It's never too late to fall in love.

Photo: Quavondo Nguyen

Whether you're 35 or 75, it's never besides belatedly to fall madly (or gently and even sacredly) in love. Only inquire actress Ellen Burstyn and a host of other women who found themselves in the heat of romance when they least expected information technology.

My female parent met the love of her life when she was 84. A widow for nine years, she spotted Harold Lapidus, a retired dr., standing lone at a span gild. She asked if he wanted to play, and they became inseparable.

"He's a younger man," she told me.

"How immature?" I asked.

"Oh...," she said. "I call up he'due south eighty."

They're still devoted to each other as my mother moves into her 90s, which fills me with awe. But do I accept to wait that long?

I've been unattached for 7 years and have become very expert at it. I dearest my house, my work, and my kids, and every day I'm grateful for adept health and what I see as a fortunate life. Only sometimes I anguish for a partner to check in with, talk, snuggle, and grow spiritually with. I'm agape that in my 60s, after two divorces, such love may be backside me, equally the pickings go slimmer every year. When I become to parties or events, there are thirteen single women and 1 single guy, and he's usually gay.

This depresses me, and I wonder if my mother'southward feel was a fluke. Just during the past month, I've talked to a dozen women, ranging from their belatedly 40s to their 90s, who've found deep dear—a soul mate—long later they idea that was possible.

Ellen Burstyn was lonely for 25 years earlier she fell in love, at 71, with the human being with whom she now lives, who is 23 years younger. Jane Fonda, 69, recently started a human relationship with Lynden Gillis, 75, a retired management consultant, and wants to make a "sexy erotic picture show about people over 70."

As I listened to these stories, I felt...hope. And I wanted to explore whether this kind of love happens considering of luck, karma, or accident, or if there are interior changes one can make or steps one tin take to connect with a partner at any historic period.

What surprised me was that the women's stories were remarkably similar. All had been agape they were too former. They all relished their independence and had come to terms with the fact that they might never notice another mate. At the same time, they'd done inner work that enabled them to feel worthy of dear, ready to have a human as he is and be accepted unconditionally past him.

Well-nigh see their human relationship as a spiritual practice, an opportunity to work on hurtful patterns and expand their capacity to forgive. There's less drama, they study, and more peace. Each woman feels her current partner is her beshert—Yiddish for "destined mate"—and that all her experiences, by relationships, and heartbreak were necessary to gear up her for this marriage.

For 25 years, Ellen Burstyn did non go out on a date.

Why not?

"Nobody asked me," she says.

I observe that difficult to believe, I say. "In 25 years, weren't you attracted to a man, or pursued by i?"

"I was busy living my life," she says. She worked constantly around the world, won an Oscar® for Alice Doesn't Alive Here Anymore, and was nominated for 5 other films. She enjoyed being with her son, Jefferson, her friends, and her animals. Every so ofttimes, she would look around and recollect, "Where are all the men?" "I idea it would exist neat to go home and curl up in someone's lap later on a chore, simply I didn't sit around crying virtually it. I made a friend of solitude," Ellen says.

Just this ease took her decades to attain. In her 20s, she'd been "promiscuous," she says. "I'd gone from man to man since puberty and had iii marriages that were all painful and concluded in divorce." She knew she had to heal the wounds that kept her repeating the same pattern with men, "so that aspect of myself closed upwards shop. I think I congenital an invisible shield that no one could penetrate."

She worked with a therapist, studied Sufism, and reconnected with her Christian roots, which she describes in her volume, Lessons in Becoming Myself. When she finally believed she knew how to "practice information technology right—attract a man who would treat me well and whom I could love"—she feared it was as well late. On a whim, she asked a adult female friend if she knew a man who might be suitable.

"I'll accept to call back near that," the woman said.

Shortly afterward, this same woman was approached by a Greek thespian who had auditioned for Ellen at the Actors Studio when he was 25 and she was 48. He confessed to Ellen's friend that he'd been in love with her for the 23 years since they'd met.

