LOVE AND MARRIAGES IN OLDER PEOPLE: SURVEYS AND FINDINGS
There were some difficulties in having an autumn rather than a spring romance. Unlike the younger lovers, the older people had more trouble deciding whether having sex was right; although the rules today have changed, they grew up with a system of values that said extramarital intercourse is always wrong. In spite of their awkwardness, most decided yes. Sexual involvement tended to develop early and was usually a vital part of the relationship. While couples enjoyed intercourse, they valued other aspects of sexuality just as much - kissing, caressing and cuddling. As one seventy-seven-year-old woman said, "Sex isn't as important when you are older, but in a way you need it more."
Few of these people wanted to get married. The women were especially reluctant, reasoning that making things legal was unnecessary. They did not have the push young people have to make a family or a life together. They also were afraid a trip to the altar would mean being saddled with the vow "in sickness or in health." Many had nursed a husband for months during his final illness. They did not relish the thought of more years spent as nurse to a sick spouse.
To find out what happens when people do take the plunge, marrying a second time after age sixty-five, sociologists at the University of Evansville interviewed a group of recently remarried older couples. These elderly new married - drawn randomly from Evansville, Indiana, city marriage records - were not younger, better educated, or better off financially than the typical older resident of the city. They were dramatically different in health. According to this study, people who get remarried in later life are much less likely to be ill than their contemporaries.
Some of these people remarried soon after being divorced or widowed. But many had lived many years before finding a new mate. The women were most surprised at the turn their lives had taken. Half said they had been sure they would never marry again. Among many reasons given for remarrying, companionship stood out. People married mainly to have someone to travel or do things with; falling in love ranked a distant second. And those female concerns about being a nurse may not be idle fears. The men - not the women - in this study often said they wanted to remarry in part to have someone to take care of them.
These marriages, now all in their second to sixth year, were working out. The couples agreed they were happier than their first ones. They felt their new marriages were better because now they themselves were more mature. And marital happiness came easier at this time of life because the stresses of child rearing and establishing a career were past.
A survey of several thousand Consumers Union subscribers over age fifty also reveals that autumn unions are unusually blissful. Although many of the couples in this large national study were contented, people married less than five years reported the highest conjugal bliss. The only other group that approached them in happiness were the golden anniversary couples. According to this survey, couples who make it to the fifty-year mark tend to be almost as joyous as newly weds.
Finding out what marriage is like after age fifty was a secondary purpose of the Consumers Union survey. The poll was mainly done to study a more shrouded area of life: sex. Every subscriber to Consumer Reports was sent a no-holds-barred, pages-long questionnaire about his or her sexual practices, feelings, and capacities. Respondents voluntarily returned the questionnaires, so those who did participate in this survey are not a random group. They are probably people especially interested in the sexual side of life. Still, the results were a surprise.
Most of us know the idea that sexuality has to die after a certain age is false. But we may feel that getting older means automatically having a much less sexy life. The Consumers Union study showed that this idea is absolutely false. A passionate sex life was flourishing among many of the respondents, including many golden anniversary couples and people with daunting physical impediments to intercourse.
While Kinsey and Masters and Johnson first shed scientific light on our sexual behavior during the 1950s and early 1960s, these pioneering sexologists had little data on sexuality past middle age. Few of their subjects were over fifty. At that time the sexual revolution was just beginning. It was hard to get older people (even men) to mention sex, much less volunteer for a study of it. The Consumers Union poll, two studies done at Duke University in the 1960s and 1970s, and the National Institute on Aging's Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging are almost the only large-scale surveys we have of the sex life of older Americans.
There are no rules about what happens sexually as we age. Some people with little interest in sex in their twenties or thirties find passion after fifty, when maturity loosens their inhibitions or fate presents them with the first love of their life. For others passion and performance burn on as strongly at eighty as at eighteen.
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