One day, when I’m running out of ways to entertain myself while entertaining my father, I bring him an application for Who Wants to Marry My Dad?, a new network reality show. I’m not naive. I know the kind of Dads they’re looking for. David Hasselhoff Dads. Bruce Willis Dads. Randy, divorced Dads. Dads who are catnip to hot broads in their late thirties, women who are, like most of my single women friends, a volatile combination of picky and desperate. At a certain point, any man can look reclaimable, I guess. One of my editors tells me that, when he was in high school, his father, a free-spirited anthropology professor, started supplementing his income by working as an exotic male dancer. And the women were all over him, a constantly changing cast of chorus girls. That’s the kind of father who’s reality-TV-ready, not mine.
It’s a warm summer afternoon, and we are sitting on the balcony of the Centra, application and pen in hand. The building is its usual ecosystem of widowed wildlife. Birds everywhere, and a few old mallards with droopy feathers. But mostly it’s a female population. There are great blue-haired herons who fish through their handbags for lipstick, and adorable clucking hens who gossip and knit. Loons with jet black dye jobs. Plump robins and mynah birds with sharp Bronx accents that my father finds unpleasant. They flock to the dining hall and elevators. They perch at card tables, picking at cookies and decaffeinated tea—well-dressed women with standards, glancing over at us. Most are attractive, like so many women in Great Neck. “Nice-looking ladies,” I tell Dad.
He shakes his head. “Not what I’m looking for,” he mutters.
Everyone in this building, to his mind, is too senior for him, too over the hill. Actually, many are not. They just happen to live here like he does because it’s easier than living alone. But he sees himself as Joe-on-the-Go, just using the place as a perch, not a nest. He doesn’t want to face the fact that he’s elderly. Life still interests him.
So we turn to the Who Wants to Marry My Dad? application, making sure to lower both his age and weight. Some of the questions require little thought. “What’s the main quality you look for in a potential mate?” I ask him. “Flexibility,” he answers. “Okay, I’ll put that down,” I say. Of course I’d like to suggest that “submissive” would be a more accurate response, but I don’t editorialize. To the question, “What kind of person will you absolutely not date?” his response is “Fat.”
“Do your children’s opinions affect who you date?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
Okay. But if he relies on my opinions, he might end up alone the rest of his life. That certainly seems to be the direction I’m heading.
“What was the craziest date you’ve ever been on?”
“Probably the time I ended up in my friend Jack’s bed at Bard College,” he says, smiling at the memory. “He wasn’t in it at the time. But he showed up in the middle of the night with a girl. My presence took all the romance out of his evening.”
“So I’ll just put down ménage à trois, okay?”
“Sure, why not?” he laughs.
I don’t know why I can’t picture my father in his twenties having dating shenanigans and high-jinx when he’s having all kinds of dating shenanigans sixty years later.
“When was that date? Were you playing the field at the time?”
“It was 1949, after college, just before I met your mother. I dated a lot in those days. But mostly I found that the women I got set up with were nothing extra.”
“And Mom was something extra?
He sits up straight. His smile becomes almost sad, remembering her as young.
“Yes. She was gorgeous, a lovely country girl compared to the ones I was meeting. She didn’t come loaded down with a lot of problems.”
“So did you have to woo her?”
“The summer before we got married I was on Long Island and she was upstate with her family. We wrote letters because long-distance calls were so expensive.”
He makes it sound easy. But I remember my mother telling me he was hard to nail down. He made it up to see her that summer only a couple of times. She was even in the hospital for surgery and he didn’t come up. She’d write him lighthearted letters as “Your Lonesome Gal,” telling him she loved him. Then she’d thank him profusely when he did finally drive up to visit. My mother had no shortage of romantic opportunities. But there was something about my father—this funny, earnest bachelor—that rang her chimes. They met at a Zionist Club meeting at the Bay Shore Jewish Center. It didn’t hurt that he was a good-looking man with his own law practice. More than that, he had a sense of fun and romance, and an ability to turn anything into a sing-along. He was sentimental and affectionate, something almost impossible to find in men back then.
“I appreciate your coming up, honey, thanks so much,” my mother wrote him from her parents’ house in 1950. “You know if marriage is a matter of give and take, I think we both have what it takes.” Somehow, they did, but without her ability to be flexible and easily amused, their marriage would have never have lasted so long.
There are more questions on the Who Wants to Marry My Dad? application, some too cringe-inducing for me to ask aloud. (“Describe a romantic evening” and “What is the biggest contribution to your sexual views?” Who the hell would ever ask such a thing of his father?) It’s easier to ask him to list three talents he has. Dad thinks a moment, then says, “Put down making up parodies, dancing, and bridge.”
