Risa Glaser, event organizer for 8minuteDating, believes that you never lose the need to have a companion in your life — especially as you age.
"It really feels great to put people together and give people a place to meet and, hopefully, make a friend or a romantic interest for the future," she explains.
Participants in the 60- to 75-year-old group didn't feel that their ages held them back when it came to finding love.
"Lonely is lonely at 20, lonely is lonely at 40. Coming here, everybody is looking for that special someone, looking for love. Just because you're older doesn't mean you don't want that same kind of passion that you remember when you were younger," says Maxine Monopoli, a widow from New Jersey, of her reasons for trying 8minuteDating.
Another senior attendee, Rosalie Sussman, told us she was looking for a younger man, because she knew that she may outlive partners her own age. Dubner agrees that women may need to think outside the box when looking for new relationships.
"It's not hard to imagine that with more men dying earlier, which has always been the case, there will be a lot of older women who presumably want to have a lot of sex," says Dubner. He compares his theory to economics — if a good is scarce or expensive, we turn to substitutes.
"If elderly men are scarce for elderly women, they may turn to other elderly women. So we may see a boom in elderly lesbianism," says Dubner.
Can You Teach an Old Dog New Tricks?
But how will elders fill their time during all those extra years? Dubner believes we shouldn't underestimate the abilities of older people because there aren't too many things that they can't learn, be it languages, music or computers.
In our segment, we wanted to put that to the test and see if older people can really learn a new skill such as juggling. Professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and professional juggler Don Rapp taught a group of 8 to 12-year-olds and a group of seniors. After only three days of training sessions, they found that many older folks were getting the hang of juggling just as well as the younger kids.
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