The Secret to Finding Love After 60

"At the end of life, what really matters is not what we bought, but what we built. Not what we got, but what we shared. Not our competence, but our character. Not our success, but our significance. Live a life that matters. Live a life of love." ––Unknown

Finding love is difficult at any age. But for men and women over 60, it requires navigating unique challenges and decisions.

Linnet Hultin and Angus Davis, both 75, are in the thick of them. She lives in Truro, Mass., with a daughter and grandchildren nearby. He lives a six-hour drive away, in Johnson, Vt. The distance has been wearing on both of them over the two years they have been dating. Their solution after lengthy deliberations: She will move to Vermont but also try to rent a townhouse in or near Truro so she doesn’t have to uproot entirely.

“I’m a nester and home means everything to me,” she says. After being divorced for 20 years and learning to do her home repairs, “It’s challenging to give up some of my independence.”

These days, late love is getting a lot of attention, thanks to “The Golden Bachelor,” an ABC-TV series that follows Gerry Turner, a 72-year-old widower, as he searches for a new wife. The show also features 22 women in their 60s and 70s, all seemingly fit and wrinkle-free, who are competing for his heart. One rides a motorcycle to her first date with Turner; another is wearing a skin-colored mini-dress.

Nobody said reality TV was anything like reality. But what is real is that there are a lot of older people searching for somebody—a companion at least, a soul mate at best. About 30% of Americans over 50 are single, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center Report, and record numbers of them are pairing up. One in six Americans over 50 has used a dating app, according to Pew.  

Longer lifespans mean that whether they’re widowed or divorced, or have never before been attached, older singles may have years ahead of them for new relationships. What’s more, because of a surge in gray divorces, there’s a larger pool of older singles. Some 38% of divorces today occur among couples over 50, and one in 10 for those over 65, says Susan Brown, a sociology professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who studies demographic shifts in marriage and families.

For many of these people, late love offers the chance for deep happiness as they age—to find a connection they might have once had but lost because of death or divorce or never found before. But it’s also a chance to do things better, to learn the lessons from a lifetime of past relationships. At this age, they also know what they want and need, far more than when they were young.

“They can walk into new relationships with their eyes wide open and use what they have learned,” says Jacqueline Olds, a Boston-based psychiatrist. “And they’re less likely to compare their relationships to romantic fantasies.”

Tough Questions

That’s the good news for older singles. But jumping back into dating also requires a lot of risk-taking and a willingness to tackle difficult questions.

How do older couples fit romance into lives already filled with children, grandchildren, work, and old friends? How do they learn about someone else’s history, and share their own? Having weathered a divorce or the death of a spouse, can they risk loss again? Can they have love without marriage and will they live apart or together? Do they want to be retired or keep working—and will they accept a partner with a different preference? What about health issues? Are they willing to be one another’s caregivers? And will they share finances or keep them separate?

For older women, the challenges can be especially tough. Those who have already juggled child rearing and caring for spouses with careers often don’t want to get stuck in traditional gender roles again. They want more emotional and financial equality and partners they can be friends and lovers with, says Boston University sociologist Deborah Carr, who has studied re-partnered couples.    

Older women also contend with a shrinking dating pool, since men typically date younger women and have shorter lifespans. Roughly half of women over 65 are without partners, compared with 21% of men.

For both women and men, the biggest challenge is balancing the longing for new intimacy with the need for familiarity, says Richard S. Schwartz, a Boston-based psychiatrist and Olds’s husband. “It’s hard to start a whole new life with someone when you’ve already lived a lot of your life and are set in your ways. It takes a big commitment,” he says.

Hard, but far from impossible. To improve the chances for success, experts say, couples must go in with their eyes open, eager to find love but aware of the challenges. Accepting those challenges, and talking about them, is perhaps the best way to make sure they won’t get in the way of finding the love they want.

To that end, here are seven facets of late love that couples should anticipate—and discuss with potential partners.

1. Expect Baggage

No one enjoys dating someone who endlessly eulogizes, or denigrates, a former spouse. But older singles have long histories that have shaped them and need to be understood for a late love relationship to thrive. That’s threatening to some people who feel competitive with a partner’s past loves.

Richard Goldsmith, a widower and retired lawyer from West Orange, N.J., dated one woman who refused to come to his home because he had shared it for many years with his wife. He had a different experience with Tina Greenberg, a widow and retired communications professional he met through a friend three years ago. They shared memories of their spouses and decadeslong marriages but didn’t get mired in the past.

Last year, when Greenberg, 75, moved in with Goldsmith, 81, they blended furnishings and belongings. “I added a picture to two that were already in the dining room, and I can feel Barbara’s spirit in this house—and I like that,” says Greenberg of Goldsmith’s now-deceased wife. And talking frankly about their late spouses has helped them shape what they want together. “I wanted more independence than I used to have and not always doing everything together,” says Goldsmith.

2. Get Comfortable with Online Dating

It’s true: It isn’t how people met 20 years ago, let alone 40. Back then, they met dates through friends, or at church, parties, school, and work. Because of that, some older singles find searching for dates online impersonal, or exhausting because of the many choices. It can also be technologically challenging.

But the fact is that meeting online has surpassed all other ways to find romantic partners, and may be especially useful for retired seniors with diminished social circles.

