When DeeDee Tate talks about her husband, she sounds like the happiest person alive. She laughs and laughs. Last summer, at age 67, Tate was married for the first time. She and husband Jay Harmon, 70, met the previous January and, considering their stage in life, decided time was of the essence. “It was a blue moon,” she adds. “Quite literally.” She laughs again and says it was pure coincidence that she and Harmon picked that particular July day in 2015 for their wedding. (Technically, a blue moon is a full moon that occurs as the second full moon in a given month.)
Tate, a residential sales specialist at Gladys Manion, met Harmon when they were set up on a blind date by mutual friends. Neither imagined marriage was in their future—Harmon’s wife of 44 years had died three years prior and Tate had come to terms with her single life. “Marriage? Oh, no, no, no,” she laughs. But the courtship happened lickety-split, and by Valentine’s Day Harmon had asked for her hand.
Tate says she had never even been engaged before, but did have a couple of near-misses. “It was never the right time or place. Never the right person.” Harmon says he certainly didn’t think he’d meet anyone else after his previous wife. “Blending families is a complicated business, so finding someone without those attachments made it easy,” he says.
From Tate’s point of view, however, Harmon’s ‘attachments’ have become a source of great joy. She went from having one immediate living relation (her sister), to having more than 50. She is now the proud mother of four, grandmother of four, and aunt to 43. “What an inheritance,” she says. In part, Tate attributes Harmon’s love of his family to her love of him. “It was a good indication that he was a kind and gentle man. And that is what I fell in love with.”
Harmon says he thinks love is different in later life because the concerns and expectations are not the same. “The first time around, your emphasis is on children and finances and building the family home. But now I’m simply looking for companionship, for someone who has the same kinds of likes as I have,” he says.
Tate and Harmon, who is retired, divide their time between St. Louis, Florida and Iowa, where Harmon is from. Tate says the adjustment to married life after 67 years has been easy. “It’s remarkable,” she says. “You’d think that after being single so long it would seem peculiar to be with another person all the time. But it hasn’t been strange in the least.” They were married at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion on Delmar Boulevard and held the reception at Washington University’s Knight Center. Tate says the moon was shining down on St. Louis that night. “We saw it,” she says. “It wasn’t blue, but it was beautiful.”