Sex and the senior set

When older people start dating, they run into many of the same heart-pounding issues as the young, trying to decide when it's time to talk and when to make love.

That's the word from older singles such as Emily Gordon, 73, a Carrboro, N.C., resident who's on the dating scene and has started a community conversation about how older people could and should get together.

The conversation is vital: Whether younger people want to hear it or not, at least 20 percent of older adults are sexually active. But these older sex partners also can be at risk in a health care world that tends to overlook their amorous activities.

On the emotional side, Gordon says, older people she's encountered want most a friend to talk to, then someone to date and, yes, a partner for something "beyond dating."

"I believe sex is important in a relationship," Chapel Hill, N.C., resident Wally Friedman, 75, told prospective older daters at a recent public discussion. "But you two will have more verbal intercourse than sexual."

For older people, particularly those who have lost partners, negotiating the dating world can present an unsettling conflict between long-ago experiences and present-day reality. Gordon, Friedman and Chapel Hill resident Rita Berman talked frankly with audience members recently about dating and hooking up.

"Is it unreasonable to ask a man who seeks intimacy to have an AIDS test?" asked one of the audience members.

Sure, that's fine, people said at the discussion at Orange County, N.C.'s Seymour Center.

According to state health statistics, the questioner was onto something. More than 700 North Carolinians 45 and older contracted new cases of HIV in North Carolina last year. They represented nearly 30 percent of the new cases in the state, with the high number of cases in the younger end of that scale.

"If you are thinking about initiating a relationship, there's a wonderful word called 'condom,'" Gordon said, adding that a sexually transmitted disease can be especially troublesome for an older person who already has health problems.

Dr. Racquel Daley-Placide, a geriatrician and clinical assistant professor at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine's Division of Geriatrics, said many older people are poorly informed about how to protect themselves against sexually transmitted diseases.

"For them, growing up, the issue was pregnancy," Daley-Placide said. "For younger people growing up now, the issues are pregnancy and a whole range of sexually transmitted diseases.

"Unfortunately, we don't really target older people in our educational efforts regarding safe sex."

With approximately 5.5 baby boomers turning age 60 every minute, the number of persons age 65 or older is projected to more than double by 2050, according to the Census Bureau. Therefore, questions and comments like those heard at the evening event will only become more common, perhaps eventually overcoming some younger people's queasiness about the topic.

"There were younger people at my job who were horrified at the thought of my dating and, God forbid, having sex," Gordon said.

When Daley-Placide recently taught medical students a class on sexuality in older people, she said, she began by asking whether the students' parents and grandparents were having sex.

"Everybody got this really nauseated look on their faces," she said. "They need to understand that that is a type of prejudice."