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'Love After 50' Chapter One EXCLUSIVE FREE CHAPTER EXCERPT A comprehensive and intimate guide to finding, keeping, and enjoying love after fifty, the best kind of love there is In this free chapter from Love After 50: Find It, Enjoy It, and Keep It, Francine Russo interviews top experts to tell us how to have the most satisfying relationships of our lives. A free chapter from AARP’s book Love After 50: Find It, Enjoy It, and Keep It by Francine Russo can be accessed online. Find the book here or wherever books are sold. Love After 50 How to Find It, Enjoy It, and Keep It FRANCINE RUSSO Simon & Schuster New York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Copyright © 2021 by Francine Russo AARP is a registered trademark. All rights reserved. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2021 SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected]. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. Limit of Liability/ Disclaimer of Warranty: The author and the publisher have used their best efforts in preparing this book. However, AARP, the author, and the publisher make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. AARP, the author, and the publisher shall not be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. The fact that an organization or website is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that AARP, the author, or the publisher endorse the information the organization or website may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this was written and when it was read. Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui Manufactured in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Russo, Francine, author. Title: Love after 50 : how to find it, enjoy it, and keep it / Francine Russo. Other titles: Love after fifty Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “This ultimate, comprehensive, and intimate guide will help you find and keep love after 50”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020043556 | ISBN 9781982108540 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982108564 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Man-woman relationships. | Interpersonal attraction. | Middle-aged persons. Classification: LCC HQ801 .R926 2021 | DDC 306.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043556 ISBN 978-1-9821-0854-0 ISBN 978-1-9821-0856-4 (ebook) Contents Preface ix Section I Prepare Yourself 1. Do the Headwork 3 2. Identify the Emotional Traits of Your Next Partner 45 Section II Start Dating 3. Master the Mechanics and Manners of Online Dating 65 4. Reconsider Your Automatic Categories 77 5. Date as a Realist: Are Negative Attitudes or Fantasies Sabotaging You? 93 6. Navigate the Emotional Currents of Dating 105 Section III Create a Relationship to Cherish, and Make It Work 7. Try a Relationship 125 8. Rediscover Sex—with a New Partner at a New Time of Life 147 vii viii Contents 9. Live Together or Not, Marry or Not: Create the Relationship You Need 179 10. Deal with the Kids—or Work Around Them 203 11. Meet the Challenges, and Savor Every Moment 227 Acknowledgments 245 Resources 247 Notes 251 Chapter One Do the Headwork ver fifty? You’re in luck. You’ve heard the stories or seen the couples all around you. People who seem far less likely Othan you have found love. My fifty-five-year-old girlfriend just got married, and she hadn’t had a date in ten years. My sixty-six- year-old aunt just moved in with a guy she’s crazy about. My eighty-year- old uncle, who’s been single forever, is madly in love! Now is your time to find the love you’ve always wanted. If you’ve had unfulfilling relationships so far, you’re now poised to find a deeply satisfying one. If you were happily married, you may find an equally wonderful partnership, different but in some ways even better. For some, this will be easy. Others will have to work harder. Even if this does not come easily to you, your age is an advantage. Look at the facts. In study after study, Stanford’s Laura Carstensen and her col- leagues have shown that people your age are more emotionally stable than younger people. You focus more on the positive; you steer away from stress and conflict when you can; you invest your energies in the 3 4 Love After 50 people and things that mean most to you. These changes set you up for a richly rewarding love. Carstensen reckons there’s no better stage of life for finding it. In addition, some life pressures have fallen away. You’re almost certainly free of hands-on child rearing. If you’re working, you’re probably less career-ladder-focused than before. One sixty-four-year- old divorced executive says that until she retired, work and family (an aging mother and a teenage daughter) were her priorities. She’d dated but remained emotionally aloof. She says, “The wonderful relation- ship I’m in now could not have existed even five years ago.” Even if you do have baggage, as Kansas City therapist and mar- riage counselor Mark McGonigle told me, “By now, most folks have mapped out their own psychological terrain. In therapy, they tend to be reflective people trying to learn from their experience. The first half of life is about accumulating. The second half is about getting rid of what you don’t need.” I can’t stress this enough. Now more than ever before, you are primed for a relationship in which you have a greater sense of self and an expanded capacity for intimacy. Getting to this place was harder for me than you might think, given that I’d been in a reasonably good marriage for twenty-two years. Alan and I had married young. He was anxious and neurotic. So was I, as well as desperately needy. We loved each other. We needed each other. We fought about things big and ridiculously small. We had power struggles. We indulged ourselves. In many ways, we were and remained big babies, even after our two daughters were born and grew up, healthy and strong, with some of their parents’ imperfec- tions inevitably part of them. The moment I really began to grow up was the night Alan had a heart attack and died in the hospital. It was six the next morning Do the Headwork 5 when I crept into our girls’ room and told them they weren’t going to school that day: “Daddy died last night.” On that October night in 1993, I was transformed from a wife to a widow and from a mother to a single parent. Parenting took on a passionate and acutely protective edge. I felt driven to shelter my girls from further pain and upheaval, to keep our lives as stable as possible. My responsibilities became heavier because I shouldered them alone. But I had more freedom, too. If I chose to try to make a go of full-time freelance magazine writing, it was my risk to take, and I could and would manage the consequences. But being alone? Without someone to love me and hold me and comfort me? Without someone to share my life? That terrified me. I was forty-six. Would I be alone for the rest of my life? I needed reassurance that I would be with someone again. Six months after we laid Alan in his grave, while I was still reeling with grief, I started meeting people through the precursor to online dating: the personal ads in New York magazine. I never said a word about this to my girls. I wouldn’t inflict that stress on them. The first man I dated offered the romance and passion my stable marriage had lacked. He was right out of the Girls’ Romances comic books I’d devoured at age thirteen. Well, maybe not that handsome. But he was wealthy and piloted a small airplane. On our second date, he parked his car along a deserted Hudson River pier, played Edith Piaf on the car radio, and danced with me! I was a total sucker for this treatment. I’d been craving it all my life. He told me I was amaz- ing and smarter than any woman he’d ever been with. He desired me. He wrote me poems. It was heaven, at least for a couple of months.
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