When Love Comes Later in Life

I was about to turn 55 when I met the man who would become my second husband. I thought I would never marry again, then I crossed paths with Daniel (not his real name) on a New York City street 28 years after we’d had a three-month romance. We hadn’t spoken since. Apparently, he stopped and stared at me, but I was looking at the sidewalk and didn’t notice him. 

He sent an email to an address I checked only occasionally, saying he thought he’d seen me on 101^st Street, which surprised him because he’d last heard I lived in Pittsburgh. “I live on 101^st Street now, so I guess it was me,” I responded.  The last I’d heard was that he was married, but I was curious to learn what had happened to him, so I accepted his invitation to have a drink at a Mexican restaurant.

Reunions with old flames can be awkward, if only because old flames have grown, well, older and no longer look the way we remember them or like we believe we still look. Daniel’s hair was mostly gray but he had plenty of it, although it was no longer shoulder length. And he was still lanky, with the same warm smile. When I told him he hadn’t aged much, he said he was glad we hadn’t met six months earlier when he hadn’t looked quite so good. “I’m going through a divorce, and I’ve been losing the weight I gained during my marriage,” he said.  

“Divorce is tough,” I responded, taking in that he was now single.    

We caught up over margaritas. I shared what it was like for me being a single mother with a 17-year-old daughter and he voiced his concerns about his 10-year-old son.  I was relieved that he didn’t talk bitterly about his soon-to-be ex or dwell on why his marriage was ending, which could have turned our reunion into a therapy session.  And I was glad I wasn’t having a drink with someone I’d met online, trying to gauge if he was trustworthy or not. After all, I knew where Daniel had grown up and gone to school, and we still had a few friends in common.  

 “I haven’t talked this much in years,” he said as we walked home together that first night, signaling the loneliness of his marriage.  Before we parted, we agreed to get together again. 

Love that comes later in life is like an unexpected gift: It’s a chance to benefit from the self-knowledge that comes with midlife and use the lessons gleaned from decades of relationships. But later-in-life love is also typically born of loss, of the grief and dislocation that follows divorce or the death of a partner. 

I’d experienced both. 

By the time I re-met Daniel, I’d been divorced for more than a decade after a six-year marriage, which my first husband ended over my wish and his reluctance to have a second child. Before that, when I was 30, my first true love was killed by a drunk driver in a car crash.   

Besides wisdom, later-in-life love (and lovers) invariably come with baggage. 

Delia Ephron, in her memoir “Left on Tenth Street,” described the fear she initially felt when she met her second husband, at 72. She’d been widowed the year before, and suddenly realized that falling in love again meant being vulnerable to loss — again.  “We had a serious conversation about what it meant to start something intense and meaningful at this age. To fall in love now, when death is right there in front of us…. Of course, the minute I expressed my anxieties, and he said it was fine, I relaxed,” she wrote.  

Then there is my friend Karen, who was dumped by her husband of 40 years. At 64, if she met someone new, she was determined to do things differently. On dates, she told men that what she wanted most was not love, but more independence. She’d married her former husband right after college and delayed starting her career until their children were grown. Her new partner might be retired, but Karen is still working at 68. The two share a home but keep their finances separate.  

Nan Bauer-Maglin, a retired English professor, searched online for a partner after her husband of 36 years died when she was in her mid-70s. Ignoring a friend’s advice to dye her gray hair before posting her photo on a dating site, she nevertheless went on eight dates over six months before she met a man who was a widower and a retired professor like herself. When he began to talk about his deceased wife, she wasn’t put off. “I was glad to hear that he’d had a happy marriage — and I wanted to talk about my husband, too,” she says.

As for me, until I began dating Daniel, I didn’t realize how mired I was in my own losses. The death of my fiancé and subsequent divorce had convinced me that I wasn’t meant to have long-lasting love. I needed a long stretch of time to just be with Daniel  before I could trust that he wasn’t going to disappear. Newly separated, he needed time, too.   

In our 50s and then 60s, we now had the time, ironically more than we might have had when we were younger. I was no longer in a race against my biological clock. I wasn’t looking for a provider or for someone to complete me. I was simply happy to be with someone who was thoughtful and generous, who made me laugh and feel appreciated. 

When we became lovers, several weeks after we met for drinks, we rediscovered the chemistry we’d felt in our 20s. But, decades later, we were more confident and felt freer to express our desires. And whatever we lacked in toned bodies, we made up for in the gratitude we felt to be sharing pleasure.           

We’d meet after work for dinner, our time a respite from parenting and work obligations.  Afterward, we’d make our way to his apartment, but as midnight approached, I’d head across town to my place so my daughter wasn’t alone overnight. We kept separate apartments for eight years, rotating between his place and mine.   

Did we sometimes argue? Of course we did.

When Daniel’s divorce settlement dragged on for three years, I worried that as long as he was still feuding with his wife, he couldn’t freely be with me. And when I talked anxiously about my job, my daughter and my mother, he wasn’t always sympathetic. “You’re worrying is driving me crazy,” is what he sometimes said. But when I promised to try and worry less, he said, “No, you have to be yourself.”    

But by the time we decided to live together and, two years later, to marry, we’d been with one another longer than I’d been with either my first husband or my first love, our lives knit tightly. We knew and cared for each other’s children and had become friends with one another’s friends. When I needed brain surgery, he came with me to doctor’s appointments and helped me through a lengthy recovery. We celebrated and supported each other through significant birthdays, job losses and career changes.

And while I sometimes regret that we waited so long before we merged households and formalized our bond, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Our slow pace — a pace we could only adopt later in life — enabled me to savor our romance, trust our constancy and, finally, accept my earlier losses to let new love in.