At the end of Wedding Plans, I included a very unscientific study of later-in-life romances that I gleaned from wedding announcements in various public sources. The newlyweds ranged in age from their nineties to a “youngster” of thirty-nine who married a man in his sixties, so I kept her in the sample.
The romance novel genre defines “later in life” as in your forties. Really? Forty is later in life?!? A meeting I attended recently defined “seasoned,” another term for later-in-life romances, as main characters older than thirty-five. Sigh. That’s just wrong.
With our current lifespan numbers in the US, that’s just midlife. In January 2026, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that life expectancy for women is 81.4 years. For men, it’s 76.5. Of course, individual life expectancy varies a great deal with things like where you live, ethnicity, family genetics, your health practices, and so on. My later-in-life romances are about sixty-year-olds and older.
In my sample of thirty-seven, there were three couples in their nineties, six couples in their eighties, six couples in their seventies, nine couples in their sixties, nine couples in their fifties, and four couples in their forties. I kept the forties because they were in their late forties and, in two of those cases, had never been married before.
I’ll share other details about how they met, what they were looking for, and why they decided to get married in a later post. For now, I want you to think about these newlyweds. Nineties. Eighties. Seventies. Sixties. Fifties. Forties.
Doesn’t this just give you hope? Hope that if you want to get married, it’s not too late. That the right person is out there for you. For some of these couples, it was what the French call a coup de foudre: love at first sight, a lightning strike. For others, it was a slow boil. They got to know each other as friends, started dating, worried that falling in love might ruin the friendship, and then fell in love anyway.
Do you have your own later-in-life romance? Tell me about it. I love to hear your stories. Go to my Love Is for Any Age page, scroll down to “Your later-in-life romance,” and tell me yours. I can’t wait to hear it.
