Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,72

and went from “dying of boredom and silence” to “a world of interesting ideas and people.” But she also had to hold down a job, and while she sat in a real estate agent’s office typing up mind-numbing correspondence after class, she missed out on the social life she craved.

Enter Richard, a charming, sophisticated upperclassman in her English seminar with whom she had deep conversations and who swept her off her feet and into the life she wanted—until their first child was born a couple of years later. That’s when Richard started working longer hours and drinking; soon, Rita was just as bored and lonely as she had been in her childhood home. After four kids, countless fights, and too many drunken episodes during which Richard struck both her and their children, Rita wanted out.

But how? What could she do? She had dropped out of college; how would she support herself and the kids? With Richard, the kids had clothes and food and good schools and friends. What could she, by herself, offer them? In many ways, Rita felt like a child herself, helpless. Soon Richard wasn’t the only one who drank.

It wasn’t until a particularly terrifying incident that Rita screwed up the courage to leave, but by then her children were well into their teens and the family was a shambles.

She married husband number two five years later. Edward was Richard’s opposite: a kind and caring widower who’d recently lost his wife. After her divorce at age thirty-nine, Rita had returned to tedious secretarial work (her only marketable skill, despite her keen intelligence and artistic talent). Edward was a client of the insurance agent Rita worked for. They married six months after they met, but Edward was still grieving his wife’s death, and Rita felt envious of his love for her. They argued constantly. The marriage lasted two years and then Edward called it quits. Husband number three left his wife for Rita, and five years later, he left Rita for someone else.

Each time, Rita was shocked to find herself alone, but her history didn’t surprise me. We marry our unfinished business.

For the next decade, Rita steered clear of dating. Not that she met men anyway, holed up in her apartment or aerobicizing at the Y. Then came the recent reality of an eighty-year-old’s body—so withered and saggy compared to the body of her last husband, who had been only fifty-five at the time of their divorce. Rita had met Mr. Saggy, as she called him, through the dating app, and “because I wanted to be touched,” she said, “I thought I could give it a try.” He had looked young for his age, she explained (“more like seventy”) and handsome—in clothing, that is.

After they had sex, she told me, he had wanted to cuddle but she’d escaped to the bathroom, where she discovered “an entire pharmacy of medications,” including Viagra. Finding the whole scene “revolting” (Rita found many things revolting), she waited until her date was fast asleep (“His snores sounded as revolting as his orgasm”), and took a taxi home.

“Never again,” she says now.

I try to imagine sleeping with an eighty-year-old and wonder if most elderly people are put off by their partners’ bodies. Is it jarring only to those who haven’t been with an older body before? Do people who have been together fifty years not notice because they acclimate to the gradual changes over time?

I remember reading a news story in which a couple, married for more than sixty years, was asked for tips on happy marriages. After the usual advice about communication and compromise, the husband added that oral sex was still in their repertoire. Naturally, this story spread like wildfire online, and most of the commenters were disgusted. Given the public’s visceral reactions to aging bodies, it’s no wonder old people don’t get touched much.

But it’s a deep human need. It’s well documented that touch is important for well-being throughout our lifetimes. Touch can lower blood pressure and stress levels, boost moods and immune systems. Babies can die from lack of touch, and so can adults (adults who are touched regularly live longer). There’s even a term for this condition: skin hunger.

Rita tells me that she splurges on pedicures not because it matters if her toenails are painted (“Who’s going to see them?”), but because the only human touch she gets is from a woman named Connie. Connie has been doing her toes for years and doesn’t speak a lick of English. But