KEY POINTS:
The atmosphere around the dining-room table in Margaret Ruffell and Keith Young's townhouse is warm, a combination of easy familiarity and late-autumn sunshine. The jug boils and conversation flows.
Over a cuppa, opinions and experiences of love are offered and imbibed.
They know nothing of University of Otago
academic Amanda Barusch's new book, Love Stories of Later Life, yet their relationship is not unlike many within those pages.
Together for five years, Margaret, 72, and Keith, 75, have loved and lost and now love again.
It is a scenario also familiar to Les Thomson (79) and Heather Austin (74) who, sipping cups of tea later the same day in Alexandra, agree their love is both fresh and familiar.
They too haven't heard of Barusch's new book, yet some of the academic's key findings resonate nonetheless.
Courtship, pursuit, infatuation, expectation, compatibility, fear, complications, experience and, yes, sex, are just some of the points raised by Barusch who, like Margaret and Keith, Les and Heather, knows a lot about both love and later life.
Head of the University of Otago's department of social work and community development, Barusch's primary focus is in gerontology. Before taking up the post last year, the American spent five years researching the romantic experiences of older adults in the United States, the result of which is the recently released Love Stories of Later Life.
"I was talking to a friend of mine who was in his 50s and he was going through a really unhappy period of life and he said, 'I have never really loved a woman'. That was the moment that I remember thinking, 'we need to look into this'," Barusch said. Her father-in-law was also pivotal to the project.
At the age of 83, having been married for more than 60 years, his wife died. He thought his days of love were over. "It was really sad. So for him to discover there was someone else he could love [he remarried] was pretty amazing."
Keith, whose first marriage lasted 40 years, his second 16 months, "sat around feeling sorry for myself" when his second wife died. "You've got to get out and meet people," he says. He saw a notice advertising old-time dances in Alexandra. Inspired, he bought some new clothes. The investment paid off. Margaret recalls seeing Keith walk on to the dance floor and thinking, "he's quite nice". She asked him to dance.
"It just went from there," Keith recalls, adding it took him three phone calls to convince Margaret to go out on a date.
Infatuation tops the list of Barusch's surprise findings.
Most people think intense crushes, which manifest themselves in emotional roller-coasters, obsessive thoughts about the lover, loss of appetite, sleep changes, and sexual attraction, are reserved for the young. Quite the contrary.
Barusch observed these in older adults up to their early 80s.
"I didn't expect that," he admits. "To find that people were experiencing infatuation at such advanced ages ... I actually struggled with it."
"Neither of us probably thought about having a partner again, but you meet someone and [think] 'why not?"', says Heather, whose husband of 49 years died in 2004, three months after the death of the couple's only daughter.
"That was a rotten year ... you've got to get on with your life. You've got too much of your life left."
Les, whose wife died in 2001, recalls the couple's courtship was relatively brief. He and Heather are diabetics; having shared a car to weekly health meetings, Les asked Heather to join him on a drive to Tarras. "It sort of carried on from there," Heather says. A month later and the couple were living together.
Keith and Margaret insist shared interests, such as dancing (yes, they still go regularly), walking and travelling around the country in their modern caravan, are the glue that holds them fast to one another. As our interview winds down, the dregs of tea are drained.
The biscuits proffered earlier remain untouched, yet Margaret offers better crumbs. "It's a different kind of love, I think, to what it was years ago. You've got to have adventures."
- OTAGO DAILY TIMES
