Groups Like ROMEO May Help You Live Longer

(Aug. 23) -- Social relationships increase our chances of a longer life by 50 percent, according to a recent study by a pair of Brigham Young University professors.

The absence of a connection to family, friends or colleagues, the researchers say, has a negative impact equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day or becoming an alcoholic.

The study compared the frequency of social interactions of participants to the state of their health over a period of about seven years. Those with more connections, positive or negative, had by far the best outcomes.

I talked about those results with some members of a loose-knit network of male elders known as ROMEO, for Retired Old Men Eating Out. They weren't much surprised. More than most, they understand the importance of friendship, especially as you age.

"A lot of our guys, when they were still in business, would go out and socialize at lunchtime," Harvey Pierman told me. "When they retired, they lost those connections, and they felt bad about it."

Pierman is a 68-year-old retired engineer, a member of a ROMEO club in Payson, Ariz. He taught himself how to create a website and built one for his club in 2004. Since then, Romeoclub.org has grown to include the individual pages of some 30 clubs around the country and links to dozens more that call themselves ROMEOs. And all that doesn't begin to encompass the hundreds of regular but nameless luncheon gatherings of retired men.

I belong to one such. There are just four or five of us who meet at a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan every couple of weeks. Without any prior knowledge of the physical benefits of friendship, we are all quite conscious of the psychological value of our sessions. It's impossible for any one of us to remain down in the dumps once the banter begins.

As we soon discovered, the lunch meetings of retirees are very different from their pre-retirement counterparts.

"People don't pull any punches," said John Davis, a 72-year-old member of the ROMEO club of Wayne, N.J., who worked in information technology. "Not that we're rude, but we no longer have to worry about what would happen if what we say got back to the boss."

ROMEOs come in all varieties. There are 80 members in Harvey Pierman's group, though more like 25 show up regularly at the 11 a.m. Saturday sessions.

There can be several conversations going on at once, and the only topic officially off-limits is politics. "All that would do is start arguments," Pierman said. Many of the members are newcomers to Arizona who had left their hometown friends and family behind and were eager to make new friends.

John Davis' group has 17 members and has added a Wednesday morning meeting to the Saturday morning sessions that started almost 15 years ago. (It was then called ROMEOS, for Retired Old Men Eating Out Saturdays.) "If somebody has something to say," Davis reported, "he stands up and we all listen. We don't do multiple conversations anymore." Club members also travel together to such destinations as Las Vegas and Monmouth Race Track.

In our small group and some others I know of, the talk tends to be surprisingly intimate -- far more so than any similar gatherings before retirement. Conversations that start out with medical updates on the state of our prostates, say, can -- and do -- end most anywhere. Relationships with families and spouses are definitely on the table.

"We let loose because we have less to lose by being open," one writer friend said. But another cited an Australian study suggesting that age-related changes in brain function explain elders' loss of inhibition -- our willingness to ask and answer potentially embarrassing questions in public.

I prefer to believe we have, consciously or unconsciously, recognized that sharing important parts of our lives with friends yields closer bonds. We understand that it's essential, especially for those elders who live alone, to have people who will care enough to stay in touch. They can come in handy if you have a fall or a heart attack that prevents you from calling for help.

Millions of older people are on their own, their spouses, whom they relied on for companionship, having left them by way of divorce or death. But making new friends at an advanced age is difficult. The pool of candidates is limited, and there's a tendency to hunker down emotionally and stop reaching out to people.

That's where ROMEO and its tea-time female counterpart, the Red Hat Society, come in. They provide an opportunity to meet other older people who are also seeking to make friends.

"What sweetness is left in life if you take away friendship?" the Roman philosopher-statesman Cicero asked. "Robbing life of friendship is like robbing the world of the sun."