"What?!" Ellen said, when the bulletin was relayed. The Greek kid? Just he was 48 at present, attractive and a successful acting teacher. (She won't disembalm his proper name.) He sent her an e-mail, which she answered, guardedly. He wrote back, "I don't see the word 'no' in this."

They've been together for three years, living in her house on the Hudson River in New York. She says it's been an easy fit, "which is startling considering he'due south from a different culture and a different generation." One reason for that may be her new approach. "Most of my life, if a man did something totally other than the mode I thought it should be done, I would effort to right him. At present I say, 'Oh, isn't that interesting? Yous do that differently than I do.' It's the biggest thing I've learned. Information technology allows for a stress-free relationship."

Ellen's greatest claiming has been working with her fearfulness of abandonment. "I had so much anxiety in my former relationships—I was scared of losing men, all of them." She believes there are patterns nosotros tin piece of work on only in a relationship, and this is i of them. "Right at present, he'southward in Greece, didactics, and that brings up feet. 'He's away—what will happen? Somebody else will grab him!' I have to see that and go on releasing those thoughts."

As I get older, I hear more frequently nearly people who fall in dearest once again with boyfriends from the past. This strikes me as auspicious: You already know the person, and presumably you've attained more than wisdom to make the relationship work.

Marta Vago, an executive passenger vehicle in Santa Monica, California, was 62 when she received an e-mail from her first honey, Stephen Manes, whom she'd started dating the summertime she was 14, after meeting him at a piano master class in Vermont. She and Stephen were a couple for iii years, parting when she was 17 and he was 21.

Xl-vi years subsequently, Stephen wrote to Marta saying that his married woman of 43 years had died of cancer, he was coming to Los Angeles to rehearse with his chamber music trio, and could he take her out to lunch? Curious and amused, Marta suggested that he come to her firm and she'd order in sushi: "I want to hear you play."

Marta lives in a cottage filled with fine art and antiques. Her piano is in her bedroom, so later on tiffin, Stephen played a Beethoven sonata while she sabbatum on the bed. "Information technology was exactly how it had been when I would visit him at his apartment near Juilliard," she says. "He would play, and I would sit on the bed. In some ways information technology felt as if no fourth dimension had passed, and in some ways I was with a stranger."

They'd been apart all their working lives. Stephen had pursued 1 calling—performing and education music—and he'd loved only ii women: Marta and his married woman. Marta had left music, earned a PhD in psychology, and lived with different men, sometimes marrying them and sometimes not.

In 2006, she'd been alone for v years when she traveled to Budapest and found the city live with culture and vibrant people. "I idea, 'If I'm not married or engaged past my next birthday, I'thousand going to retire in Budapest,'" she recalls. "That statement told me that I really wanted to be married, and if I wasn't, I would make a large change in my life."

She hired a matchmaker, who bundled a few dates that fizzled. The matchmaker told her: "My dear, yous wait too old. That'due south not gonna fly." Because Marta coached executives, she'd always worn her pilus severely brusque and dressed in "scary-looking suits." By the fourth dimension Stephen's eastward-post arrived, she'd ditched the suits and let her hair grow out soft and curly. V months later on their reunion, she and Stephen were engaged.

While Marta's teenage love had fabricated the commencement move, Sally Grounds, 72, set things in motion at her 50th high school reunion. Emerge had run with the most pop girls and football players at University High in Los Angeles. At the reunion, Sally, who's 51, spotted a homo who was 65, trim, strong, and tan as a surfer—Gene Grounds. He was a surfer, and also a banker, who had flown in from Hawaii.

Sally went up to him and asked, "Do yous remember me?"

"Of course," Cistron said. He'd asked her out in one case, for grad night, and had been nervous she'd say no considering he didn't belong to her oversupply. Sally remembers Gene as "kind of intellectual, and he wore braces." But at the reunion, Factor, at 71, was a standout. "All the other men had potbellies," Emerge says.

