Commentary

Below is an excerpt from new book by Abigail Trafford, As Time Goes By, out for Valentine’s Day.

This excerpt also ran as a newspaper column this week in the Washington Post.

Trafford, former health editor of the Washington Post, is the author of two other books. The first, Crazy Time, is about divorce. The second, My Time, is about the extra years of life which baby boomers are expected to live. What do you do with the last third of your life when the last third is expected to be decades, not just some extra years?

She asked. She found answers.

She, however, will keep asking. Baby boomers will need to have a close watch kept on them.

Washington Post

“The symptoms are familiar: the pull in the stomach, the tingling in the arms and lips, the fluttering in the lungs. To meet, to touch, to hold! The obsessive longing — the wild bouts of fantasy! Will you be my Valentine?

“But this time, I was not 16 or 22 or even 30. I was inching toward 60. Falling in love is usually associated with the thunder of hormones and evolution’s goal to produce the next generation — with youth.

“Until it happens again. You’ve got crow’s feet around your eyes, an extra inch or two around your waist. Cupid’s arrow finds its mark. How could this be? You are hardly a teenager. Yet you feel like one. This is what the French call a coup de foudre — a bolt of lightning — out of the blue: BAM! And at your age! History has a few names for you: dirty old man . . . merry widow. The social grapevine gets to work. Adult children get worried — and protective. Has Mom lost it? Is Dad being taken for a ride?

“Longevity is opening up a whole new culture of romantic adventures. There is more opportunity for older men and women to pursue different kinds of relationships and to rekindle the spark in a long marriage now that the kids are raised. There is time to review old loves, to fall in love anew. Coupled or single, you ponder the role of romance in your life. The classic coup is overpowering, ecstatic — and temporary. It can metamorphose into attachment, stumble into friendship, turn into hate or simply dissipate. (My coup eventually faded.) According to studies by the late psychologist Dorothy Tennov at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, the high-wire infatuation phase usually lasts from about 18 months to three years. But whether the crush is over in a few months or launches a 50-year relationship, the experience stays with you forever.”

Source: Washington Post, My Time, February 10, 2009