gray love Gray Love Stories

About Dating and New Relationships After 60

EDITED BY NAN BAUER-MAGLIN AND DANIEL E. HOOD

“Everything you wanted to know about late-life dating and mating... and then some, from wide-ranging personal accounts.”

—Susan Gubar, author of Late-Life Love: A Memoir

“These are fresh, new voices that give dignity, pathos, humor and warmth to the search for love, or finding love, in the third or fourth quartile of life. This is a book that people of a certain age should read-but also people who will, I hope, reach a certain age-because they should know that love and passion can exist way beyond reproductive years.”

—Pepper Schwartz, author of 50 Great Myths of Human Sexuality, and on air-relationship expert, Married at First Sight

“Cupid’s got a lousy sense of humor. We just keep longing for romance and companionship—even in our nineties. Love’s a drive–like thirst and hunger. And this book shows the yearning (and resignation) among older folks with touching delicacy and exquisite sophistication. It’s a treasure.”

Table of Contents

To Be or Not To Be In A Relationship: Tales of Humor, Disappointment, Rewards, and Personal

Insight

1. Not Jane Eyre’s Story by Susan Ostrov Weisser

2. Discovery through On-line Dating Sites: A Woman’s Perspective by Phyllis Carito

3. Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind by Nan Bauer-Maglin

4. Confessions of an On-Line Dater by Neil Stein

5. Advertisement for Myself by Jonathan Ned Katz

6. What Would I Wear? by Laura Broadwell

7. Something From Everyone by Stephanie M. Brown

8. A (Mostly) Amusing Exercise in Futility by Elizabeth Locke

9. Rick Redux by Candida B. Korman

10. You Say Potato by Amy Rogers

11. Three Dates by Margie Kaplan

12. Dreams and Matches in an Unsure Virtual World by Alice F. Freed

13. In Transition, Not Seeking For Now by Hedva Lewittes

14. “Do You Get It Yet?” by Rett Zabriskie

15. On the Road by Irvin Peckham

16. Dark Clouds and Silver Linings by William Wiesner

17. An Octogenarian’s Adventures in Online Dating by Natasha Josefowitz

18. Coping with COVID-19 by Phyllis Bogen

19. It’s Valentine’s Day. So What! by Erica Manfred

20. What’s Sex Got To Do With It? by Judith Ugelow Blak

21. Gray Love En Noir: African American Women Flying Solo by Choice and by Chance by Linda Wright Moore

22. Passion and Prejudice by Jean Y. Leung

Part II. The Complications and Pleasures of Elder Relationships

23. Checking a Different Box by Jan Jacobson

24. Weume by Stephanie Speer and David Levy

25. Begin Again? by Sandi Goldie and Jim Bronson

26. The Wizard of Algo by Vincent Valenti

27. Date, Marry, Repeat by Stacey Parkins Millett

28. Late in the Dating Game: Walked, Homered, Fouled Out by Eugene Roth

29. Matchmaker, Matchmaker! by Isabel Hill

30. A Cozy, Crowded Bed by Nan Bauer-Maglin

31. Our Bench and Other Late Life Wonders by Doris Friedensohn and Paul Lauter

32. Love after 70 and 80 by Susan O’Malley

33. Where Is This Going? by Barbara Abercrombie

34. Pleasures and Complications: Living Apart Together by Susan Bickley

35. Parallel Matches by Anonymous

36. Reflections on “Old Love” by Sarah Dunn

37. A Vine of Roses by Mimi Schwartz

38. From Texas to Ohio by Bonnie Fails

39. ‘Til Illness Do Us Part? by Angela Page

40. What Remains Has Just Begun by Tierl Thompson and Idris Walters

41. At Once by Dustin Beall Smith Notes on Contributors

Dr. Helen Fisher, Chief Science Advisor to Match.com, author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray

“An inspiring collection of personal stories from individuals seeking emotional and physical relationships in their later years. Their honest, insightful, and poignant narratives are a worthwhile additionto age studies.”

Ellyn Lem, author of Gray Matters: Finding Meaning in the Stories of Later Life

Gray Love narrates stories about the most common themes— searching for and (perhaps) finding love. Forty-five men and women between ages 60 and 94 from diverse backgrounds talk about dating, starting or ending a relationship, embracing life alone or enjoying a partnered one. The longing for connection as old age encroaches is palpable here, with more and more senior singles searching online.

NAN BAUER-MAGLIN is Professor Emerita at the City University of New York. She has published eight collections (six with coeditors) on topics such as step-families, retirement, feminism, death, dying and choice, and older parenting. Her latest book is Widows’ Words: Women Write on the Experience of Grief, The First Year, The Long Haul, and Everything In Between (Rutgers University Press).

DANIEL E. HOOD is a retired professor of sociology. He taught at several New York metro area schools for four decades. His latest book is Redemption and Recovery: Parallels of Religion and Science in Addiction Treatment. His memoir essay, “Better Late Than Never,” was recently published in Tick Tock: Essays on