Prime Time - Jane Fonda [102]
Dr. Gloria Steiner is a friend of mine from Atlanta. When Gloria was fifty, her husband of thirty years told her that he was homosexual and wanted a divorce.
“I’m not at all judgmental—it wasn’t that,” Gloria told me. “I am still very fond of him, I respect him, and I’m glad he still lives close by. But I thought I would be with him forever. There was all that history—lost. That’s what made me sad. The loss. My sense of self before that was entirely different from my sense of self afterward. I was knocked off-kilter and was trying to come back to center. That took a while.”
“How did you do it?” I asked.
“About a year and a half after the divorce, I got into dancing and music. I adore music. Any kind of music. It became my salve and I lost myself in music, dancing.”
“How? Did you go to, like, Arthur Murray’s or—”
“No, no. I just went to a salsa place. I found people who loved to dance and I hung out with them and that made me feel alive.”
“And did you have actual dates?”
“Yes, but not many fix-ups. Mainly, I would go to the symphony and somebody would sit down next to me and we would get to talking, and we would have a common interest and we would go out.”
“So when you went dancing or to the symphony, you’d go alone?”
“A lot of times, yes. That is why I loved living in Atlanta. I never minded being alone. I have a lot of friends getting divorced who just can’t stand being alone. Just the thought of being alone makes them feel as though the whole world is looking at them.”
“I felt exactly that way for two years following the end of my second marriage, as though I were a leper,” I confessed to Gloria. “So for thirteen years you were single and dating?”
“Yes, but the dating part was uncomfortable for me. It was so different after thirty years of being married. And you are searching for your identity. You go out in these situations and you say to yourself, ‘Is this what my identity is now as a single woman? I don’t want this to be my identity. How do I work on a new identity?’ The thing I missed the most of anything about dating were the hugs. Hugs are so important, but once you encourage that, you encourage more than you want. They think you’re asking for the whole kit and caboodle. You can’t just ask for a good hug. So I got my hugs from my kids and got massages for the touching.”
When I met Gloria she was with an attractive man named Scott who I assumed was her husband. I was wrong. She and Scott have been lovers for almost four years, although they’ve known each other for ten or fifteen years. Scott and his wife had moved into Gloria’s building, and they would invite each other over for dinner. When Scott’s wife died of pancreatic cancer, Scott and Gloria got together.
“Do you live together?” I asked her.
“No, I live here on the twelfth floor, and he lives upstairs on the sixteenth.”
“Would you ever want to live with anybody, with your ex-husband or Scott or anyone else, again?”
“You know, I say no … but who knows? I really don’t. We spend a lot of time together, but it’s when we want to be together. It is really nice having your own space.”
“I guess he knows how to hug.”
“Oh, yes. He is wonderful.”
Clearly, getting out and about in situations where you are apt to meet like-minded people, the way Gloria did, is a good idea. So is telling everyone you know, including your children, that you’re looking to date.
Younger women and men who want to meet someone go to bars or clubs. I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that, and I doubt most older women would either . . . or men, for that matter. That is a main reason why online dating has become such an important part of socializing in the Third Act. Frankly, I was stunned when a close friend of mine in Atlanta told me she’d been to a lunch with ten or so female corporate executives and that a number of them were dating or had married men they’d met online. With Internet services such as Match.com, PerfectMatch, and eHarmony, you can find