Study Highlights What We Can Learn About Relationships From Older Adults

Older people report having happier relationships. Here’s what you can learn from them.

Our social scripts are the stories we tell ourselves about how relationships and sex should be. One of the most persistent scripts is the relationship escalator.

You may have heard about this by now. It’s this vague idea or fantasy that people have that tells them relationships must go something like this:

• Two people meet.
• They date one another for a while.
• They start dating exclusively.
• They have sex.
• They decide to become an item.
• They move in together.
• They get engaged.
• They get married.
• They have kids.
• They grow old together, live boring, sexless, joyless lives, and die.

Each of these bullet points is a step along the relationship escalator. Each step up represents an escalation of commitment. The point is to dissolve yourself and your independence in the other person.

So vivid is this idea in our minds that it’s hard for younger people to imagine sex and dating after people turn fifty. We assume that by the time people hit 50, they’ve already had kids and have forged themselves with the parental identity.

We don’t think about what love, dating, sex, and relationships are like for older people. We envision an elderly population as being lonely and isolated.

Sex, Love, and Friendship

And while social isolation and loneliness among the late-middle-aged and elderly exist, it isn’t the whole story.

A 2011 study of people over 50 found that 72% of the people between 50 and 60 were sexually active, and 57% of the people 60 and older were sexually active.

A 2019 study found that 60% of the people over 60 had sex within the past few months.

You might be surprised to learn that most people over the age of 65 are unmarried, and 6% of people over 55 have a Tinder account.

In other words, the relationship escalator is bullshit.

It’s a young people's bias.

Plenty of late-middle-aged and older adults have a vibrant social life. Some fall in love, others remarry, and some even decide to stay single and date around, perhaps having casual sex.

Relationships Get Better With Age

An interesting finding from a 2012 study is that relationships improve as we age. And I don’t just mean sexual relationships. I mean relationships of all stripes.

A 1998 study found that older adults report having more satisfying social lives than younger folk. A 2007 study found that older people report having more positive encounters with the people they care about. And the 2012 study above did more than confirm this trend — the study authors sought to explain why.

Older people have fewer conflicts and fewer negative social experiences.

While some of this can be chalked up to the process of aging, shifts from competitive orientations to cooperative orientations, declining hormones that make everything seem a bit less intense, and more, a lot of the things older people do to make their relationships better are things that people of any age could implement.

Smaller, Tighter Social Networks

It’s a fact of life.

The older people get, the fewer connections they have in their social networks. Their social networks get smaller. Friends die, spouses pass away, and people lose touch with friends over the years. But at the same time, the freed-up headroom creates stronger bonds with the people who are left.

We build our networks when we’re young and maintain the important ones when we’re old.

There’s power in saving your scarce time and energy for the people you really care about and not trying to befriend the whole world.

Older people have better relationships because they’ve trimmed the fat around the edges.

They Become Allergic to Negativity

I’ll never forget my ex-girlfriend’s grandfather. He was a sweet, southern man with charm and a permanent smile — the kind that would light up a room. His wife, on the other hand, whom he’d been married to for a half-century or more, could get moody.

He had this uncanny ability to defuse her when she was at her worst moments. A harmless, well-timed joke seemed to be the magical incantation that snapped her out of whatever temporary worry and stress she had.

And when people brought their negativity to him, expecting him to become emotional, he artfully made light of the situation in a way that could make them laugh.

This man had discovered negativity repellent.

Sometimes, people would try to get a rise out of him. They’d try to intimidate him or bully him. But he never fell for it. He always kept his cool and focused on the positive aspects of life, ignoring the negativity like he was allergic to it.

And he was continually reshuffling the deck. He was constantly choosing the people he allowed in his life based on the value they provided him — things like having mutual goals, a shared sense of humor, and not being a Debbie Downer.

This tracks with the science.

Choose Your Friends Wisely

It’s called Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST), and it’s a theory that states that we choose our friends based on how they make us feel and our goals in life.

What’s super interesting about SST is the fact that it’s relative to our perception of time. Remember when you were young and wanted to build lifelong friendships with everyone who made you feel slightly good inside?

Remember your first time falling in love? You expected it to last forever and to unfold with the relationship escalator? Because you felt like life was going to last forever.

20th-century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre came up with a brilliant concept: we begin to die the moment we realize we’re not going to live forever.

When we’re young, the natural tendency is to build lifelong relationships that have profound meaning, even if we’re not sure what that meaning is.

When we get older and realize our days are numbered, we stop focusing so much on the future and learn to enjoy the precious moments we have left.

When we’re young, we tolerate work colleagues we don’t really like in the name of “building connections” and “getting ahead.” We invest a lot of time and energy into purely transactional relationships, and we forget the present moment in the meantime.

We can either be focused on the happiness of the present moment or obtaining future happiness — but rarely can we focus on both simultaneously.

Focus on what matters and be happy.

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