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Is
Loneliness a Senior Citizen Epidemic?
By
Sherman N. Miller
6/23/1991
We often hear people focus on love as the
girder that holds marriages together.
Yet this sterile view ignores the roles played by companionship
and commitment in a long-term relationship.
Successful marriages evolve through three
stages. Love dominates
roughly the first twelve years.
During these formative years, commitment establishes a beachhead
and begins to displace love's dominance in the relationship.
Commitment evolves into the glue that keeps the families together
while love oscillates from emotional highs to lows for the next 13
years.
Divorce is not an option during this cyclic
love period because commitment counterbalances minor irritants.
A skillful spouse prepares for this stressful period by making
his/her mate become dependent on his/her personal skills and talents.
They know marriages held together on guilt (e.g., small
children), socioeconomic status, and so on end in the divorce court.
After 25 years, companionship comes to the
surface as a treasured commodity.
Children are almost independent.
Ones maturity, with its associated physical limitations, reminds
one of his/her mortality.
The above scenario has meaning when seen
through the eyes of a couple of recent events.
At a Pennsylvania retirement party, I ran across a chap I had not
seen in roughly ten years.
During our conversation, he poured forth about his late wife.
His comments perplexed me because I
remembered him as an unemotional chap who is highly fact oriented.
I, then, read his emotions to appreciate fully his comments.
His dry tears (emotional crying without shedding a tear)
of loneliness took me aback.
A couple of weeks later, the specter of
loneliness again haunted me.
It was in the eyes of a silvery haired chap setting alone in the
waiting room of a Wilmington, Delaware hospital intensive care unit.
Despair emanated from this chap's eyes.
His cry for help was very enchanting, so I struck up a
conversation with him.
He proudly pointed out that he remained
married to the same lady for 58 years.
He argued against divorce because he could not imagine anyone
gaining from a new spouse.
This senior fellow felt that my 28 years of marriage rated both of us
the title of Neanderthal men.
Once we established an emotional link he
gushed out, "She has a bad case of cancer.
They assured me that she will make it."
He felt helpless to comfort his wife in her suffering.
Dry tears immediately covered his face.
The thought of being forced to be a mere
sympathizer for his wife's plight gnawed away at him.
He spoke of many friends calling him, nonetheless, loneliness
remained his greatest companion.
When he could no longer contain it, he poured forth over the
special companionship that only his wife can provide.
As America grows older, loneliness will
become an epidemic for senior citizens.
This emotional crisis is fast approaching the point where
loneliness makes the nation gullible to foreign exploitation through
targeted propaganda campaigns.
However, we must make certain that the domestic con men and women
don't bilk this national crisis by making senior citizen scams
tantamount to hitting the daily numbers.
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