I’ve written both critically, and whimsically about the tradition of relationships between older men and younger women. I’ve cited Hugo Schwyzer’s meditations on such relationships with approval.

This morning around 4:00 AM a less-frequently mentioned issue… one that everyone seems to be aware of but everyone also tends to whistle past the (literal!) graveyard about… came to pass. My mother’s long time relationship with a man nearly two decades her senior ended when he passed away.

They met when she was in her early 70s and he in his later 80s. They became involved some time after his wife, a friend of hers, passed away. They’ve been extremely good friends for more than a decade. He was as smart as she is (quite a feat) and even more full of stories. He was a funny, charming, loyal, and true companion. As his health declined, even though he had admirable care, including nursing- and hospice care in the retirement center they both lived in she spent most of her waking time with him — talking to him, combing his hair, holding his hand, talking and joking with him, reading to him, listening to him, and (since she was a physical therapist before retirement) helping with his physical care. And he deeply appreciated and cared for her.

But now he’s gone. And as she has approximately the same life expectancy he did (late 90s) she’s quite likely to spend the better part of two decades without him.

Anyway, when we speak of relationships we’re so biased towards relative youth we tend to merely romanticize rather than analyze relationships among the very old. Staying in a community that thanks to the confluence of relationship patterns and life expectancy is generally about two-thirds widows of men who’d have tended to have shorter life expectancies even before factoring in their age differences it’s… pretty clearly not the ideal arrangement gendered relationship tradition suggests.

While I would never take away the deep enjoyment my mother and her partner had, nor do I automatically scorn even broad differences in age, I wonder how much loneliness might be avoided if we encouraged our children, should they be inclined to long-term heterosexual relationships, to seek more-literally, and more demographically, age-appropriate ones.