Friends first, one thing led to another, and in February, right before Valentine's Day, "Diamond Lil" Williams - whose favorite blues love song is "When something's wrong with my baby/Something's wrong with me" - and Stan Gamble married at the old house they're fixing up in Portland, Ind.
But this isn't the love story of a couple in their 20s - or 30s or even 40s. The Gambles are looking toward retirement - he's 51 and she's 50 - even as they're looking forward to many happy years of romance.
Yes, Grandma and Grandpa can still like each other That Way. And, if it's true that life begins at 40, then sex these days sure doesn't end after 50 - or 60, or 70.
Pick up a copy of Modern Maturity, the magazine published by AARP, and actor Sean Connery looks back at you from the cover in all his 75-year-old vigor.
Sign onto the Web's Yahoo Personals, and you'll find about 850 men and almost 700 women older than 50 seeking opposite-sex relationships within 50 miles of Fort Wayne. Nearly 350 of the daters-to-be are older than 60.
Show up at Dupont Hospital for a monthly session of the Red Hot Mamas group on a recent Tuesday night, and you'll encounter a dozen 50-something women discussing "Pause and Effect: The Journey Through Menopause" with Fort Wayne psychologist Georgia Floyd. She advises them not to let the "signs and symptoms" of their midlife transition interfere with their relationships - or their sexual enjoyment.
Meanwhile, Fort Wayne urologist Dr. Chris Steidle and a colleague are surgically implanting inflatable devices that restore erections to older men's penises at the rate of two a week.
As the first members of the largest generation in American history start turning 60 this year - nearly 3 million of them by year's end, according to the U.S. Census Bureau - they're not just poised to become the healthiest, most well-educated and most well-off group of seniors ever. They're also bringing with them attitudes and life experiences shaped in the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s - and shattering stereotypes about sex and aging as they go.
"They're not buying into it that they're too old (to be sexual) anymore," says Dr. Kathryn Einhaus, a 60-something Fort Wayne obstetrician-gynecologist with many older women as patients.
Indeed, says Bobbie Goltz, a registered nurse who coordinates Red Hot Mamas programs, women who attend generally aren't thinking that The Change means the end of sexual attractiveness or desire.
"They are looking forward to an active and healthy sex life," she says. "It wasn't too long ago that we didn't live much past menopause. Now it could be another 50 years."
Interest in sex may wane with age, and an active sex life isn't the top requirement for happiness, a major survey of midlife and older Americans by AARP found in 2004. Being in "good spirits" and staying healthy and physically active top the list.
But the study of more than 1,600 people over 45 also found that 84 percent "strongly disagreed" that "sex is only for younger people." Even among those over 70, only about 6 percent of men and 7 percent of women agreed with that statement.
And, the survey found, respondents have more than opinions about sex. They also have sexual thoughts and fantasies: About 50 percent reported having them at least once a week. About 36 percent of men and 24 percent of women over 60 said they had had intercourse in the last week.
The Fort Wayne resident says he tried performance-enhancing pills including Viagra and Cialis and even painful shots of a key male hormone, testosterone. But nothing worked for long, because he had a tiny leakage of blood that wouldn't allow for an erection.
Not willing to give up, this year, Kent underwent surgery that implanted two tiny tubes on each side of his penis through incisions in the scrotum. When activated, the tubes fill with a saline solution that causes an erection.
Having surgery wasn't pleasant - "I laid on my back for two days. That's how sore I was," he says. But the device is now virtually unnoticeable to him, even during intercourse. "I still have orgasms and sensations. To be honest, I can barely tell it's there," he says. "I'd do it again in a heartbeat."
Einhaus says today's aging generations "just won't put up with it" when the quality of their sexual life isn't all they want it to be. And it's not just men who are seeking out medical solutions.
Today's boomers and seniors already make up nearly 35 percent of the U.S. population - and the boomers are expected to nearly double the ranks of seniors by 2030, when one in five Americans will be past 65. About 12 percent of the population is now 65 or older.
About 15 percent of men and 18 percent of women 45-64 are divorced, nearly double the 8 percent of men and 10 percent of women 65 to 74. Add to those numbers the approximately 3 percent of boomer men and 5 percent of women who are widowed, and the 9.7 percent of men and 8 percent of women who never married, and you've got nearly one in three boomers quite possibly partner-shopping.
The numbers are good news in that more people such as the Gambles can find new life partners, sometimes without looking. "Neither one of us was looking," Lil Gamble says with a laugh. "I didn't want a relationship. My life was full and my musical career was going great, but he just kept showing up at my front door."
But the number of singles is also a recipe for a churning dating pool, especially when some are armed with newfound pharmaceutically charged sexual confidence and others with a high-speed hook-up tool in the form of the Internet.
"There are even some fears about a rise in sexually transmitted diseases among the older-age population because they are dating in greater numbers and they are not used to dating," says Annie Wenger, a clinical social worker and certified sex therapist in Fort Wayne.
At 54 - and after a courtship experience that she says at first more resembled the careful questioning of a job interview than being swept off her feet - Wenger recently became engaged to a man 10 years her senior.
Having no possibility of pregnancy and having done their previous dating when AIDS hadn't yet been discovered, Wenger says, older people might not be familiar with the need to use condoms or discuss their sexual histories to prevent incurable sexually transmitted diseases.