“Okay. Last question, Dad. They want you to list your bad habits.”
“And how much room do they leave?”
“Two lines,” I laugh.
“Write small,” he says.
So I do. And while he lists a few, a longer list accumulates in my mind. He’s always late. He’s sloppy and absentminded. He chews with his mouth open and is prone to unforeseeable rages over nothing. He is controlling, willful, profligate in advice giving and matchmaking, even when people aren’t asking and don’t want to be set up. He’d rather talk than listen. He loves changing plans. He keeps you on the phone, even when it’s obvious you don’t want to talk. He writes postcards to people he hasn’t seen in ages. His bridge habit is actually an addiction that makes him miserable when he can’t play. And when he does, he gives too much advice to his partners. He remains a rabid Republican. He veers into the middle lane when driving. And lately, I’ve been appalled to see that, in addition to the ballpoint pens he keeps in the front pocket of his shirt, he has toothpicks that he pulls out at all the wrong moments. Like now. We are sitting among his fellow Centra residents, all out enjoying the late-afternoon sun on his building’s big terrace, and he starts picking at his teeth and making a sucking noise. Appalling.
“Dad, would you mind? Save it for your bathroom.”
Fortunately, he doesn’t take it personally today. But pity the poor date who dares to criticize him if he’s in the wrong mood. Who wants to marry my dad? There are days when I think nobody. And the more I talk about his dating travails to my friends, the more I hear similar stories. It turns out I’m not the only bemused child sucked into a senior father’s mating melee. One friend has an upstanding dad who picked up a woman on a commuter train and dropped her straight into the family without so much as a word of explanation. Two sisters I know are totally flummoxed by a shy Connecticut father in his seventies, very recently widowed, who has taken up with a married woman in her forties. I hear stories of men whose dying wives leave them lists of women they approve of for dating after they’re gone. I hear about an “intervention,” in which a family removes a father from a woman about to marry him and take him for all his money. One friend tells me that when her rapscallion dad moved into her apartment after his fifth divorce, he started lobbying her prettiest friends to set him up with their mothers. “I ended up racing to the phone every time it rang so he wouldn’t answer it,” she says. “It was horrible.”
My favorite story is one about a friend’s father in his late seventies, recently widowed, and also legally blind for thirty years. At his country club, the women circle around him like ducks to bread. One widow, in her seventies, white-haired and overweight, flirts with him, and he flirts back. She recently confided to my friend that she loves flirting with her father because the last time he was able to see her she was still young and thin.
In June, for my Father’s Day column, I write about Dad’s big hunt for new love in his old age, touching on both the amusement of knowing he still has so much potential ahead of him and the unseemliness of the notion that, at eighty, he wants to have what he calls intimacy with women. He’s a good sport about it and doesn’t seem to mind being material for me. He’s always trying to tell me what to write about anyway. So there’s some satisfaction for him in being my topic. And the column gets a good response. One reader, a woman with a seventy-one-year-old mother, is moved to write:
Dear Bob,
I have to admit, it was a bit of a shock when my mother called one day with the news that she’d started seeing someone. It was bracing, and at times even comical to hear her dating postmortems—how his sweet nothings made her hearing aid squeal, how he was lusting (lusting, Mom?) for her body (they definitely had it going on in the chemistry department). But ultimately, I took heart in their growing romance.
Such whirlwind love affairs are too often relegated to the young. What I’ve learned is that falling in love and desiring companionship isn’t the sole domain of the young at all, but something we crave regardless of age. The year Mom married, she had two friends, both in their eighties, who were smitten. One tied the knot that summer, another, at age eighty-five, went through a protracted divorce to leave her empty sixty-year marriage so she could be, at last, with a man who truly made her happy: her ninety-two-year-old beau. In hindsight, Mom’s romance has left me feeling hopeful. I realize that growing older doesn’t preclude our ability to tap into that heady, butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling of love. With the recent collapse of my own marriage, I take heart in the notion that I, too, have “all this potential” ahead of me.
Personally, I think you’re too focused on what you might lose instead of seeing what you and your dad stand to gain. So buck up and quit thinking your father needs you to manage his life. My guess is that he’ll do just fine out there and likely fall madly in love with someone who won’t be your mother—but who will ultimately make him happy.
And isn’t that what we want for those we love?
Yes of course it’s about his happiness, not mine. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to stop passing judgment. I have more opinions than anyone I know.
So many, it seems there’s hardly any room for feelings.