All they remember is that they were on an elevator. But what do the details matter now?
A year ago, Bill Miller saw her standing there and was dazzled by her beauty. He asked her name and she told him: Jeanne Hamilton. He dropped her a smooth line.
"Sounds like a movie actress," he said, grinning like the Cheshire cat. She got off the elevator at Sunrise Senior Living-Brighton Gardens Assisted Living of Pikesville, flushed, intrigued.
The next day, she saw him again, and on an impulse, blew him a kiss. They've been inseparable ever since.
It's a classic tale of boy-meets-girl. Except in this case, the boy is 99 and the girl is 84.
"It was love at first sight, actually," said Miller, just after a gallant show of kissing Hamilton's small hand, which he will hold at a Valentine's Day dance at the center today.
"We're lucky," Hamilton said.
Experts say it takes more than luck to find love late in life, or to keep the fires burning well into the senior years. With more Americans living longer, tales of long-term love and late-blooming romances offer lessons to today's Match.com generation.
"They really did grow up in a different social-historical context," said Finnegan Alford-Cooper, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Stetson University in Florida who is the author of For Keeps, a study of 576 couples who had been married 50 years or more. "Their values and beliefs about love and marriage were really quite different."
In surveying couples for For Keeps, which came out in 1998, and a subsequent study of 540 other longtime spouses, Alford-Cooper found that nearly all the seniors were adept at putting their mates and families before themselves.
"They grew up with a sense that you had to make it work, you had to hang in through the difficult times; you can't just bail out when things don't go your way," Alford-Cooper said. "They felt that younger people were more selfish and more self-centered than [the seniors] felt they were growing up."
Seniors' perspective on romance helps them not only to stay in relationships but also to find new love - even in the winter of life.
Alexis Abramson, a lifestyles gerontologist for Retirement Living TV, said there are a "growing number of single people who are mature adults." Some struggle with feeling unattractive or with grown children who are not excited about them dating again.
