In Love, Again, Eve Pell beautifully and thoughtfully concludes that life experience adds dimensions to the art of connection - and that we all stand to learn something from unexpected romance. How do old people meet new loves? Eve Pell was 68 when she convinced a friend to set her up with Sam Hirabayashi. Ten years her senior, Sam, a fellow runner, was handsome and sweet. Soon Eve and Sam were plunged into a giddy romance that began with a movie date. "It was crazy," Pell writes. "It was wonderful."
Pell wrote about their romance in a New York Times Modern Love column and received a wave of responses from people who recognized their own stories in hers. This thing, this late-in-life love: It's growing, it's everywhere, and it's transformative. In staggering numbers, old people are meeting and falling in love - in senior living facilities, in retirement homes, in bars, in grocery stores, on cruise ships, on the Internet - brazenly, quietly, unexpectedly. People once written off as too old for intimacy are having romances, beginning intense affairs once thought to be for the young.
Part memoir, part journey to a new frontier, Love, Again is illuminating and heartwarming. Speaking with poets and artists, a retired nurse and a retired coach, environmentalists, philanthropists, and teachers - couples whose partners' ages range from 61 to 96 - Pell reports on their relationships, from saying hello to knowing they'd found the one, from blending routines and traditions to overcoming judgments and challenges. These widows, widowers, divorcés, and never-marrieds open up about old love versus young, the thrill of sex, and the looming shadow of mortality. At the core of this book is wisdom: what we all can learn from the experience, regardless of age.
- Fall in love with who someone is now - not who they someday might be.
- Always be honest, but don't feel pressure to share everything.
- And most of all: The heart can continue to expand.