Ask Mary Mary Kenny
Dating agencies and websites, putting love before one’s offspring, and the rights and wrongs of gay parenting
Q WE have a dear friend, a fit seventy-year-old, who is now on her own after losing her husband from dementia after fifty years of marriage. Her children are both living abroad.
She has gone from ‘I will never have/ want another partner’ to ‘perhaps I should consider a dating agency because I am lonely and all my friends are couples’.
My long-ago experience of agencies is that they provided an excellent means of finding sexual partners. Do you know whether there are any ‘respectable’ organisations helping older people to find companionship, please?
Bob Maggs, Bristol
A I know this subject interests many readers, and I’ve been asking around, among those who have some experience. One seasoned counsellor says she never gives advice about particular agencies, even the most reputable, because things can always go wrong, and then the advice-giver gets the blame. However, I have had positive feedback from people who have used the Times, Daily Telegraph and Guardian soulmates columns. Deborah Moggach, the 67-year-old author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, met her husband via Guardian Soulmates. ‘It wasn’t especially for old people at all, but one found them simply by saying how ancient one was oneself, then an equally ancient bloke responded,’ she says. ‘Trouble is – an awful lot of old men like younger women, shame on them! But I persevered.’ Internet sites are always a possibility if you know how to navigate shrewdly: Charlotte Cory, art curator and scriptwriter, met her current husband, a mathematics professor, via a web contact and it’s worked out well. But some of the internet sites do not meet with the criterion of ‘respectability’, so caveat emptor. The veteran agony aunt Irma Kurtz always says that you should never embark on a relationship with anyone ‘you haven’t smelt’ – the chemistry of real, one-to-one interaction being a key to compatibility. I still believe there’s a lot to be said for joining clubs and associations where you encounter people. (Military history attracts older men, and it’s a jolly interesting subject anyway.) Oldie contributor and bellelettriste Valerie Grove also recommends a helpful book, Two’s Company: Love Again, A Woman’s Journey by Hélène Pascal. One added point: noticing that many other people are in coupledom may not be a good enough reason to embark on a new relationship, which, in the senior years, will always involve ‘baggage’. Perhaps your friend needs to address her loneliness first.
Q A couple, both widowed and over seventy, have had a long friendship that has turned, delightfully and unexpectedly, into a late-flowering romance. They would like to get married, which is in accordance with their upbringing and their principles. The woman’s daughter, always dependent and self-centred, has responded by threatening to cut her mother out of her life. Would you advise the couple to call the daughter’s bluff and get married?
Name and address supplied.
A Yes, I’d say, definitely, take a leap of faith for love. Too many older women are over-dependent on the approval of their grown children (including myself). But try to get another family member, or close friend, to talk the daughter round to a reconciliation. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s worth activating a kinship network to make the effort. Someone should tell the daughter that she’ll regret it later if she breaks with her elderly mother.
Q I was at a dinner party recently where a family lawyer told us she now works a lot around gay couples and children. A new phenomenon is that lesbian couples both want to feel a biological or physical attachment to the baby they are having, and so the fertilised egg of one woman will be transplanted into the womb of the other, so that she can carry and give birth to the baby that isn’t biologically hers. Some of us were appalled that the parents could put so much emphasis on their relationship with the child, rather than the wellbeing of the child itself, and were prepared to spend so much money to prop up their own claim. The lawyer said I was being hopelessly reactionary but I felt it was yet another example of spoilt Western self-indulgence, while across the world in war-torn and impoverished countries, children were suffering from neglect, abuse and poverty. I also know a gay couple who have adopted two brothers from a very disturbed background and given them a kind childhood, rather than have biologically related children. I would be interested to know what your readers feel on the subject.
Alice, London N7
A The long answer is that we will have to wait for twenty years to see how these experiments turn out. There was a time when orphanages – and child emigration – were greatly approved of by experts. But I will invite readers’ views – and experiences.