Male, Sexually Active Octogenarian in Senior Home - Sweet & Harmless, or Predator?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This article in HuffPost raised the question for me:

The upshot: author’s widowed father (now deceased) moved into a senior retirement community and has been emotionally, romantically, and presumably physically involved with a succession of female residents. Suggest you read the article (and the comments!)-- it’s pretty interesting, and I know I’m not capturing the nuances. Both Dad and partners (some of them) suffer from dementia.

A good friend of mine moved her widowed dad (who has dementia) into senior care a few weeks ago. It was too dangerous for him to continue to live alone-- gas stove, stairs, etc. He’s also well into his 80s and is a very good-looking man. I told my friend, “He’ll have a girlfriend by Christmas.” Well, he had a girlfriend by the following week.

When you get old you experience a lot of changes, some of them really unpleasant. However, one of the biggest surprises is what doesn’t change. The dining room at the senior home isn’t all that different from the middle school cafeteria. There are the cool tables and the nerd/reject tables. (In my mother’s assisted living center, they had assigned seating-- not a bad idea.) Some boys/men attract girls/women like flies, and some can’t get a date. And the biggest surprise? It’s that the rejection hurts as much as it did when you were 11, and the first flickers of affection, appreciation, and love feel exactly the same, too!

In a way the residents of a senior care home are more like the kids in a dorm than they are like independent adults in, say, an apartment complex. As the article points out, the author’s son holds the dad’s health care proxy. This can be as much a source of humiliation and irritation to the old folks as it was to the college students. At least, the college students can look forward to being independent eventually – the old folks, not so much.

It was the comments to the HuffPost article that got me asking the question in the title. Old people who have lost their spouses, their homes, their careers, and their active hobbies can still experience the timeless joys of flirting, desire, and emotional/physical union. Apparently the author’s dad was quite sexually active, but even barring that, kissing, cuddling, holding hands, looking forward to seeing that Special Someone – what’s the harm? I said to myself.

Yikes! Some of the commenters likened Dad to a sexual predator and condemned him the way you would a conquering frat boy who worked his way through a sorority house collecting notches on his bedpost! They thought his serial romances were disgusting, immoral, cruel, and damaging to his partners. (Even partners who couldn’t remember him from one day to the next.)

Other commenters took a position more like mine, i.e., what’s the harm? If these folks can have some pleasure, fun, relief from pain, loneliness, and boredom, why not? It’s not that there is no potential for serious and lasting harm, but don’t the joys of connection, even at the very end of life, make the risk worth it?

Like I said, read the article and some of the comments and tell me how you assess this situation. Have you faced this with a parent or older relative? Do you see “hooking up” in the intramural hothouse (as it were) that is a nursing home as one of the last potential perks of old age, or a moral outrage that must be controlled? Or something else?

2

I may or may not have more to say later, but I would definitely have a problem with someone of high mental faculties having sex with someone with lower mental faculties. That part about someone who wouldn’t remember you from day to day definitely seemed like a bad thing.

That would be my first instinct of where potential ethical problems might lie—the part where someone might be taking advantage of someone’s mental state.

3

Prudes will always be with us.

4

Given the survival differential between males and females, the old guy at the nursing home has the odds in his favor, for sure. But as has been said above the issue of mental faculties does play into this, in both directions. Take, as an example my late father in law. As a younger man, he did a lot of physical activity, ran, sailed, etc. But he ultimately had dementia and lived to be 91. Almost to the end he was a prime physical specimen for a guy his age and had a “girl friend” or two at the home. Could it be argued that they were taking advantage of him?

5

It’s a fraught situation. “Consenting adults” takes on a new meaning when both have varying degrees of dementia and when another family member holds your power of attorney. Does this indeed reduce you to the level of a child who no longer is considered legally able to consent? Does the word “legally” even have any relevance here?

And the phrase “taking advantage of…” – what does that mean if no money changes hands, no wills are rewritten, no one gets pregnant, and no one is intentionally and cruelly dumped? (Maybe one of the partners just dies, ya know?)

6

Maybe I missed it but I didn’t notice anything about predatory behavior in that article. And based on what I’ve heard it’s the women who are likely to be the predators in those places. Just what I’ve heard, not fact, but I don’t understand the sudden leap to assume terrible behavior. We are talking about adults, most likely they’ve all had sex before, and as mentioned no one is getting pregnant,

I guess all the shock and horror about kids and sex has become tired and to replace that the moralists have be disgusted by their parents exhibiting the kind of behavior that made them their parents in the first place.