Nan Bauer-Maglin, a retired English professor at the City University of New York and a writer and editor, sought advice from friends when she went online after she was widowed seven years ago. Although she didn’t listen to one friend who told her to dye her gray hair before posting a photo, she followed another’s counsel to date at least seven men before getting discouraged, and to only meet those who had at least a 90% match with her profile. It took her several months and nine tries before she met Daniel Hood, a retired sociology professor. They’re now romantic partners and work colleagues who’ve coedited “Gray Love,” a book of essays about dating after 60.

3. Be Open to Nontraditional Relationships

Cohabitation rates among couples over 50 more than quadrupled from 2000 to 2020, while marriage rates in that age group are steady, says Bowling Green’s Brown. “Older couples are innovators, leading the changes occurring in American families,” she says.

Others are forming “living apart together” or LAT relationships. Bauer-Maglin and Hood are LATs who’ve kept their separate apartments in New York City and regularly see one another twice a week. For both, it’s a way to keep their romance fresh and free of conflict and remain in the homes they’re attached to.

“I’m very tidy and he’s messy and this way we don’t fight about that little stuff,” Bauer-Maglin says. “We keep the time we spend together special.”

4. Make Sure You’re on the Same Page About Your Children

Adult children may be living on their own but they’re rarely out of mind and can pose conflicts. Many adult children worry that their aging mother or father will be mistreated by a romantic partner, or that the inheritance they expect to get will be depleted. Older couples themselves often differ about parenting and grandparenting styles, how much time they want to spend with one another’s children, and whether they want to try to blend their families, especially on holidays or vacations.

Stefanie Weiss, now 65, had just rented an apartment in Silver Spring, Md., with her new boyfriend when her son and his girlfriend moved in for a year after graduating from college. Their two bedrooms were separated by just a wall. Could they all get along together? she wondered.

For Frank Gallagher, now her husband, the answer was yes. Now 68, he had been single for years and had no children “but I knew Stefanie came as a package with her son,” he says. The eldest of seven brothers, he knew how to get along in a crowded home, but he also got to know his young roommates. And before marrying Stefanie in 2017, he asked her son’s permission.

“I wanted him to be OK with our marriage, and to know that, even though I’m not his dad,” Gallagher says. “I want to offer him unconditional support.”

5. Plan How You Want to Deal with Finances

Older couples often decide to keep their finances separate—and not get married—because they want their children and grandchildren to inherit their estates. Others simply want autonomy, especially if they have struggled to build wealth after a divorce. If they’re living together, though, they need to plan how they want to handle living expenses. If one person has significantly more wealth, will he or she pay for travel, for instance, or redecorating a home?

Expectations about finances are bound to change over time and should be regularly reviewed. Couples who’ve been together for years may expect to be included in partners’ wills—and may need whatever inheritance they receive to support themselves in old age.

Financial disputes also may arise if couples split up. Boston psychiatrist Olds consulted with one woman who’d left a job and moved cross-country to be with her partner, but several years later split up with him. “She felt she sacrificed so much financially to be together and wanted a settlement,” says Olds.

6. Be Honest About Health Issues and Care Giving

Aging invariably leads to frailty and illnesses, which raises the question of how much caregiving you’re willing to provide. Those with “living apart together” arrangements usually expect their partners’ adult children to be the primary caregivers. Others want to be one another’s caregivers. Consider Hultin and Davis, the couple in Massachusetts and Vermont. Hultin has Parkinson’s disease and Davis has non-Hodgkin lymphoma. They have vowed to provide care to one another and for now, don’t want to let their illnesses limit the travel plans they have.

Stacey Parkins Millett and her husband, Kurt Ross, in Candler, N.C. They married last year after meeting on a dating app. Photo: Mike Belleme for The Wall Street Journal

7. Be Open to the Unexpected

When you’re young, you expect to fall in love, marry, and start a family. By the time you have wrinkles and gray hair, you may think you’re too old to attract or find anyone. Older singles who thought they’d be aging alone say the discovery that they can feel passionate again came as a surprise. But their willingness to be surprised enabled them to fall in love.

In Silver Spring, Md., Weiss says she likely would have overlooked Gallagher in her 20s because “he’s not the dashing bad boy” type she used to find appealing.

Similarly, Stacey Parkins Millett, 68, a writer and retired manager at nonprofits, says she might not have recognized her strong fit with Kurt Ross, 71 when she was younger. During her marriage and for more than a decade after she divorced and dated sporadically, she says she “fell into a pattern of being the consummate fixer,” and often ignored her own needs. After a lot of self-reflection and with the help of a dating coach, she decided she would be better off alone than with someone “not quite right.”

Millett defined her “must haves, won’t haves, and deal breakers,” posted her profile online—and 10 months later met Ross, a ceramic artist and retired architect. They talked nonstop for hours on their first date, soon started living together in homes in New York and Candler, N.C., and married last year. 

“The fundamentals of passion and friendship—and teamwork and independence—favor us,” says Millett, a marathon runner. “I need alone time to run, he needs alone time to read. We support one another’s creative pursuits and agree calls from our adult children take precedence over everything. My journey here took 50 years—but the beauty of time has been unearthing who and what I’ve wanted.”