Heh, my MIL (who is 85) told me that Cher is 77 and has a boyfriend who is in his thirties. After informing me of this she waggled her eyebrows. She cracks me up.
Working in my building is an 80 plus yo widow. Lives on a cattle farm, fixes her own stuff, makes wood crafts, still drives her Buick. Apparently she’s quite the catch for feeble old men who pursue her relentlessly. She used to feel flattered now she says they just want her company to clean and cook for them and wash their clothes.
Buzz off!
There’s probably a lot of that in the older demographic, but somewhat less all the time. My Mom said such things 20 years ago. In 20 years when I’m old enough to be feeble I’m sure not looking for a woman for those purposes. Any more than I am now.
There are lots of good reasons to have a companion; them (or you) being the housekeeper for the other is not one of them.
My wife and I are childless. We had intended to have children, tried to have children, and it just didn’t work out that way.
When we were still pretty young (i.e., before we gave up on having kids), we invested in long-term care policies for both of us, when they were still fairly inexpensive. The premiums on those policies creep up every year, but it gives us a level of reassurance that, particularly when there’s only one of us left, we won’t need to worry about the issue.
Sounds like a good investment for peace of mind.
Question- say you end up in a nursing home and start receiving benefits from that policy. Will the premiums increase much? I’m assuming you have to keep up with premiums until death.
Depends on the policy.
Under my LTC policy, all premiums are suspended as long as you’re drawing benefits. If you stop drawing benefits the premiums may or may not restart depending on [details].
The premiums before that suspension are just based on your age and the rate of inflation in the care biz. Which could very well be pretty eye-watering 20 years from now when I expect I’ll finally start needing it.
I looked into LTC insurance when I was in my 40s. Upon seeing the premiums, at that age, I decided not to do it.
At my folks’ assisted living, it was the opposite. Women greatly outnumbered men. My dad said within days after my mom died, women were inviting him “to watch the sunsets” from their rooms!
When my late aged MIL was living in the independent living place the men there were great fun to talk to. They had a couple of real Lotharios there, and even the less forthcoming ones admitted they were getting more positive attention after age 80 than they had in the entire rest of their lives.
The goods are wrinkly, but the odds are good. Or something like that. 
I can hardly wait for my turn.
My mom’s oldest brother, who died in late 2022 a few days after his 92nd birthday, said the same kind of thing! He did remarry but the marriage lasted only a few months, and he later had an LTR that lasted until his own death.
A woman I worked with in my old town was telling us about an 89-year-old relative (IIRC, an uncle) whose wife died on Thursday and the funeral was on Saturday, and on Tuesday, 3 women knocked on his door with casseroles, and offered to also, ahem, keep him company. He appreciated the food but declined the other offers.
My father-in-law’s wife (my wife’s stepmother) died when they were both in their early 70s; my father-in-law was a handsome guy, and in good shape. They lived in a fairly upscale community, which was mostly retirees, and while the swarm of widows didn’t descend on him instantly after his wife died, it was pretty soon thereafter.
Both my mother and my wife’s are pushing a hundred. We don’t spend as much time with them as in previous generations because… they’re too busy for us!
Both are in retirement homes (that have assisted living or higher degrees of care when needed). We refer to those as their sororities. They have more planned activities than we do!
We’re happy that they’re spending our inheritances keeping busy, and that they have medical care when needed. But they don’t depend on us at all.
My late aged MIL spent the last 5 years of her life in an Independent Living place. And before that lived in a regular apartment on her own for the previous 5 years.
During both those intervals, but especially at Independent Living, she’d have been screwed had we not been around. They did an excellent job of taking care of the basics, keeping her fed, sheltered, entertained, and her laundry done.
It was everything else that needed family involvement. She had an hourly aide, but they were flaky, so every 6 months we had to assist her in finding another. Somebody had to monitor her finances, pay her (few) bills, do her taxes, and fix her PC when she clicked something random and “broke it”.
Somebody had to take her for a haircut, or to buy new shoes, or to the doctor’s. The aide could have driven her to the doc’s and sat in the waiting room, but if MIL interacted with the doc alone, she would not hear, understand, or remember anything the doc said. Nor would she do a quality job of explaining whatever her medical concern was. With us along, problems got explained, questions got asked, notes got taken, and we could explain it to her in simpler terms 5 times until she understood. And send that explanation to her in an email so she could read it again later when she got it mixed up again.
Those are sorts of the services an elder just can’t buy. Both because they aren’t really on offer commercially, and because as we get older, we eventually regress into a sorta lazy, sorta childish ineffectuality. Everything is too hard, too complicated, or too different than it was when you were 30. So it becomes undoable. As the list of adulting necessities you can’t / won’t do grows, the wheels slowly fall off your life. Even if your health and mobility are still decent.
As I said upthread, eventually we become sort of a wrinkly 8yo. An 8yo thrown into the big wide world stands no chance, even if they have a safe place to sleep. A sobering thought for this particular childless 65yo with good longevity expectations.
I’m reminded of my MIL’s life long bachelor Uncle in his 70’s who found love with an older woman and married. When asked why he decided at his age to get married he said She had the loveliest wrinkles of any women he’d known. 
This post could have described my Mom in the last six years of her life after Dad died. Had my wife and I not been living in the same town, Mom would have had an incredibly difficult time managing her affairs and living her life. I paid her bills, drove her to appointments, and ‘fixed’ her PC countless times.
As @LSLGuy can probably attest, this duty does not come without sacrifices.
Compared to trying to care for someone’s physical needs in my own home, Mom was a small burden. A persistent burden, but a small one.
She had the good graces to become dead one night in her bed before she became difficult or mentally truly incompetent. So I never suffered much for doing the right thing. But I can honestly say I was girding my loins for the battles I knew lay ahead.