Danny and Nancy laugh a lot – big, wholehearted, body-shaking laughter at things that don’t even seem funny, but with a joy they can’t contain. They sit on the sofa, squished together. Danny had proposed to Nancy a few weeks earlier. A series of small events ensured they met in September 2017, on a train from San Francisco to Chicago. Danny, who had been travelling in the US, messed up his ticket booking, which meant he was on the same train as Nancy. She had been on a trip with two of her sisters and wanted to fly to Chicago but couldn’t get a seat. Nancy’s third sister hadn’t wanted to go on the trip, which meant there was a space at the table in the dining car at which the waiter seated Danny. “I said, ‘Do you ladies mind if I join you?’” says Danny. “Nancy looked up and said, ‘It would be our pleasure.’ Within five minutes she had me laughing.”
“When he came to sit with us I just wanted him to feel comfortable,” Nancy says. “Then he entertained us all night long with lovely stories. He told the most delightful stories about his wife and I thought that anybody who thought that well of his wife would treat any woman wonderfully.”
Nancy told Danny later that she always asked potential partners about their previous relationship. “If he rubbished her,” says Danny, “she dropped him. I said, ‘You never asked me about that.’ She said, ‘I didn’t get a chance – all you did was talk about Eileen.’”
Danny and Eileen were together for more than 40 years until her death in 2014. Working in mental health, Danny knew he wasn’t coping afterwards and had bereavement counselling. When he retired in 2016, he wanted to spend a few years travelling as a way of keeping busy and moving on with his life. “I never thought about dating anybody,” he says.
Did it feel strange to be with someone else? “Oh my God, yes. To me, I’d met my soulmate, the universe had given me my share of happiness and I thought that was it.”
Danny’s daughter encouraged him to join lots of clubs after her mother died. “When I told her about Nancy and said, ‘How do you feel?’ she said, ‘Dad, why do you think I told you to get a social life? You and Mum were so happy, I wanted you to find somebody else.’”
Nancy had been single most of her life. “About 10 years ago I just sort of gave it up,” she says. “It was very freeing to say, ‘I don’t care: I’m going to be happy for me, I’m going to do what I want to do.’
“I never expected to have a relationship again. This was quite out of the blue.”
After swearing off men, what is it like to have a boyfriend? “You know, I never thought it could be so comfortable, and that to me is the best thing about it. Maybe it’s something that comes with age – you stop pretending, you stop trying to please other people.”
They spent the whole of the next day on the train together but didn’t exchange numbers when the journey ended in Chicago. Then Nancy posted a comment on Danny’s blog and they started emailing. “My wife made me laugh every day,” says Danny. “And one of Nancy’s first emails made me laugh out loud.”
“Our emails were about our interests and we agreed on so many things, could write pages of email at a time,” says Nancy. Then they started talking on the phone twice a day – their longest conversation was six hours.
In March 2018, Danny went to see Nancy in the US; he has been to see her three times and Nancy has been to Scotland twice. After her visit at Christmas, Danny proposed. How does it feel to meet later in life? Danny says: “I said, ‘Nancy, you make me feel like a teenager.’”
Nancy beams: “It feels miraculous.”
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