In January of this year, Sally airtight up her dwelling house in Palm Desert, California, and flew to Honolulu, carrying ii suitcases. "I felt like a war bride," she recalls. Gene was barefoot when he picked her up at the airport and placed a lei around her neck. They'd spent a few months getting to know each other, sailing on his trimaran and visiting each other's homes; then he proposed.

Sally and Cistron hadn't been in honey before, but they had much in mutual now: Both had lost their spouses to disease, and they shared a zest for take chances and hunger for spiritual fulfillment.

When she moved into Gene'southward house, where his 39-year-sometime son and new wife (who happens to be my niece) live in an upstairs suite, Emerge started to cry. She'd known the house was a bachelor pad, simply now she had to acquire to live in it. Gene and his son Daniel surf 10-foot waves and exercise long-distance swims between the islands. They had surfboards on the walls, and a boat in the garage, along with mountains of boxes filled with junk, Sally says. The paint was peeling, the bathrooms were moldy, and cockroaches were on parade. Equally Daniel put it, "We had a roof over our heads. A dead gecko in the closet? Any. My dad said he'd rather live with clay than employ chemic cleaning products." Sally put on condom gloves and went through the house with Clorox. Slowly, she'southward been sorting and discarding boxes—"I had to fight for space," she says—painting walls and, with Gene'south help, picking out fabrics to reupholster the furniture. "I gave upward my perfect footling house in the desert, my friends, my fashion of living," she says. "But I would practice anything to exist with Gene. I've never loved everyone similar this and never idea I could. I experience such a bond because we went to school together, and we can actually communicate. You know how very few men can communicate? This one tells you everything."

Sally's lifelong passion has been dancing, and she'due south always been agape of the water. Now she's learning to swim, and Gene is learning to trip the light fantastic toe. They pray together daily and nourish church meetings. "Are we soul mates?" Sally asks. Gene answers: "Yes."

Well, what is a soul mate? Not someone who'southward identical to you, I've constitute, only a partner with whom you lot share values and a commitment to bring out the highest good in each other. As Ellen Burstyn puts it, "In that location's a coupling of two people's evolution into i path—so his development is equally important to me as my ain."

Two of the women I met prayed for such a partner. Verlean Kingdom of the netherlands, 65, who lives in the Bronx, New York, lay downwardly on her bed one night and said out loud: "Lord, I am sooo lonely. Please send me someone who will dearest me but for me, and I volition love him for himself." She prayed for a hubby who shared her faith and "could become to church building with me. That'southward what I wanted virtually."

The answer to her prayers was right under her nose. Verlean had been solitary for 13 years, only she was always decorated with her piece of work for the board of educational activity, her church, and her grandchildren. But in 2003, because of upkeep cuts, she lost her job testing vision and hearing in special ed children. That'southward when she began to feel lonely.

Effectually the same fourth dimension, a human in her extended circumvolve, Rodney Holland, called "Popular" by friends and family unit, lost his son in a machine crash. Popular had befriended Verlean's youngest son, Tyrone, when her second oldest son was killed in a shooting. Pop, a retired postal worker, came to Verlean'due south house on Thanksgiving and New Year's, but she paid him no attention. "He was a friend of my baby's," she explains. Her friends teased her: "That man likes y'all." Verlean would say, "No, he don't."

On New Yr's Eve 2003, Verlean, her son, and Pop went to church building and and then a political party. Verlean couldn't stand up the loud rap music, so Pop escorted her home. And so he started calling and taking her to the movies. After a few weeks, he said, "We're also one-time to be dating. I want a married woman, non a girlfriend."

Did you accept right away? I inquire.

"Oh, yes, I wasn't going to let him get away," Verlean says. "Looking back, it was like a cake that had to be baked upward. The homo knew me, and I knew who he was. I liked his gentleness, and he treated me with high respect."