Besides, Wenger notes wryly, "condoms sometimes don't work so great when you're older. You might be having trouble with other things … such as (maintaining) an erection." Alternatives such as the female condom? Off the radar screen, she says.
National health statistics tell what some call a cautionary tale. New AIDS cases are rising faster in the over-50 population than in people under 40, and heterosexual transmission in people over 50 has doubled since 1991, although the numbers remain small. About 13 percent of all AIDS cases to date have been in people over 65.
Gregory Manifold, executive director of the AIDS Task Force in Fort Wayne, says the statistics may mean that new drug treatments have helped more people delay the progression to AIDS until they're older - not that the number of new infections is rising.
"Certainly one of the interesting things these days is, as people get older, they experience more medical symptoms, and the question is, "Is it the HIV, or the drugs, or another disease, or just aging?' " Manifold says.
Meanwhile, diagnoses of four sexually transmitted diseases in those over 44 have been rising in northeast Indiana. Cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, HIV and syphilis have more than doubled from 27 cases in 2003 to 55 in 2005, statistics from the Fort Wayne-Allen County Department of Health show.
Julie Reece, a registered nurse and director of the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Clinic of the health department, says older people are still the smallest proportion of patients at the clinic.
But she does see several people each month who are newly divorced who have been out on the dating scene. "Many do have regrets when they come in - that they wish they had been more careful," she says.
For many older people, the numbers on singlehood tell a different story - of a growing "partner gap" that leaves many older women sexually alone for much of later life. According to the census bureau, nationally there are only 72 men for every 100 women over 65, as men succumb to shorter life spans and, sometimes, younger women.
In the AARP study, only 21 percent of women respondents over 75 had partners, compared with 58 percent of men the same age. The study didn't ask women whether they wished they were part of a couple.
At 68 and divorced for many years, Morris Allen of Fort Wayne should be in an enviable position. But the retired department store decorator has pretty much given up on dating.
"I met people through friends and relatives after my divorce," he says. But one woman had issues with an ex-husband and another was too religious to be compatible. He'd now rather spend his time painting and developing his relationship with his adult daughter, whom he barely knew when she was younger.
"I'm what they call treading lightly right now," Allen says, adding there are times he'd like a female companion. "But I don't want what comes with it."
Sometimes, Judy Harris, a 59-year-old sex educator with Planned Parenthood in Fort Wayne, wonders whether today's seniors and seniors-to-be aren't being sold a bill of goods about the prospects for their sex life in later years.
She's happy older people can read Gail Sheehy's new ideal of the sexy, "seasoned" postmenopausal woman and see Lauren Hutton still glam in her 60s. And she's even designed a workshop on sexuality and seniors aimed at encouraging nursing-home and assisted-living center staff to develop policies that are more sensitive to the sexual needs and expressions of residents - a workshop she's never given because of lack of registration.
"Basically, seniors now are almost being inundated with information about sex, like our youth are, and feeling they need to be sexual," Harris says. "The saying is that 60 is now the new 40, like it's something that seniors are expected to live up to. … It really has raised that bar."
"It's different not just because we have gone through The Change, but our desires and goals have changed. When we make love, it's because we truly are in love. It's not a fantasy or an illusion; it's love," she says.
"We took it very slow. We had many dinners and meals together, and we would sit in the evenings together and just talk. We became friends long before I would even consider a relationship, and it was months and months before we became intimate."
Well, some older people don't mind. About 30 percent in the AARP study said they were neutral about or would be "quite happy never having sex again."
After 50, she says, a better prelude might be to avoid the libido-depressing alcohol, go easy on dinner to avoid diverting blood flow to digestion, and go for a brisk walk, spend time in a Jacuzzi together or give each other a massage to rev up skin sensations.
Older couples even might want to wait to have sex until morning, when men's hormone levels are higher, some experts counsel. Couples might want to find positions that put less stress on joints, extend foreplay with or without intercourse, or try building desire throughout a day or weekend through verbal hints and romantic gestures.
But other adaptations mean changed thinking, says Harris, who soon will celebrate her 33rd wedding anniversary with her gynecologist husband, Lee.
"We need to broaden our definition of sexuality," she says. "It includes sensuality, touch, comfort, communication, commitment and emotional intimacy. Then we could accept sexuality more beyond the reproductive ages."
When Stan Gamble talks about his new wife, he says, sure, she was physically attractive. But what really attracted him was that they had a lot in common.
"We played together for a couple of years, and what can I say, we fell in love," he says. "It was just a feeling that we have all these common interests and I thought, wow, this could be my soul mate."
Having faced some health problems as well as a divorce, he knew he wanted a companion for later life, he says. He says the two are now trying to find what he calls "a mission" that God is calling them to.
One possibility, he says, might be traveling together performing gospel music and combining that with his sidelight, fixing up old Hammond church organs.
For her part, Lil Gamble says she was skeptical about any relationship because of past disappointments. But she came to believe the two "had the same needs, which were closeness, partnership, and affection and feeling worthy in someone else's eyes."
"When I look at him I see a beautiful man and a beautiful person. He brings me joy and has given me the gift of learning how to love and be vulnerable," Lil says. "I think it's going to get better and better."
This is cache, read story here
