Bob Morris, who writes for the New York Times Sunday Styles section, has authored this humorous, tender memoir, Assisted Loving, about mending emotional rifts with aging parents and the art of senior dating.
What inspired the book?
Shortly after my mother died, my dad handed me the personals page from a free weekly newspaper and asked me to call some women for him. I was appalled, then amused. I filed a Sunday Styles column in the Times on his dating travails and hit a cultural nerve. Seniors dating! What’s that like for them? What’s it like for self-absorbed boomer children like me?
What effect did your mother’s death have on you and your father?
Suddenly, my father and I were two single men as much as we were father and son. Yes, it was unseemly that he wanted to date so soon after her death. And no, I didn’t understand his intense need for companionship, after resigning myself to my own middle-aged solitude. But I admired his desire to get back into the world for some fun and some nookie. He was on the side of life.
The chief subject of the book, grief, is partly offset by your father’s determination to endure, to live and love as normally as possible. What do you attribute this to in your father’s personality?
A profound distrust of psychotherapy and introspection, for one thing. He had a very lounge-act approach to life—light and easy does it. He had lost both of his parents before he was a teenager, so maybe that was enough pain for a lifetime.
The media says that 70 is the new 50. What conclusions about aging did you draw from writing this book?
First of all, sex is not out of the picture when you’re 80. And chemistry, not to mention chemicals like Botox and Viagra, figure into the senior dating dynamic, too, along with J Date and Match.com. In general, nobody is willing to be old anymore. That’s why middle-aged fathers get around New York on scooters and middle-aged actresses end up with men half their age.
Dating in modern America is a perilous enterprise. As a gay man, what did you learn from your father’s approach?
I learned that the only way to find perfection in someone is to stop looking for it. My dad, who was so open (a democratic Republican), encouraged me to come out as a teenager, and years later, he told me not to run from Ira, the wonderful man who has become my domestic partner and is as imperfect as I am.
