Nursing homes are helping residents find love
A nursing home in the Bronx in the US is helping its residents look for relationships in new and novel ways.
The Hebrew Home nursing home has organised regular happy hours, a senior prom and even started a dating service called G-Date (Grandparents Date) to ensure residents who are looking for relationships have ways to do so.
And many care home residents are looking for relationships. According to the Hebrew Home, about 40 out of 870 residents are involved in relationships, and that’s not counting the ones that want to be in one.
Beverly Herzog, an 88-year-old widow, told The New York Times, she missed sharing a bed with her husband, Bernard. She’s ready for a new relationships, saying, “I hate getting into a cold bed. I feel no one should be alone.”
Daniel Reingold, the president and CEO of RiverSpring Health, the organisation that operates Hebrew Home, explains that growing old is often focused on loss: the loss of vision, hearing, mobility and even the loss of loved ones.
So if residents are looking for a new relationship, a new love, then why should nursing homes be the ones to deny them?
“We don’t lose the pleasure that comes with touch,” he said. “If intimacy leads to a sexual relationship, then let’s deal with it as grown-ups.”
Eileen Dunnion, a registered nurse who has three couples on her floor at Hebrew Home, said she encourages her patients to take a chance on “later life” relationships, reminding them, “You get old, you don’t get cold”.
In the last year, dozens of people signed up for G-Date, with half being matched by social workers and set up on a date on an on-site café.
“We’re not giving up,” Charlotte Dell, the director of social services, said. “We’re going to get a wedding out of this yet.”
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