.

More seniors using Internet dating services to find love , and
skipping remarriage

By Frank Greve
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Murray Katz, 82, a retired senior federal patent-appeals
examiner, has made a transition that lies ahead for millions of
Americans.

"When I was growing up, I didn't see women who were in their 60s and
70s as women," he said recently. "Now, it's amazing. The men I know
are all looking at 80-year-old women. They're our friends. We listen
to them. We dance with them. We have sex with them when we can. It's
beyond comprehension."

For many it's unimaginable. But one of the things new under the sun
since Katz was a boy is an 18-year increase in U.S. life expectancy,
much of it spent in healthy retired life.
Those who are living through it spend their time in the traditional
American way: pursuing happiness. And so it is that seniors today
aren't just dating more, they're the fastest-growing users of Internet
dating services and the fastest growing group of cohabiters.

To be sure, older men remain in short supply and millions of widows
decide that meeting one man's needs was enough. A few million more are
ailing beyond caring. Still, there more couples than ever like Eleanor
Robinson and John Kunec.

She's 85, a Scrabble player, poet and table tennis champ whose social
hub is the bustling Holiday Park Senior Center in Wheaton, Md., just
north of Washington. He's 83, fit and friendly, a retired government
accountant. Both are widowed.

As surely as she carries his harmonica in her tote bag and they
finish each other's sentences and watch ballgames together, they're a
couple.

"I never had a relationship such as I have now," confided Robinson, a
Roman Catholic from West Philadelphia who married at 19 and was
widowed 54 years later.

"It's like I'm a kid," she said. "When I'm with him, I'm caring for
him, and when I'm not with him, I'm thinking about him."

Her beau — still a term in their set — had less to say. But Kunec's a
fine harmonica player, and the first tune out of his mouth during the
intermission at a recent senior center dance was a stately rendition
of the old Ray Charles hit "I Can't Stop Loving You."

Nonetheless, the couple maintain separate houses and marriage isn't
in the picture. "The complications wouldn't be worth it," Robinson
explained. "I've limited income that I've decided to share with my
grandchildren and I wouldn't want to interfere with his family."
Multiply this by a million or two, drop the ages by a decade or more,
and you have a more accurate picture of what many seniors are up to
these days, or would like to be.

Longer healthy life expectancy is part of the explanation. There are
also more men around, thanks largely to better drugs and treatments
for diseases that more often afflict men, such as heart disease and
cancers of the prostate, colon and rectum.

Seniors are also richer, their constant-dollar incomes more than
triple what they were in 1960. Sex is hardly out of the question,
thanks to Viagra and its cousins, which about 14 percent of senior men
use, according to an AARP study.

Finding partners is easier, too, the Internet being a superior
resource to barstools or the friends of friends. According to Mark
Brooks, a consultant and newsletter writer who tracks the
Internet-dating industry, the number of seniors joining online dating
services has risen at double-digit rates annually since 2003, the most
of any age group.

But attitude changes are probably the biggest factor in the expanding
social lives of seniors.

A generation ago, romance among the elderly was widely derided, said
Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist who's studied
dating among older adults.

"Falling in love at an elderly age was seen as somewhere between
unwise and dementia," she said. In the parlance of the day, only
"dirty old men" pursued sex. Cohabitation was not just low-class, as
the term "shacking up" implied, it was morally "living in sin."

Today, the elderly find remarriage fraught with headaches: It
threatens some pensions. It alarms children worried about
inheritances. It comes with love-testing anxiety about liability for a
new spouse's future health costs. So remarriage rates among seniors
are flat.

Instead, Schwartz said, "People who wouldn't have let their daughters
into the house if they were cohabiting are now doing the same thing."
According to Susan Brown, a demographer at Bowling Green State
University in Ohio, cohabiting among older people increased 50 percent
from 2000 to 2006, based on census figures.
The total — 1.8 million — counts only couples who live together full
time and were willing to admit it to census interviewers. Part-time
cohabiting — traveling together, sharing a summer house, spending
weekends together — is up at least as sharply, according to seniors
and people who work with them.

Does anyone in their age group disapprove?
"Maybe in the red states," sniffed Eve Jacobs, 87, of Friendship
Heights, Md., a labor demographer who still publishes in the field.
Opposition is more likely from children whose widowed parents are
newly in love, said Joanne Wilder, a Pittsburgh lawyer and the editor
of the Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.
"Many of them take a pretty dim view of this behavior," she said, and
their parents know it. "Matrimonial lawyers see a lot of people
looking for ways to break things to the kids," Wilder continued.
"They'll say, 'My daughter will kill me!' or 'They really like her,
but I don't think they'd like it if we got married.' "

Consequently, prenuptial agreements are much discussed at poolside in
adult communities. "They make it safe for his kids to like you," said
Linda Stevens, 70, of Arlington, Va.