Susan Rosenberg Jones, Footsie, 2017, inkjet print, 16 x 20 inches, $800.

After having been married for 32 years my husband passed away in 2008, after a long illness. Once widowed, I experienced the confusing and mixed feelings of grief: guilt, loneliness, regrets, indelible memories of loving glances, hugs, and laughs. In 2009 I decided to try online dating because I wanted to meet a man for an occasional movie or dinner date.

The second man I met online was Joel, and we felt a bond right away. Soon after, I closed my account on JDate. We married in January of 2012 in a lovely ceremony at home. I hadn’t expected to fall in love, but I did. To my surprise and delight, I found that I could deeply love this wonderful man who entered my life, while holding dear the memories of my first husband.

Having been in a long-term marriage, I came to this new relationship with the tools in place to be a good wife. We quickly fell into the routine and ease of being a stable married couple, except that we were newlyweds in our 60's. There is humor in that. For one thing, our bodies are not supple and streamlined the way they were when we were young. We both come with a lot of baggage, and at our ages, it’s no big deal, nothing to get excited about. We’ve both seen a lot, done a lot, and have higher thresholds for idiosyncratic behavior than in our 20’s and 30’s.

In this series, Second Time Around, I delight in observing my new husband as he goes about living day to day. We both know that life is short, and perhaps because of our new found love and comfort, we can journey through this life with a certain enthusiasm. We feel secure, yet we know we’re lucky. - S.R.J.

Susan Rosenberg Jones is a portrait and documentary photographer based in New York City. Her work explores themes of home, family, community, identity, aging, love, and relationships.  Susan was a Critical Mass Top 50 recipient in 2017 for Second Time Around and in 2021 for Widowed. Her work has been exhibited in solo and juried group exhibitions at the Center for Fine Art Photography, Baxter Street at CCNY, the Griffin Museum, Center for Photographic Art, apexart, and Panopticon Gallery, among others.  Recent publications include: Lenscratch, Strange Fire Collective, Float Magazine, F-Stop, Memory Orchards, and On Covid.  Her first monograph, Second Time Around, was published in December 2023.