This is Dating While Gray, the grown-ups guide to love, sex, and relationships.

I'm Laura Stasi.

And if you need some inspiration because you're starting to feel like you'll never find the one.

This episode's for you.

Three stories of unexpected love.

I've been told that if I'm serious about wanting a long-term partner, I need to become

intentional about finding him. And while this advice makes a lot of sense to me intellectually,

I'd still like to believe that when we stop trying so hard and just let it be, love will magically make its way to us. So that's

why when I was scrolling through Twitter one day, I was so excited to come across this tweet.

It's from a woman in California named Carol.

Okay, here's what I said. Life is so strange after nearly four decades of marriage,

I never expected to be single again at 70. And I certainly didn't expect to find true love at the age of 73 in the middle of a pandemic, and now this, and it's a picture

of my engagement ring. And it actually got 1.1 million likes. Carol's tweet went viral. Isn't that

great? Though I noticed in some of the replies that assumptions were being made based on Carol's age and long marriage.

I decided to track her down and learn her story.

I wanted to know, is there anything I can't say?

Well, that's up to you.

I mean, is there anything that shouldn't go out on the airwaves?

Again, that's your... This is not live, so it's your story, however, you feel comfortable

telling it. Let's break it down a little bit. Why was your singlehood or singleness? Why was that

unexpected? I think a lot of people thought you ended up as a widow, but that's not the case.

No, I'm not widowed. No, I was married, as I say, for 37 years, and it wasn't a particularly

...