Melissa Harris-Perry: It's Valentine's Day and we've been talking a lot about L-O-V-E, Love.

Speaker 2: It's more than love at first sight

Melissa Harris-Perry: About our romantic dream that love will last forever.

Speaker 3: You're mine

And we belong together

For eternity

Melissa Harris-Perry: Sometimes eternity is a little too long.

Speaker 4: You're so vain

You probably think this song is about you

You're so vain (you're so vain)

I bet you think this song is about you

Don't you don't you?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Nan Bauer-Maglin and Daniel Hood are co-editors of the new book, Gray Love: Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60. They know that love changes and evolves. The love you had in your twenties and thirties is likely to be pretty different from the love you settle into in your sixties and beyond. Janae Pierre spoke to Nan and Dan last week about the good love and we can make as we grow older and wiser.

Janae Pierre: You two are dating, right?

Daniel Hood: Yes.

Janae Pierre: Go ahead and tell me how you two met.

Nan Bauer-Maglin: We met on Match. I think, if I could count right, he was about the ninth person I encountered on Match, and I was doing another book at the time. I asked him to help me with the footnotes. He was so good at that, that I asked him to be my co-editor for Gray Love.

Daniel Hood: I agreed.

Janae Pierre: The book is split into two parts. Could you tell me about those two parts?

Nan Bauer-Maglin: Part one is about looking for love, especially online, but it is not all online, but it's about, do I want to date? How do you date when you're over 60? What are the issues? What does it mean to date 10 people, 20 people, 30 people? How does it feel when you're dumped or ghosted, as I say? it just really follows men and women in their experiences with dating and looking for connection of some sort. Part two is about people who have found a partner, and then what are the issues for older relationships that are different than younger relationships?

Janae Pierre: How did the idea of this book come up in the first place?

Nan Bauer-Maglin: Well, I do books on issues that bother me, and I assume, therefore, if it bothers me, it bothers other people. Anytime I have an issue, I figure, let's get a group of people together and have them write about their experiences. I didn't want a how-to book, although a lot of the stories give you how to. I wanted to get a sense of the complications of people's experiences.

After my husband died, and it was about a year later, I went on Match and I figured, I'm 75, I don't know what I'm doing. Do other people know? What does it feel like and how do you do it? Should I meet somebody? That's what prompted me to bring together 45 people to write about their experiences, because I really wanted to hear other voices.

Janae Pierre: Several women in these essays said they were having the best sex of their lives now that they're older. Can you tell me about why you think this came up over and over again?

Nan Bauer-Maglin: I'll let Dan talk.

[laughter]

Daniel Hood: I'm not really sure I'm the one to talk about this since it was women in the book who largely said this. At that age, you're often released from a lot of practical responsibilities that you have when you're younger, first married, having children, having jobs, your lives are busier, there's more anxiety. When you're retired, your life is somewhat freer. There are other problems, but at least, you have time. With a new relationship, I'm not really sure how to describe this, but there isn't the backlog of difficulties that it sometimes takes to shape a marriage.

You feel freer and more open to talk about what's happening to you. You also have issues like aging bodies. It's difficult to present yourself as a stud or whatever the opposite of that is because it's simply not possible anymore for most of us anyways. You have to talk about those issues. You have to explain what you can do and what you can't do as well as what you'd like to do. In many ways, you're freer to talk about it, to make it work, and therefore, to enjoy it.

Nan Bauer-Maglin: For a lot of the women in the book, one of the issues was their bodies. At 60, at 70, at 80, what do you wear when you're going to date? Do you show somebody that you had a mastectomy? Lots of aches and pains, but if you can deal with that and if the partner is open with that, I think that's what makes good sex.

Janae Pierre: There are lots of different kinds of people and couples in this book. Talk to us about all the diverse voices you guys chose to add to the book.

Nan Bauer-Maglin: We tried to get a distribution of men and women. That's one of the reasons why I wanted Dan to be the editor. I thought if he was there, men would write. Although it's very hard for men to talk personally.

Janae Pierre: To talk, period, right, Nan?

Nan Bauer-Maglin: Yes. Also, men have to admit then, if they're going to write about this, that they have a wider choice than women. They can date people 20 years younger. Women are much more confined. I think men didn't know how to write or what to write. Also, men find it, I would say, I'm making a generalization, easier to go online and find somebody.

Not many men wrote, but the men that wrote were very touching, and several of them actually said that they didn't want to find anybody, that they wanted to be a alone. They wanted friends, but they really didn't want to replace their former partner. A lot of the people in the book are widows or divorced. In terms of the distribution, the range of people writing, there are men and women. There are people throughout mostly the United States, different religions, different ethnicities. The one thing that's not different, it's hard to find working class people to write for a book.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, let's take a quick pause right here, and we'll be back with more of Janae Pierre's conversation with Dan and Nan in just a moment.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thanks for sticking with us on The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We're back with more of our conversation between Nan Bauer-Maglin and Daniel Hood, co-editors of the new book, Gray Love: Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60. Last week, they sat down with Janae Pierre.

Janae Pierre: Why do you think that people of your generation are left out when it comes to dating?