At their church building wedding, all their offspring and siblings walked down the alley. Popular moved into Verlean's flat, "and that was the worst part," she says. "That kickoff year was haaaard. I'grand used to doing things my mode. I'k used to cleaning and picking upwards; he doesn't clean and pick upwards. He likes to watch TV; I don't," she says. "And so I realized: I beloved him a lot, and he loves me a lot. Let me accept him the way he is—that's what I asked for. Stop screaming about piddling things and just accommodate."

They ready up a twenty-four hours room for Pop with his Telly, "and I have my own room where I can pray and listen to gospel music," Verlean says. She's grateful to take someone "to grow old with. I escort him to the doc and he escorts me. And we go to church building together. I like to wearing apparel upwards, merely at first he was coincidental. I told him, 'A human needs to be in a accommodate on Sunday.'"

Donna Zerner, who lives in Boulder, Colorado, likewise prayed for a spiritual partner. In 2003 when I met Donna, an editor in her 40s, she said she'd never been in love and didn't call up it was possible. She had dated men only never felt she could be all she was or give herself completely to the relationship. She idea she might be "perpetually single" considering she felt flawed. She too suspected that what other people call "being in honey" was an illusion and that eventually they'd get their hearts broken. Despite these thoughts, she was withal trying to find a "cute, healthy relationship."

On New Twelvemonth's Eve 2005, Donna and I fabricated a list of the qualities we desired in a mate. "Jewish" was at the top of her list. She's a leader in the Jewish Renewal community and founded the Kosher Hams, a Jewish comedy improv troupe that performs at services and conferences. She had dated simply men who were Jewish and couldn't imagine sharing life with someone who wasn't.

Non long afterward drawing up the list, Donna went to a multifaith conference. She constitute a chair beside David Frenette, who she thought was the "cutest guy in the room." During the three-solar day briefing, they sat together, talked, and went for a walk. David invited her to a movie, and "past the 2nd date, nosotros realized something astonishing was going on," Donna says. They seemed a perfect match: They made each other express mirth, they liked the same books and films, they both craved solitude, neither drank alcohol, and both are gluten intolerant. Information technology was perfect, except...David wasn't Jewish. He was a Christian spiritual counselor who'd lived like a monk for 12 years. It was his intense spiritual devotion that made their wedlock possible.

"He was much more interested in and open to Judaism than any of the Jewish guys I'd dated," Donna says. She brought him to Jewish Renewal services, which he loved. "And I became interested in his path of contemplative Christianity," she says. They found they could come across "in that place across faith. For both of united states of america, religion is a path to God, and our commitment to God goes beyond whatever organized structure. That's what really bonds us."

Unlike the other couples, Donna and David oasis't had any conflict. "Not even a moment of irritation," Donna says.

That defies credulity, for me. Neither had been married or had children. What are the odds they could connect in their 40s and not have a single argument?

"No i volition believe it," Donna says. "I don't believe it. It's like grace." They haven't lived together and don't wish to marry nevertheless, simply this past August, they invited their friends to a "commitzvah" ceremony to celebrate their interdependence. "We wanted to publicly express our gratitude for this relationship and set intentions for our hereafter," Donna says. "Nosotros both know this is it—nosotros're done looking."

What about people who've been married multiple times? Do they see this as failure and throw in the towel? Do they privately fear, equally I do, 'I'thou just non expert at relationships—I lack the gene?' Or do they acquire knowledge and skills that make later relationships more fulfilling?

I explored this and other questions near love afterwards l in my book Leap! What Will We Exercise with the Rest of Our Lives? I wrote about my friend, Joan Borysenko, the spiritual teacher and author of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, who'd just divorced her tertiary husband when we met. Before long after, she began telling friends that she was getting married for the fourth fourth dimension to Gordon Dveirin, an organizational psychologist who'd too been married three times before.

The women's posse mobilized. They cornered her and said, "What the hell are you doing? I'1000 sure he's terrific, but you said good things about your other husbands at the start." None of them had met Gordon, but that was irrelevant; they were upset at what they considered the mirage of taking vows she'd already broken three times.

