Love, Again: The Wisdom of Unexpected Romance

In Love, Again, Eve Pell beautifully and thoughtfully concludes that life experience adds dimensions to the art of connection—and that we all stand to learn something from unexpected romance.

How do old people meet new loves?

Eve Pell was 68 when she convinced a friend to set her up with Sam Hirabayashi. Ten years her senior, Sam, a fellow runner, was handsome and sweet. Soon Eve and Sam were plunged into a giddy romance that began with a movie date. “It was crazy,” Pell writes. “It was wonderful.”

Pell wrote about their romance in a New York Times Modern Love column and received a wave of responses from people who recognized their own stories in hers. This thing, this late-in-life love: It’s growing, it’s everywhere, and it’s transformative.

In staggering numbers, old people are meeting and falling in love—in senior living facilities, in retirement homes, in bars, in grocery stores, on cruise ships, on the Internet—brazenly, quietly, unexpectedly. People once written off as too old for intimacy are having romances, beginning intense affairs once thought to be for the young.

Part memoir, part journey to a new frontier, Love, Again is illuminating and heartwarming. Speaking with poets and artists, a retired nurse and a retired coach, environmentalists, philanthropists, and teachers—couples whose partners’ ages range from 61 to 96—Pell reports on their relationships, from saying hello to knowing they’d found the one, from blending routines and traditions to overcoming judgments and challenges. These widows, widowers, divorcés, and never-marrieds open up about old love versus young, the thrill of sex, and the looming shadow of mortality.

At the core of this book is wisdom: what we all can learn from the experience, regardless of age.

• Fall in love with who someone is now—not who they someday might be.
• Always be honest, but don’t feel pressure to share everything.
• And most of all: The heart can continue to expand.

Advance praise for Love, Again

“A heartwarming, eye-opening, life-affirming journey to the final frontier of romance, this is a beautiful book about the possibility of late-in-life love and the life-changing lessons we all can learn from those who have been lucky enough to find it.”—Katie Couric

“Eve Pell’s career as an investigative reporter served her in discovering such couples and learning their stories, which, along with her own love story, she imparts with fluency and zest. Love, Again is a joy to read, full of humor and heart and sweet collective wisdom, a book for all ages.”—Susan Trott, author of the Holy Man Trilogy

“I remarried at 75 and have followed one hundred marriages from age 50 on. Eve Pell knows what she is talking about. Her book is touching, eye-opening, inspiring, and wise. In addition, it is beautifully written.”—George E. Vaillant, M.D., author of Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“In this inspiring exploration of fifteen late-in-life romances, Eve Pell illustrates the human appetite and capacity for romantic love at any age. As these men and women—widowed and divorced, gay and straight—share their stories of forging deep connections in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and, yes, 90s, they deliver a heartwarming message: We are never too old for new love.”—Jill Smolowe, author of Four Funerals and a Wedding: Resilience in a Time of Grief