“I still will talk about orgasms,” Dr Ruth Westheimer said during a conversation over the summer. “I still will talk about sexual dysfunction. But I have done that.” She had recently turned 95, and after a long and spirited career as America’s most famous and least likely sex counsellor, she was driven by a new challenge.
“So now I am going to say, let’s go and see how we can help people who don’t have a sexual problem,” she said. “I don’t want to be known only as a sex therapist. I want to be known as a therapist.”
For Westheimer, this has meant turning her attention to what she views as the biggest need right now — the epidemic of loneliness in the United States. Her new goal: to become the Loneliness Ambassador for New York state.
When she began her quest last year, no such position existed. So she enlisted the help of a state senator and began petitioning Governor Kathy Hochul to create the role.
Directly lobbying the governor for a job is generally not how Albany works. But Westheimer, not known for her patience, can be tenacious and is rather persuasive.
And so on Wednesday afternoon, following a query from The New York Times about the likelihood that such a position was even being considered for her administration, Hochul called Westheimer and offered her the job.
“Dr Ruth Westheimer has offered her services to help older adults and all New Yorkers cope with the loneliness epidemic,” the governor said in a statement sent after the meeting, “and I will be appointing her to serve as the nation’s first state-level honorary Ambassador to Loneliness.”
For Westheimer, it was welcome news.
“Hallelujah!” she said in a text sent directly after speaking with Hochul. “I am deeply honoured and promised the governor that I will work day and night to help New Yorkers feel less lonely!”
Early in September she had suffered what she called a “little stroke”. She spent a month and a half in a rehabilitation facility and has only recently returned to the apartment in upper Manhattan where she has lived for 60 years.
She said she needed to meet with the governor’s staff to make a practical plan, but was eager to get to work. “The first thing to do is have the courage to admit you’re lonely,” she said. “Then you can do something about it.”
The cost of loneliness has been discussed for some time, but in May, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an official advisory, warning that isolation can be just as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day and poses a greater risk to longevity than being sedentary or obese. Several senators have also taken up the cause.
Loneliness was on the rise before the pandemic but escalated because of lockdowns and social-distancing requirements.
And Westheimer felt the effects first-hand.
“Covid hit her hard,” said Miriam Westheimer, her 66-year-old daughter, who cared for her mother and brought her meals during those beginning solitary months.
“She loved going out. She never had food in the house because she almost never ate dinner at home. She’d just eat out almost every night and bring home some leftovers for the nights that she was, by chance, home. This was a total, dramatic change for her.”
The elder Westheimer insists, however, there was at least one upside to her confinement. She was grounded long enough to recall having written in her childhood diary about feeling lonely. And she had the time to look for it.
She found it.
‘I live with 150 people — and am alone’
The diary, started in 1945 when she was 17 and written in her native German and sometimes in Hebrew, recounts in painful detail what it was like for her to grow up in a Swiss children’s home during World War II.
Before her explosive rise to stardom as America’s sex therapist in the 1980s, Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel to an Orthodox Jewish couple in the German town of Wiesenfeld.
She was 10 years old when she was put on a train to Switzerland, part of the Kindertransport of Jewish children seeking refuge from the Nazis. It was January 5, 1939. Her father, Julius, had been taken from the family home six weeks earlier, and her mother, Irma, and grandmother, Selma, were offering her what they believed was her only chance to survive.
Once she made it to the children’s home in Heiden, a village in the east of Switzerland, she was kept safe for the duration of the war, but she felt unmoored from her surroundings and disconnected from the people around her.
When the war ended, she boarded a British naval ship with hundreds of other refugees to what was then Palestine, before the establishment of Israel, to remake her life once again.
She joined the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organisation that predates the Israeli military, and changed her first name from the German-sounding Karola to her middle name, Ruth, keeping the middle initial “K” with the hope that her parents, if they were still alive, would be able to find her more easily.
And she devoted herself to her new diary.
“I live with 150 people — and am alone,” she wrote on July 13, 1945, while still in Switzerland. She confessed to “longing for a friend” and pleaded, in an entry a week later, for someone who “loves and understands me”. In October, living on a kibbutz near Haifa, she lamented that “everything is bleak, grey and empty”.
An only child who never saw her parents and grandmother again after boarding that train, she recounted feeling completely alone on her 19th birthday. “Nobody is congratulating me,” she grieved on June 4, 1947. “All the congratulations I’m reciting to myself!”
Reading the diary now, Westheimer recognised the parallels between human sexual problems and struggles with loneliness. No one wants to admit to having trouble with intimacy, and no one wants to admit to not having enough friends.
‘Meaningful busyness’
Throughout the 1980s, when Westheimer gained national celebrity, the epidemic that carried the most stigma was Aids. She addressed taboo topics including homosexuality and condom use, giving those who were being shunned and tormented much-needed information and compassion.
Her advice was easier to take, she determined, because it was offered by a “matronly woman” with a non-threatening demeanour and a charming accent.
She wants to do the same stigma-bashing for loneliness. It just “makes sense”, she said.
So with the pain of her diary fresh in her mind, Westheimer reached out to state Senator Liz Krueger, a family friend. Encouraged by the UK’s appointment a few years earlier of a minister for loneliness, Krueger wrote Hochul a two-page letter, putting forward Westheimer as New York’s first Loneliness Ambassador.
Shortly after that, Westheimer said, she and Hochul spoke about the role via Zoom, but then weeks passed. A multimillion-dollar affordable-housing development in Ithaca required the governor’s attention, and then she made a trip to Israel after the attacks of October 7.
So while Westheimer was waiting for an answer, she conceived of an initiative to combat loneliness on her own.
She decided that making a cheery public service announcement about isolation would be a great start. She had been collaborating with a creative team on a concert based on her books about grandparenting, Ruth Grandmother to the World, part of her extensive work to bridge generations.
A recording session took place in August, featuring the singing of Pearl Scarlett Gold, 10, who was part of the Broadway cast of Leopoldstadt. The result is an upbeat jingle about intergenerational friendship that will be given to the New York City Department for the Aging for its use and distribution.
Surrounded by framed photographs of her children and grandchildren in her curio-packed living room in Washington Heights, Westheimer said she understood loneliness not just through the prisms of Covid-19 and adolescence, but also as a widow. Her husband, Fred Westheimer, died 26 years ago.
The key to working through any hardship, she maintains, is to continually embark on new projects and to help others. But being busy isn’t enough to keep loneliness at bay, Westheimer warned — it is “meaningful busyness” that is crucial.
So is intentionally curating your social circle. “If you feel lonely, don’t be just with other lonely people,” she said. “That’s not going to be productive.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Allison Gilbert
Photographs by: Gabby Jones and Aaron Richter
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
