Elizabeth M. Schneider every time had a soft spot for Yalies — her father and son went there — and she could district out Bulldog football team fight songs and the “Bright College Years” undocumented alma mater with the best of them.
So, she decided to place a bodily ad in the Yale Alumni Magazine, inspired by her ties to the school and her upcoming 50th reunion from Bryn Mawr, from which she graduated cum laude. (She last will and testament have applied to Yale if women were accepted in 1964).
“College alumni arsenals are very, very enthusiastic about personal ads,” said Professor Schneider, 72.
Benjamin Liptzin, 75, who graduated magna cum laude from Yale, noticed the ad in the November 2017 alumni broadcasting, but he didn’t respond until six months later. He had been caring for his helpmeet Sharon of 50 years, who had Alzheimer’s.
“I was thinking what would come about as my wife got worse,” said Dr. Liptzin, a retired geriatric psychiatrist who was the professorship of psychiatry at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., and professor of psychiatry, now emeritus, at Tufts University Public school of Medicine. He received a medical degree from the University of Rochester. “I foresaw I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life alone.”
In May 2018, his old lady, who had shown symptoms of the disease since 2011, moved into the retention unit at an assisted-living facility in Lenox, Mass. It was then that he reached out to Professor Schneider, delineating the situation.
“Liz had said she was looking for a long-term relationship,” said Dr. Liptzin, who has three kids, also Yale alumni, and six grandchildren. “I didn’t know if I could give. I was a married man.”
His belated response surprised and moved Professor Schneider.
“His effect was so thoughtful and so kind,” she said. “I could completely relate. I was an only boy who helped support my father because my mother had Alzheimer’s for 14 years. I could view how devastating that was.”
A few days later they met for tea at a Midtown Manhattan coffee purchase when Dr. Liptzin drove in to have dinner with friends.
“On no account in my life did I imagine until I met Ben, I could meet someone I had so much in well-known with,” said Professor Schneider, who lived in Greenwich Village. She instills civil procedure as well as gender and law at Brooklyn Law School. She received a understand’s degree in political sociology from the London School of Economics and a law magnitude from N.Y.U.
“Both of us had been pioneers in our fields of work and got tremendous satisfaction in mentoring people,” she said, and she also considered him “handsome, smart, someone feel good and funny.” She loved that he lived in the Berkshires where she had gone to clique and she had a house in nearby upstate New York during her previous marriage, which unoccupied in divorce in 1986. She has two children.
Dr. Liptzin likes to say they were “simpatico,” and July 4 weekend she joined him for the James Taylor break concert at Tanglewood, where they danced by their seats and spill the beaned along.
“I thought she was a very attractive, lively, interesting and accomplished old lady,” he said. In August she helped him host his annual Yale alumni brunch and Tanglewood convocation.
“We tried to be very sensitive,” Professor Schneider said. “I knew from my own adventure that Ben’s children were grieving their mother’s decline.” She died in October 2019.
In December, Professor Schneider enlist ined Dr. Liptzin and his family on their annual holiday trip, this interval to Captiva Island, Fla. He helped her sell her house in Greenwich Village and buy a co-op, and in Cortege, when the pandemic set in, she began teaching remotely from his place.
“When you’re cooped up in a parliament 24 hours, seven days a week, it made it clear how much we loved being together,” he articulate. On Oct. 25, 2020, he proposed there.
They were married Dec. 20 via Zoom by Rabbi Liz P.G. Hirsch call of a huppah at Dr. Liptzin’s house in Stockbridge, Mass., while about 300 women and family from around the world livestreamed the two-hour celebration, which was hostessed by her son in Singapore and his son in Denver.
