Jim Lehrer, host of PBS’ Newshour, says:

‘Connie Goldman is on to something. It’s called life …’

Connie is a former host of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Before joining National Public Radio, she worked at Minnesota Public Radio in Saint Paul. In 1983, she formed her own production company in Santa Monica, California. Much of her work at Connie Goldman Productions has focused on exploring the positive aspects of aging in a culture that seems to be obsessed with ‘staying young.’ She has written five books, including Late Life Love, The Gifts of Caregiving, The Ageless Spirit, Secrets of Becoming a Late Bloomer, and Tending the Earth, Mending the Spirit. With Valentines Day upon us, ‘Changing Aging’ is pleased to bring you this interview with Connie Goldman, and her insights on Late Life Love:What inspired you to write Late Life Love?There was a period of about eight months when people kept telling me about their mother or their grandmother or their dad who (they whispered quietly to me) was having a love affair! Why the astonishment I wondered. I started to think about some of the jokes and remarks I’d heard over the year about “those old people”. I remembered remarks like “aren’t they too old to do that?” or “I’ve never gotten used to the idea of my parents in bed together now that they’re older”. There was another challenge waiting for me in my mission to deal with damaging negative stereotypes about aging. My way of passing along information that share real life stories. Late Life Love€”Romance and New Relationship in the Later Years is a collection of 22 stories that scratches the surface of the variety of relationship newly formed between people in their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Do you feel that love in one’s older years is different than love earlier in life?First let me clarify that in this book I don’t explore relationships that have a long history. Long married couples and their evolving patterns of love, adjustment, change, and all the changes and challenges of such relationship is another book. Your question has me thinking about that. Long marriages might end up being my next project! However, in Late Life Love I looked for couples that met and formed a new relationship in late mid-life and the years beyond. They had dealt with the death of a wife or husband, had a divorce after 40 or 50 years of marriage, or possibly had never married. The next question I’m guessing will be “but what about sex?” Yes, physical love and exchange of deep affection can be different from those wild times when we’re young. My conversations with the couples I spoke with covered the sexual and the physical and each talked as little or as long as they chose to share with me. But you asked about love and much of what they told me was that this new love was special; special in a way that maturity, life experience, accumulated self-knowledge and yes, wisdom were ingredients that contributed to the partnership in a different and unique way. Love in late life means a caring relationship, companionship, appreciation of life and life together in new ways. Some of the couples were wealthy, some had modest retirement incomes, a few I talked with had much less as far as material goods. Maybe the best way to end my answer to this question is to quote the last sentence in the book from the story of Laura and Robert. I think each couple in their own words said something like this:“We have everything we need, and thankfully, we have each other.”Can a person who had an incredibly close relationship with someone for years love fully again after one’s spouse dies?From what I learned in a number of these interviews, yes. The new love doesn’t replace the original partner. Each relationship is deep and meaningful but in different times of one’s life and in different ways. We’re really different people with different needs, different life goals, and wanting different things in a relationship earlier in life. Some I spoke with were actively seeking a new relationship while expecting to live out their remaining days alone. They cherished the memory of their spouse, had adult children and grandchildren to share their lives, their work or hobbies or other connections. They weren’t looking for love. Yet one day, there it was, an unexpected attraction, shared conversation, time spent together, and habit became comfort and comfort turned into deeper feelings of love and commitment. There are often concerns with the feelings of adult children when some see the new partner as a replacement for the lost parent. Yet each couple I spoke with met these situations in their own way and none of them abandoned their new relationship.What were you surprised to learn in your research for Late Life Love?When I would finish the interview with a number of the couples, they’d tell my about their cousin who just got re-married at age 82 or their father who was dating a woman in her mid-70’s who lived next door, or a friend who didn’t plan to marry but was happily living for the past 19 months with a gentleman she met at a local senior center. Did I want to contact them? They’d be happy to connect me.My surprise was what I’ve now come to accept as how things really are. Older couples are coming together, planning how they’re going to live, separately or together, married or not, linked by a wedding ring and a legal wedding ceremony, a spiritual commitment ceremony or simply sharing a life in their own special way. There’s no one pattern. As older people mate up they plan their own road map for their lives together. Why should I have been surprised? I’m doing the same thing!You began a relationship in your 70’s. What have you learned from your own Late Life Love?I was one of those long single women, divorced many years ago. I had a career, my children were grown, married, on their own, I had friends all over the country, and my life was interesting, busy and fun. I wasn’t looking for a relationship. Then I ran into an old friend who had lost his wife a number of years earlier. It was so comfortable to be with him. It was a unique experience for me to slow down and just be with someone. Our friendship grew into a love I never expected, a caring connection that satisfied something in me that I wasn’t aware that I needed until it woke up inside of me. I deeply care for this man; I respect him, admire him, and love him. A special love that’s just for him. The years of my late life are richer for having this commitment. I was lucky to have the opportunity to find my late life love.Do you feel relationships in older life take on a greater sense of urgency or have a faster pace because life is closer to the end than the beginning?When I connected with the man I now live with we had a long distance relationship. He lived near the Twin Cities and I resided at that time in Los Angeles. We would take vacations together and visit each other in the cities we each lived in. It was romantic and fun. Then one day we talked about our deeper commitment to one another and we realized that for us, both in our 70’s that the geography no longer worked for us. I come originally from Minneapolis although I haven’t lived there since 1975 but my daughter lives there, I have family in the area and Minnesota was always “home in my heart”. So the decision was easy. I made the move back. That was the right decision for us. I don’t think as you had asked that I’d call it a sense of urgency or that we moved together faster than a young couple in love who wanted to be together who might feel a sense of urgency. I guess we’re among those people in the later years who are realistic about the number of years behind us and the possible number of years ahead in our lives, and we wanted to live each day we had left together, not apart. I know every older couple looks at how they’re going to work out in their own way the particulars of sharing a life. Some couples in my book keep their lives in separate houses or apartments and move their relationship from one to the other depending on their particular plans.Two couples I spoke with live in different countries (specifically in my interviews one partner in Canada, the other in the US) and they prefer it that way. As I said earlier. each couple designs their own arrangement and they feel free to do that. They’re adults you know!What stereotypes of love in later life should just be thrown away?In my opinion negative stereotypes continue to pervade our thinking about older persons. For many individuals, including the media and the advertising and marketing industry, much of what we hear and read is that the way to grow old is to stay young. 60 is the new 30. In that frame of mind someone wrinkled, gray-haired, walking slowly or stooped over doesn’t fit with craving physical contact and affection, experiencing deep love and caring for a new person in their lives. We’ve got some un-learning to do in our culture before we can accept the reality that new relationship in later life is part of the beautiful reality of aging. Happy Valentine’s Day!