Sex, Love, and Nursing Homes

[La_Serpiente]

Sex, Love and Nursing Homes

Forget bingo: for some frisky senior citizens, romance is the name of the game. Why intimacy matters to the Medicare set

Dec. 15 issue — At 86, William DePippa is one hip dude. Sporting an earring and suspenders, he sparked the interest of Rosemary Gould, 62, a kindly grandmother who lived down the hall at the Barn Hill Care Center in Newton, N.J. In a six-month courtship—much of it spent on the porch talking bingo and gardening—they fell in love. “Nobody bothered,” says Rosemary, who has diabetes and congestive heart failure, “to come see what we were doing.” A week or so before marrying in September, they moved into the same room at the home, pushing the beds together. If they wish to be undisturbed, she says simply, “We keep our door closed.”

NOT SO LONG ago, the desires of senior lovebirds would make care administrators blanch, says Barbara Cox, who runs Barn Hill. But now homes for the aging are facing the facts of life: the fires of romance still burn at twilight. With people living longer and healthier—not to mention popping Viagra—there’s more on the minds of some nursing-home residents than just the next visit of Christmas carolers. Some of them want romance. Not so long ago, nursing homes treated residents like children, or inmates, incapable of making their own decisions. But today many enlightened facilities are respecting the wishes of their clients. “You want to give them dignity and privacy,” says Cox. “Just because they’re in a nursing home doesn’t mean they can’t have feelings for someone else.”

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Enjoying the fruits of life

[Gore1FL]

1. I heard a quote froma senior citizen about this

He said "What we used to do all night, now takes us all night to do."

[izzie]

2. Interesting Alaska put in rooms for the old to go into for.........

It was needed as how can you tell 65 and up that they can not have sex? The joke was do not tell their children as they would stop it. Most of us students that were doing this study and going to the old peoples home were wondering when the Christian Right would stop it as they were taking over that state in the 80's.