Dating After 50

When people over 50 date and fall in love, very different conversations are needed compared to lovers who are younger. Dating is the easy part, joining lives is where it can get difficult. How do you balance two houses, two jobs in different counties, two families, and two separate lives. Here are some steps we had to take.

1. THE SCALE BACK: As adults, we accumulate what we need to make a comfortable life (furniture, books, kitchen gadgets, bedding, appliances, and maybe even a house). Using our best reasoning skills, we decided which house would be better for our lives and began to prepare the other one for sale. Some people might choose to rent one, but that was not our choice. Then, we looked at our household items. We sometimes had quick decisions like which towels and sheets were in the best condition for keeping, but other times we had more emotional decisions that required careful communication. Narrowing down your life possessions, because we all know that two households can’t completely fit into one, can be time consuming, emotionally taxing, and complex. This challenge is the first step to understanding how negotiations will work in your relationship. Hopefully you can find the same balance we did.

2. THE ESTATE PLANNING: It should be a requirement that anyone considering marriage should have to complete a will, trust, and/or power of attorney before they can tie the knot. Tedious? Expensive? Scary? YOU BET! But everything you agree with in holy matrimony is defined within these documents. These valuable legal documents help organize the debts and assets of a union, define how your death should be orchestrated, and most importantly, describe how your life should be run if you become temporarily or permanently incapacitated. For the over 50 groups of newlyweds, there may be children, large debts, or unusual assets that need planning. In our case, we each had grown children and two houses. Therefore, in our estate planning, we chose to give complete medical and financial care to each other with one child each as a contingent.

3. BANKING: People over 50 who have been married before may come to the union with financial or emotional baggage. It’s important to have frank conversations with your new partner about how the finances will be managed. This should include responsibility of bill pays, saving plans, and investments. Some new couples join everything, some keep everything separate, some use both methods. If there is any union of finances, plan to spend a fair amount of time in the bank or on the phone adding the other person to your accounts. It surprised us about how much longer it took to add another person to all of our accounts than to simply open an account from scratch.

Combining our lives took effort, communication, and will. Some of these values appear to be fading in society, but we are proof that the skills still exist in humanity.