Dating Deborah Kerr

I'm seventy-two and widowed but I'm not in bad shape. I can walk around the block without a cane, which places me in the top ten percent of my age group. I may even have an exaggerated sense of my social possibilities because I was at this wine tasting last week and immediately approached a rather shapely blonde who could not have been older than forty-five. I'm a little reticent socially but I'm ok at a wine tasting because I know something about wine and I'm fairly confident that I won't say anything incredibly foolish. In fact, the blonde seemed attached to what I was saying, whatever the hell that was.

I was working my way toward asking her what she was doing after the tasting, when she said, "You know, you are terribly interesting, and I wonder if you would like to meet my mother."

Now I know you think I made up this story and I wish I had. But it actually happened, word for word, and it tells you something about how I see the world. Just because I can walk around the block and play a little racquetball I actually think I could be interesting to a forty-five-year-old.

We seventy-year-olds don't see ourselves at all. Everyone tells the same stories: When we're riding the subway and someone says, "Would you like my seat?" we all look around to see who he is talking to.

We do hear stories about older men and younger women, and that is ok with me. I'm also ok with older women and younger men. Generally, I'm ok with everything, my feeling being that we don't make rules for other people. But you do have to ask what is going on when an attractive forty-five-year-old wants to date a seventy-year-old man. Either it's money or she wants a father, two needs that may not encourage a healthy relationship.

There's nothing wrong with an older man wanting to be in bed with a young woman. I mean, what man would not have wanted to be in bed with Marilyn Monroe? The error is in thinking that there can be a meaningful social connection or even a marriage. Even if it could work, five years later the man can no longer walk around the block while the woman is energetic and in full flower. And I don't even want to go near what happens when they go to bed.

So this is the elderly dating scene, the only subject in the world that I am an expert on. And since I'm so smart and well balanced – although you might ask why I was flirting with the forty-five-year-old – I have proceeded to explore dating on the Internet, which, I am told, has resulted in a number of successful relationships. The only trouble is, I don't know how to get on the Internet.

But I do have a computer and I am resourceful. I'm ceo of a publishing company and there are a lot of people in the office who could arrange my Internet social life. But I can't become the office soap opera so forget about that idea. They say necessity is the mother of invention and I put an ad in the newspaper for a college student who would come to the office and handle the computer dynamics. He or she wouldn't care one bit who I was having dinner with, who I was going to bed with, or who was telling me to get lost. I'm just an abstraction to the college student; the mechanics of the computer is all that matters, and also how much I am paying them.

So the first college student appeared for the job interview, and of course any fifth-grader can handle the Internet – not much skill is involved. Nevertheless, I did want someone who displayed some maturity and discretion, and would not run all over the office telling everybody at the...