Joan and Gordon, who were 57 and 59 respectively, had to ask the question themselves: Why is this nuptials different from all our other weddings? They'd both felt instant sparks—physically, mentally, and spiritually—when they ran into each other at the general store in Gold Colina, Colorado. They seemed well matched. They began didactics and writing together and their latest book, Your Soul's Compass, was just published.

They decided that what would be different about a fourth wedding was them. "We're mature individuals who've learned a lot and know who nosotros are," Joan says. "When I was younger, I couldn't have articulated the vows I want to take. This time I will vow with my whole eye: 'I volition walk the balance of the way with you. I will walk into the mystery with y'all. I know at that place will be difficult times, and I vow to see them as grist for the mill.'"

Joan knows—as do the other women—that infatuation burns out and deeper affinities must ascension. "At first it'due south like you're drugged," she says. "Yous have seen the promised land. You can't sustain that bliss forever, but after 4 years, we're still in it a lot of the time." She says they've cultivated ways to return to that country.

"How?" I inquire.

"Existence in nature together, sharing spiritual practice, creating together—similar writing or designing a garden, when all all of a sudden ideas are flowing and you're in that magical space."

She says what's different virtually love when you're older "is that we're and then damned grateful. I'one thousand even grateful for my previous marriages—I don't consider any of them failures—because you get honed in the process. They readied me for this."

What'southward liberating about late honey is that yous don't accept to follow convention or anyone else's ideas; you lot tin design what works for you. Marry, or non. Live together, or not. Take sexual practice a lot or a trivial.

Peggy Hilliard, eighty, met John Morse, 84, through an Net dating service in 2006. They lived in unlike cities, and after a year, Peggy left her business firm in Oregon and moved in with John at a retirement hamlet in Washington State. She says that 50 years agone, "I would never accept lived with a man without existence married. At eighty you have more liberty."

I tell her some of the women I've met are having glorious sexual practice, but others say erotic want lessens as you become older.

"Wrong!" Peggy says. "We take a wonderful sexual life—very fulfilling." She admits there are physical challenges, "but that doesn't stop us. You just accept to relax and be creative."

I take center from these stories, even if some seem a bit mushy. They offer evidence that dear can come to people at all ages and stations. They inspire me to allow go of my trend to exist pessimistic and think, "They're writing songs of honey, simply not for me." What good are such thoughts? Donna Zerner had never been in love before, and the joy and sacredness at her commitzvah ceremony with David were and so palpable, people couldn't stop grinning. Those who were unmarried felt there was still a chance for them, and those who had a partner were inspired to strengthen their bond.

Donna and David ready the bar loftier, vowing they would e'er run into challenges betwixt them as an opportunity to deepen their love and their human relationship to God. When I heard them voice this, I idea, "That'due south the reason I want to exist in a relationship again. Not for sexual practice (alone) or even companionship, simply for the opportunity to go deeper with another and draw closer to the light—peculiarly at this age, when fourth dimension seems to be speeding upwardly."

Ellen Burstyn talks about how, around age 65, "I experienced my bloodshed. Not similar 'Oh yep, I'thou gonna die,' but it'south a possibility that's there all the fourth dimension. And once that happens, everything becomes more precious.

"And to be in love!" she says. "To feel the joy of intimacy in the presence of death—that is delicious. When you're in love y'all experience then young, and at the same time, you're summing life upwardly. So it'south cute and rich, and you have to be aware that it's impermanent." She says that she and her partner joke all the time about funerals and ashes. He told her recently that he was driving home and a song on the radio threw him into a terrible nighttime place...

"Oh, was I dead again?" Ellen said with a laugh. "Will you stop already?"

She says they don't plan to marry. "Nosotros have existence in love right now. We know that life is short. Death is sure. And dearest is real. We're going to savour every moment of information technology."

More on Love and Relationships

  • The key to letting dearest in
  • How to know information technology'southward existent love
  • Finding and keeping the love of your life

From the November 2007 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine