Dr. Ruth Shares a Final Lesson After Her Death: How to Live Without Loneliness (Exclusive)

Dr. Ruth Westheimer knew how to make — and keep — a friend.

If you were lucky enough to sit down with Dr. Ruth, says author and New York Times writer Allison Gilbert, she might have ended the conversation with a question: "When will I see you again?"

Then, Westheimer would pull out her big monthly calendar and figure out a day and a time to reunite. That's what happened to Gilbert when she first met Dr. Ruth for an interview in August 2023 — and that's how Westheimer ended each meeting they had thereafter.

"It was an example to me of her secret sauce," says Gilbert of the sex therapy guru, who died in July at the age of 96. "It demonstrated that you can't leave connections to chance — if you want to have a friendship, you need to make it a priority. When you were in her presence, she had the ability to make you feel that you were the most important person in her day."

In the last several months of her life, Dr. Ruth was largely confined to her New York City apartment after suffering several strokes, but she was devoted to a project to help others fight loneliness and find ways of connecting with the rest of the world.

That project became her last book, The Joy of Connections, out today and co-written with Gilbert and Westheimer's longtime friend and publicist Pierre Lehu. Although Dr. Ruth didn't mean for it to be her final work ("Even when the book was coming to completion, her question to me was, 'What's next?' " says Gilbert), it's a fitting coda for a life fueled by the power of human contact.

Westheimer became a pop culture icon as Dr. Ruth in the '80s with her frank advice about sex and relationships on her radio, and later, television shows. "She had a remarkable ability to make people feel special, feel seen, feel heard, and feel valued," Gilbert says.

But in her last year, Lehu says, she was focused on a different problem, sparked in part by the surgeon general's advisory in May 2023 calling loneliness an epidemic in the United States. She even reached out to New York governor Kathy Hochul to offer her help — and was given the honorary title of Ambassador to Loneliness.

"I think she had done almost everything she could do with sex," says Lehu says. "She'd answered every question. And suddenly there was this announced epidemic of loneliness, and that was something she knew about very well from her own life."

Born to a Jewish family in Germany as the Nazis rose to power, Westheimer lost both parents to concentration camps and was in an orphanage by the age of 10.

"She pieced together a chosen family after her own was wiped out in the Holocaust," Gilbert says.

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Westheimer rose to prominence as a no-nonsense advocate for healthy sexuality, removing the shame from talking about sex. She wanted to do the same thing for loneliness.

"At her heart, she was a teacher and wanted to impart this final lesson of inclusivity: no matter our differences, there's no shame," Gilbert says. "And we can talk about it with the same amount of openness that she talked about sex."

Her new book is a guide to fighting loneliness, written as a series of action steps: "Throw Parties," "Have Family Game Night," "Bring a Prop." "Think visually," she writes.

"Put on a T-shirt with the name of your high school or college... Place a few stickers on your laptop... A carefully chosen prop can signal your interest and affiliations. Without saying a word, you've made it easier for like-minded individuals to initiate a conversation with you."

The book, like Westheimer's approach to sex therapy, is intentionally practical, says Lehu. "She always said she wasn't looking for the underlying cause of a sexual problem," he says. "It was a step-by-step approach. Sex therapy to her was more like carpentry than it was like digging into your self and trying to figure it out. What can you do to fix the problem? It's the same thing with this book and loneliness."

Westheimer knew "small steps can lead to big changes," Gilbert says. "If something felt too big and unwieldy, it would feel like something you can't even begin to tackle."

And Dr. Ruth's own life was an example of how to make positive changes.

"She never accepted any excuses for herself, so she didn't accept excuses for anybody else," Lehu says. "The book is not someone BS-ing you. It's somebody who had a very hard life, and yet she more than overcame it. I hope the reader says, 'If Dr. Ruth could do this, this little 4-foot-7 person, I can do it too.' "

One of Dr. Ruth's recommendations has particular personal meaning: "Embrace Your Inner Turtle," Westheimer writes.

"It's about remembering to stick your neck out and take risks," Gilbert says of the symbol, which was a favorite of Westheimer's — she had hundreds of miniature turtle figurines, many given to her by fans over the years. Since her death, her family has been giving them out to special people in her life, including Lehu and Gilbert.

"It's a prized possession," Gilbert says of the turtle gift she received. It is, she says, a reminder of her friend and of her brave and loving approach to life.

"She wanted people to take risks in order to live a bigger life. For her, a bigger life meant one full of real, meaningful relationships that can bring you joy and actually make you live longer. So even if it's hard, even if we would prefer not to stick our necks out, even if it's easier to stay home, she would urge us to keep pushing ourselves because the bigger life is outside the front door."

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The Joy of Connections is available now wherever books are sold.