Romance and the Aged

In Florida's Sun City retirement community near Tampa, a street sign warns motorists: DRIVE SLOWLY, GRANDPARENTS PLAYING. They are indeed--in ways that their children can scarcely imagine. In Sun City, as well as in other places across the nation, elderly people in growing numbers are having emotionally close, long-term affairs. Young people prefer to think of their parents and grandparents as old moralists, says Unitarian Minister Richard Boeke of St. Petersburg. In fact, he asserts, many of the aged are still looking for sex and romance.

Like teenagers, old people date and dance. They send scorching glances at each other across the room. They talk about "steadies," and the women grow possessive about "boy friends." In St. Petersburg, Boeke reports that his flock includes two Casanovas of 75. In Sun City, a former model who looks 60 but is 82 boasts of having "the best boy friend in all of Sun City," a man of 72 with whom she has found "a Utopia."

She rhapsodizes: "We dance. We ride bicycles. We go out to dinner. We do everything, just everything." In San Pedro, Calif., Regina Shermerhorn, a white-haired grandmother of 57, is exuberant about her 72-year-old companion, William Hanson. When she met him five years ago, "it was as if I were 17 and had never been on a date. I had never turned anybody on in my life, so far as I knew. Now, all of a sudden, it was Christmas. Believe it or not, we fell in love."

Rather than marry, many elderly men and women pair off in what one geriatric counselor calls "unmarriages of convenience"--relationships established for companionship and sex but never formalized because, as married couples, they would receive less income from Social Security and other retirement benefits than they do by remaining single.

Even in Florida, where informal liaisons between the elderly are becoming accepted, many of the relationships remain clandestine, sometimes to avoid the censure of children. Psychiatrist Theodore Machler of Clearwater, Fla., has had two cases of children asking that their parents be committed to mental institutions because they suddenly moved in with an elderly person of the the opposite sex.

There are other reasons for secrecy. "Some of the men enjoy the teenage bit of living together again and not being married," Mr. Boeke says. "They like having their own secret." In California, Regina Shermerhorn and William Hanson are somewhat discreet about their relationship. "People may say they are free and easy, but they don't really feel free," Shermerhorn explains. She admits to some guilt over her status. "It took me quite a bit of adjusting in the beginning, but you have to get over your hang-ups."

That can be difficult to do. One reason, suggests Martin Berezin, past president of the Boston Society for Geriatric Psychiatry, is that "when old people were young they regarded an old man who was interested in sex as a lecher. So when they're old they're embarrassed by their own continuing needs. What was considered virility at 25 becomes lechery at 65." As a result, says Gene Borowitz, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois, "the elderly often try to suppress their sexual desires." That needlessly impoverishes their lives; according to Masters and Johnson, sexual interest and capacity can persist into the 80s and beyond.

Even the proprietors of nursing homes have begun to acknowledge that fact. "Up until a few years ago," Psychiatrist Berezin says, "an old couple admitted to a home were separated and their sex life cut off. Now they are more and more being allowed to live together." Institutions have also become more tolerant of sexual contact between unmarried residents. That is quite a change from the old days, Berezin says, when "those who wanted sex would have to slip out into the woods like adolescents."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.