Clans that accompany new couples can be challenging Relationships

Ruth Reiner

March 2009

Coupling is no longer simple at any life-stage. The good thing, however, is that outdated notions of lonely old widows and widowers settling for “companionship” have mercifully been shredded. As we expect to spend more time than ever in our senior years, it is not unusual for people to have second, even third vibrant relationships. But these new beginnings bring new challenges.

Whereas marriage was once sometimes disrupted by one or two meddling mothers-in-law, imagine the cast of characters more mature couples must contend with. Changing and alternate lifestyles have added relatives that don’t yet have definitions in the English dictionary. I mean, what do you call your ex-husband’s nephew? And do you invite him to your next wedding?

Seniors have accumulated clans with children, grandchildren and daughters-in-law twice removed. Everyone brings their own issues to create a complex emotional base, into which a new partner must struggle to integrate.

For starters, new relationships rarely sit well with our need for predictability. Old time friends get disgruntled having to abandon the familiar. The condo might get redecorated many times over. Some birdlike grannies of yesterday down more than a single swig of sherry at the implications of senior romance. And grown children don’t necessarily adjust well to Grandma “getting it on.”

Our choice of partners is no longer limited to age or life-stage. Older men are fathering children. Older women are dating younger men.

Whereas many adult children welcome the idea of their parents having a companion, they have mixed feelings of loss and loyalty. Sometimes seeing someone new in Dad’s old chair can stir up unresolved grief.

Take Grace and Eddy. They met at an investment club a few months after Grace’s husband, who had Alzheimer’s, was placed in a nursing home. It had been a happy marriage, and Grace and the children had time to mourn gradually, during the years of his slow decline. By the time placement was necessary, the man they knew was gone.

Suddenly Grace was rarely home when the children phoned. She began to spend weekends with her new “friend” Eddy and was unavailable to babysit New Year’s Eve for the first time since the twins were born. The children had mixed emotions about this new liaison. It was strange to think of Mom as a woman. What felt stranger was that Eddy was the older brother of her son’s college roommate.

“We must be supportive of Mom,” they confided in each other. “After all, her happiness is what counts most. And, frankly, I’ve never seen her look so good!” But mixed feelings complicated their good intentions. The entire configuration was so different from the natural order of things that it just felt, well, weird. Everyone had to work hard to readjust their expectations. One of the daughters chose to understand this in therapy.

The only person who had no problem sorting this out was Grace’s 95-year-old mother. Her opinion was stubborn, clear and conflict-free: “She’s nuts! That’s all I have to say. My daughter’s gone off her rocker!” This take on things was etched into an ancient roadmap that was far too old to bend. Modern thinkers, however, do not have the luxury of nestling into old-fashioned stereotypes.

The growing pains that come with change are never easy or age specific.

Ruth Reiner, a member of The Canadian Writer’s Society, is a psychologist, couples therapist, and motivational speaker. She is the author of Divorce: Dips, Dives and Daffodils. She is in private practice in Westmount and the Eastern Townships.