Senior Love Aging Baby-Boomers Are Changing Their Minds

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CHAPEL HILL (NC) – When older people start dating, they run into many of the same heart-pounding issues as the young, trying to decide when it’s time to talk – and when to make love.

That’s the word from older singles such as Emily Gordon, 73, a Carrboro resident who’s on the dating scene and has started a community conversation about how older people could and should get together.

The conversation is vital: Whether younger people want to hear it or not, at least 20 percent of older adults are sexually active. But these older sex partners also can be at risk in a health-care world that tends to overlook their amorous activities.

On the emotional side, Gordon says, older people she has encountered want most a friend to talk to, then someone to date, and, yes, a partner for something "beyond dating."

"I believe sex is important in a relationship," Chapel Hill resident Wally Friedman, 75, told prospective older daters at a recent public discussion. "But you two will have more verbal intercourse than sexual."

For older people, particularly those who have lost spouses or partners, negotiating the dating world can present an unsettling conflict between long-ago experiences and present-day reality. Gordon, Friedman and Chapel Hill resident Rita Berman – giving advice based on their personal experiences – talked frankly and sometimes explicitly with audience members recently about dating and hooking up.

"Is it unreasonable to ask a man who seeks intimacy to have an AIDS test?" asked one of the audience members who handed up folded questions.

Sure, that’s fine, people said at the discussion at Orange County’s Seymour Center.

According to state health statistics, the questioner was definitely on to something. More than 700 North Carolinians 45 and older contracted HIV in North Carolina last year. They represented nearly 30 percent of the new cases in the state, with the high number of cases in the younger end of that scale reflecting a growing problem.

"If you are thinking about initiating a relationship, there’s a wonderful word called ‘condom,’" Gordon said, adding that a sexually transmitted disease can be especially troublesome for an older person who already has health problems.

Dr. Racquel Daley-Placide, a geriatrician and clinical assistant professor at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine’s Division of Geriatrics, said many older people are poorly informed about how to protect themselves against sexually transmitted diseases.

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May 21, 2009