Daniel Hood: There's a definite bias in the United States and maybe in the western world in general. They're considered no longer useful in the workforce. They are considered to be diminishing in many ways, their skills, their intelligence, their usefulness. They are in several ways just shunted aside as no practical use for the culture or the country. As such, people also consider old folks like us to be devoid of desire and devoid of passion, just waiting to pass on to the next life. When they write about love and dating and those kinds of relationships, we easily get left out. We're not considered fit or capable of those sorts of feelings or relationships.

Janae Pierre: Nan, you wrote one of the essays in Gray Love. It's called a Cozy Crowded Bed. Go ahead and tell us about that story.

Nan Bauer-Maglin: I will. I also wrote another essay in that. I'm the only one that has two essays. The other one is called Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell us about both of them.

Nan Bauer-Maglin: The Close Encounters is in part one, and it talks about the first five dates I had with five different men and how, essentially, terrible they were.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh gosh. Were these men that you met on Match?

Nan Bauer-Maglin: Yes, I met them online. I wrote about that, and I was about to give up after about five, six, but friends urged me to continue, so I actually did. As I said, I met Dan on the ninth date, but there are people in the book that did 150 dates or over 20 years. Then there are people who did three dates, different dates online and gave up. I wrote about my first five dates.

Cozy Crowded Bed, it's a very short piece. The New York Times has a column called Tiny Love Stories, and you have to write something, a hundred words or less. That was a big challenge. It was fun. I wrote one and I sent it in and it got published and then I put it in my book. This is very common for older dates, older couples, it was about how you have a history, you have a long history and you bring that to the relationship.

Some people get very angry that you want to talk about your husband and your wife, but my peace, Cozy Crowded Bed, supports that, well, since you had a history, since you had a marriage, talk about it. Let the dead person, as it were, in the bed. When I got together with Dan, he brought his wife, Linda, into the bed, and I brought my husband, Chris, into the bed. It was a bit crowded, but it was cozy. It was cozy.

Janae Pierre: Oh my goodness. That's great. Well, Dan, with all that you've heard and all that you know, I wonder what your favorite essay is. That is not a setup.

Daniel Hood: Actually, the first essay which is a prelude by Cynthia McKay.

Nan Bauer-Maglin: McVay.

Daniel Hood: McVay, I'm sorry.

Nan Bauer-Maglin: Approaching 60.

Daniel Hood: Approaching 60. I need a little help from my co-editor here.

Janae Pierre: I love it.

Daniel Hood: First of all, it's very well-written and it explains, in many ways, what it means to be 60, even though she wrote it approaching 60, she's now 60 or beyond. It just captured the entire experience in a way that made sense to me.

Nan Bauer-Maglin: She writes about the difficulties of being alone, and there's a quote I love about what is it like to fall off a ladder. No one's there. She also writes that, at this age, why should you compromise? What does it mean to merge two households and all one's habits and give up your own lifestyle? It's a question. I don't think it has to be that way. We see in the book that a lot of people don't merge households. We're not 20, we're not going to have children.

A lot of people do living apart together. It's called LAT. They live near each other and they don't see each other all the time. They don't have to merge their households or their families. What they're doing is having an adult relationship. I have lots of favorites, of course, because they're all my children, but there's one that I think is really amazing. It's called Matchmaker, Matchmaker. Two people in the book, two different articles, talk about using a matchmaker.

People might consider it because both these women found men, found partners, but the Matchmaker, Matchmaker, this matchmaker takes over the entire process, pretends that she is you, and you don't go online. She goes online, she writes back to whoever answers. I find that very amazing, very [crosstalk]. She only lets you in when you're absolutely going to start talking to the person that you're dating. Obviously, something like that takes money. You have to have money to hire a matchmaker.

Janae Pierre: If that was possible for me, I'd be married by now. [laughter] Before we let you go, this is the big question. Does love get easier as you get older?

Nan Bauer-Maglin: I think it gets easier and harder. Both. I think, as Dan said, that you have much more time and you're more relaxed. I'm not worried about my academic stuff anymore. I think it gets easier because you can enjoy yourself more and you're not worried, but I think it gets harder, especially about illness, disability, and illness. When you meet somebody at 20 or 30, you're not thinking about, well, they're going to die tomorrow. However, when you meet an older person, you have to decide, how well is this person? Will this person get very sick and what's my responsibility?

There's a lot of ethical questions about meeting somebody older. I know a lot of women do not want to be caretakers. I watched my husband die. I don't want to go through that again, but however, if you're going to have a relationship at an older age, especially, I'm 81 now, you have to accept that you're going to face the death of the partner or yourself. Usually, unfortunately, men die earlier. You have to face that. That's very heavy.

Daniel Hood: On the other side of that, health issues give you a lot to talk about.

[laughter]

Melissa Harris-Perry: New words to understand.

[laughter]

Daniel Hood: Yes.

Janae Pierre: Nan Bauer-Maglin and Daniel Hood, editors of Gray Love: Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60. Nan, Dan, thanks so much.

Daniel Hood: Thank you.

Nan Bauer-Maglin: Thank you.

[music]

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