"As soon as we got together she said, 'I want to take care of you the rest of your life,"' Bernie recalls. So they got married in October, spent their honeymoon dancing around the multipurpose room at Tenth East, and return twice a week to dance some more. They take turns staying at each other's house.

Vyrl says that at first her children told her she was too old to get married. But they've accepted it, she says.

In her book "Love Stories of Later Life," former University of Utah professor Amanda Smith Barusch tells the stories of several older adults who "restricted their romantic involvements out of deference to their children." Sometimes it's a fear about future inheritance. Sometimes, it's what author Robert Butler calls "a primitive childhood need to deny their parents a sex life."

"One of the biggest myths in our society," says geriatrician Baraldi, "is that old people don't have physical desires."

Or don't long to be touched, even platonically. At a book group of widows that Helen Rollins facilitates at the Sandy Senior Center, one woman asked bluntly, "How many of you miss being touched?" For the next 90 minutes, the book was ignored and the women spoke of missing hugs and that moment when someone rests a hand on your shoulder. One woman said the only touch she gets now is a handshake at church.

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When you get old, says one 89-year-old man, you still want a relationship. His seven-year-romance with an old friend is challenged by her rheumatoid arthritis and his multiple eye surgeries. She lives two states away, and they've only been together a dozen days in the last three years. But they spend hours each week talking on the phone, and he hopes that some day they'll get married.

People don't like to be alone at night, he says. This is what he has missed since his wife died, and this is what he longs for as he's lying in bed in the middle of the night: He wants to reach over and touch someone and know, in this moment, that he's not alone.

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com, lois@desnews.com