7

My BIL lives in an assisted living facility due to a stroke. He is currently at about 75% of his pre-stroke condition. He complained a few months ago about all the older women in the facility that have asked him to stop by for a little fun in the sack. My wife told him to go for it, better then paying for a hooker. Well apparently he listened to her, a female resident of the facility let my wife know yesterday that she enjoys my BIL’s visits to her room.

8

As someone who’s getting up there, age-wise, I can easily see myself in that environment. I see nothing wrong with it, as long as it’s consensual, non-exploitive and responsible.

9

Question: what makes a relationship “exploitative”?

Here’s a definition of exploitative: making use of a situation or treating others unfairly in order to gain an advantage or benefit.

Senior home flings strike me as the very essence of “no strings.” It’s a closed environment, each party is paying their own way, their time is their own, they’re not taking time or resources away from family or work obligations-- kind of like a potential perpetual Love Boat cruise that will never dock (in this world). Possibly one person is more mentally on the ball than the other, even more than in their former lives, but is that really a problem? If there’s fantasy involved, what is the downside of that?

I guess I’m still thinking about the buzzkill Morality Police in the HuffPost comments who wanted the dad in the story locked up for being a sexual predator.

10

No, I was merely referring to the cases where an able-minded person (of either sex) was making the moves on a person of compromised mentality. I was ruling that out as something that should be permitted.

11

Well said.

The problem is that in most of those places, everybody is at least a little mentally compromised versus their 60-yo self. Trying to measure whether he is more or less impaired than she and which is the “aggressor” of the relationship is a fraught task. As is measuring when a little impaired shades into fully oblivious.

POAs, guardianships, and such are for managing the affairs of people who can’t, or won’t manage their own business affairs. My aged MIL is becoming forgetful, but otherwise seems to think just fine. But she can’t be arsed to pay her bills, so I do that as one of her trustees. Mom may not want to pay bills, but I know she enjoys the attention of the few men at her independent living facility. I strongly doubt she’s having sex with anyone, but I think she’d be fully within her sphere of competence to decide yes or no.

Imagine two 25 yo Down’s syndrome patients with a “mental age” of around 10 who live in an in-patient care home facility and have “consensual” sex. What exactly is consent for folks like them? Is that sex OK? If not, why not? What does the answer to this scenario tell us about the elder one?

12

Agreed. Unfortunately there will be grey areas (heh) and I’m glad I don’t have to make decisions around this kind of thing. At some point it must be as arbitrary as an 18 year old being able to consent but a 17 year and 364 day old not being able to.

As long as both parties are happy and it is legal.

13

They could go back to saltpeter in the lunchroom. Like they did when his sexuality was inconvenient at the other end of the age spectrum.

14

a friend of my cousins worked as the super in some senior semi assisted living apartment buildings its a fenced off set of apartments where they have on ground things like movies and there’s a restaurant and van trips ot the mall and stores and the like and everyone has their own apartment

he said some of the things that went on make the golden girls look like nuns … there were swinging/orgies parties complete with booze and pot (it was also where he learned what a “key” party was) it got to the point that they required most residents to get a monthly STD check and he had to have one of the workers come in with him when he fixed something otherwise some of the men and women both would hit on him and he was cornered a few times

(and to be honest we wondered if he said yes to some of the nicer girls )

there even were rumors that one or two of the younger female aides quietly left and had a baby 6-7 months later …

he left about after two or so years because the Caltrans position he was in line for opened up

15

:astonished:

Soon to be a 12-part miniseries…

16

And it would be just as ineffective now as it was then (if it ever actually happened at all, which is very doubtful).

17

If a person living in a captive environment sough socialization in the only accessible venues, why would the term “predator” even come to mind?

18

Because some people are less able to give consent than others.

19

So, we also need an upper age of consent? Its statutory rape below age 18 or above age … what? 60? 70?

20

My dad lives in an assisted-living facility. My mom died several years ago, and since then he’s been spending time with a few different women, and we’re pretty sure he’s been intimate with one of them. Privacy is maybe the biggest challenge: staff seem to be constantly checking in with residents, so spontaneity is kind of a thing of the past.

Run-of-the-mill assisted living is for people who are too physically frail to manage daily tasks and/or maybe a bit too forgetful to manage a long list of daily medications. I’ve visited many times, and thinking of his neighbors, they all appear to be reasonably capable of consent. Residents with substantial dementia, whom you might expect to be unable to meaningfully consent to intimacy, do not live in run-of-the-mill assisted living; they are kept on an entirely separate floor of the facility with controlled access and much more supervision, and I’d be surprised if they were engaging in those kinds of activities.

Bottom line, I’m not terribly concerned about issues of consent under these circumstances. And the rest is nobody’s business but the two (or more?) people involved.