Assisted Loving by Bob Morris

too.
    I put down the Personals page and the phone and find that I’m smiling deviously.
    And thus begins my father’s year of dating dangerously.

CHAPTER 1
Geriatrix (cont.)
    B otox, lipo, cardio, angioplasty. Seventy is the new forty, right? Add to that the boost that dating gets when seniors have cell phones and Internet access, not to mention physical trainers and Viagra, and you get the turbocharged arena my dad’s about to enter. Three women for every man! And just because these men are old doesn’t mean they’re nice. How else would you explain the rash of codgers who divorce their first wives for women half their age? Hard as it is to believe, it was always women whose sex drives were actually stronger than men’s in their later years. Now things have changed. In Scottsdale, Arizona, a cyclotron of senior society, one man observed in a newspaper article that the women he knows “wouldn’t trade their cat for a man” and added that they aren’t looking to get involved “with some randyeighty-year-old,” at least not on a full-time, intimate basis. Still, with demographics weighted so heavily in favor of men, and with plenty of highly focused women anxious to remarry for their own reasons (money, or the convenience of someone to have on their arm), even a shlump who was not much of a ladies’ man in high school can be a total catch in his senior years for no other reason than he is still alive and drives at night.
    â€œSome of the women are total carnivores,” says my aunt Sylvia, who lost my delightful uncle Dan twenty years ago, and has been happily widowed and entirely consumed with her family and her Palm Beach and Vermont lives ever since. “My cousin Raymond is eighty years old. The woman circle around him like vultures. He’s a nice-looking man and a good sport who likes a good time, so he’s always with another one. When he ended the last relationship—this was with a woman ninety years old, mind you—she passed away a few months later and all her friends said she died of a broken heart. Can you imagine? The whole thing is so ridiculous. Your father has a million things to keep him busy, but he still has to meet someone to love. It’s just so funny.”
    I wish I could have more of a sense of humor about the whole thing.
    But it’s just too uncomfortable, so I decide to get a column out of it. Enough people my age are going through something similar. I interview a man who owns New York’s oldest dating service. He tells me that children who come to his office to set up their elderly fathers request women of a similar age to their mothers. Then, the fathers call the service (without their children knowing)and declare that they want young, not old. So the father finds a match, and the kids get jealous, and, of course, issues of inheritance come into play when marriage comes up as a possibility. It’s all perilous. “But you just have to pull yourself back,” this dating maven tells me, “and let your dad do his thing and pick who he wants.”
    Aunt Sylvia agrees. “You father is his own man, and he needs to meet someone nice and understanding,” she counsels. “But I don’t know if he’s going to meet who you want him to meet.” I tell her he’d better or I’m going to make myself scarce in his life.
    â€œMy goodness,” she says. “If you had kids dating, you would be impossible!”
    That’s exactly what this feels like. I’m playing father to a son, a kid!
    â€œBecause,” says a woman I call who wrote a book about second wives, “when he’s on a date, he feels young again, as if he’s starting a second life. And so does the woman. There’s just all this potential ahead of them, a whole new future.”
    â€œPotential for trouble,” I say. “Potential for total disruption.”
    â€œPotential for love and a new