Waiting Dating and Mating: A Guide to Woman-Man Relationships in the Middle Years

A unique, comprehensive guide to relationships for adult singles (divorced, widowed, never-married). Detailed suggestions help the reader deal with, among other things, the shock of sudden singlehood, the impact of the women's movement, finding date partners, the first date, sexual expectations, living together, and creative wedding services. The illustrations by Jim Clark are wrily humorous, and sometimes hit hard.

The following is the beginning of the first chapter of Waiting, Dating and Mating.

Recently I flew across the country to visit my daughter in Pennsylvania. The stop-off was St. Louis, and I found myself sitting next to a young couple, happy and clearly in love. They wanted to talk to me, or rather the woman did, and I learned they were on their way to see her parents in Missouri. She hadn't visited them in some time, he never. His quietness right now, in fact, was due to a natural nervousness at the prospect of the imminent introduction to his prospective in-laws.

It took me back. Those were the days, when we had to make a good impression on our girl- or boyfriend's parents, in case they might one day become ours, in-law. And yes, I used to be nervous too, meeting such people for the first time, no matter how amiable I'd been told they were.

Yet there was something wrong. This couple sitting beside me in the airplane fitted into my memories perfectly, but into my present situation not at all; and it finally hit me. It had been decades since I'd thought about nervousness at meeting prospective in-laws. I'd been dating for several years since my separation, and I'd met many women in the hope that this time we might click in all the necessary ways. And many times I was nervous too, at the thought of meeting her relatives. But the relatives were not her parents. They were her children.