Love Offers New Lease On Old Life
The save-your-life wife often becomes a necessity for men after 60. Older men without wives are much more vulnerable to illness, depression and death than widowed or divorced women.
Representative national samples show that men without wives in the 45 to 64 age-group - whether widowed, single or divorced - suffer almost twice the rate of depression as married men.
Furthermore, on a variety of psychological and physiological measurements, men who have recently lost their wives are at risk of suffering marked deterioration in physical health. Men are much more likely than women to follow their spouses into the grave in the first six months to a year after they are alone. Social scientists have finally concluded that the men, having lost their sole confidantes, actually die of grief.
Even the eternal prince of the Playboy magazine empire renounced his vows to hold out for the single life once he had crossed the line into his 60s. It took a year of depression followed by a mild stroke to reverse the lifelong credo of professional hedonist Hugh Hefner. At the age of 62 Hefner asked a 24-year-old model to be Mrs. Playboy, acknowledging “the sense of mortality has changed my life.”
One of the curiously repeating stories I hear from both men and women interviewees in their 50s and 60s and even older is how they reconnect, usually accidentally, with old flames. And then what fireworks!
Consider the story of Dr. William Masters, the male half of the most renowned couple of sex experts in the world, Masters and Johnson. Dr. Masters and Virginia Johnson were in the process of getting an amicable divorce when I met him at age 77.
During our formal interview his eyes fixed me with a fishy stare, and he spoke in icy, staccato bursts. His Parkinson’s disease was not noticeable, but he walked with a cane and complained about multiple operations on his foot and a long wait for an artificial knee. Once the interview on male menopause was over, I said, “I hear you’re planning to remarry.”
Suddenly his froggy stare softened, and with no prompting Dr. Masters launched into a heartfelt tale of rediscovering his lost love - after 55 years! He had courted Geraldine while he was a poor young medical student at the University of Rochester. When his love came to town to have a breast biopsy, the young swain decided, “She had to have two dozen roses.” Nothing less would do. He could find only half a dozen roses in the whole town. “So I took a plane to New York to get another dozen and a half and flew back and gave them to the night nurse. Visiting hours were over. That’s how much I loved her.”
The next day his love went back home and shortly thereafter married a big man on campus. “I was heartbroken. Why? I never knew. I carried a torch for her for 55 years!” He then described the heart-stopping accident. One day he had stepped onto an elevator in Montreal just as his long-lost love was stepping off.
“My heart almost broke with joy. We recognized each other immediately. I said, ‘What happened that day in Rochester, 55 years ago?’ She looked sad. ‘You didn’t care enough to come to see me in the hospital,”’ she said. Geraldine had never received his roses.
“The chemistry was there instantly for me, and I think for her, too.” He pulled out a picture of his love. “I look like an old codger, but she - she looks 45; she’s beautiful!” As we left the restaurant, the old man with limp and cane straightened up. Six months later he married Geraldine Baker Oliver.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate