Him+17

What if?

2012-01-27T14:27:00.002-05:00

Laura Linney gets real with younger man Topher Grace in P.S.

What would you do for a second chance?

That’s the tagline for the 2004 movie P.S., which we watched a few nights ago, having put it on ourNetflix queue as another older woman/younger man love story. Louise, a 30-somethingdivorcée played by Laura Linney, is still mourning the death of her high schoolboyfriend many years earlier. Now she meets a younger man who has his name, hislooks and his affinity for art. Hasher dead boyfriend returned? Naturally, complications ensue.

The movie didn’t dwell on the age gap (about 15years), which was refreshing. The storyhad more to do with the ex-husband, the best friend, and sibling tensions.Still, it got me thinking about the idea of do-overs.

I’ve written about just this thingbefore: the summer boyfriend spurned, killed in a car accident and then mythologized. In my case he returnedin a dream to deliver a message about Michael, just when I needed to hear it.

Do-overs aren’t always so transcendent. I’ve moved back toplaces I’d lived before: Connecticut, Montana, Baltimore. I quit smoking atleast 10 times before that final cigarette 22 years ago. Lost weight, gainedweight, lost it, gained, lost again. For writers, revising is a kind of do-over. Planting new seeds everyspring? A do-over.

But the fantasy of getting a for-real redo – erasing largeblunders and small goofs, getting things right after all these years – seemshardwired into human nature. What if?It’s an engaging vehicle for movies and books – in one2009 book , a 48-year-old guy goes back to kindergarten and his prom night.But what if, instead of looking backand trying to redo your life, you could realize that what you might want to doover is in front of you right now? In the movie, Louise reconciles with herbrother and lets go of the ex-husband as she recovers the balance she had lostwhile living in the past.

My friend Courtney put up a recent blogpost that put this in perspective for me. A wise woman who just turned 32,she wrote about how her life has moved from the leading edge of journalism to anotherfrontier that she loves even more: the husband, toddler, the hard work andjoy of farming in central Montana. She’s surprised at how her life has turnedout – it’s the last future she imagined for herself, but now that she’s in it,she has no regrets, doesn’t want a do-over.

Life is hardly ever what you imagine it will be. Michael andI have each abandoned places we love in order to be together. We’ve struggledto pay the mortgage some months, watched our dogs die, had arguments over sillythings. But I've never wanted a do-over. And sometimes he’ll whisper into my neck, “Will you marry me?” Meaning: I’d do all of it, all over again.

I'm a grouchy bear.

2012-01-15T09:52:00.000-05:00

Isn't the Cougar phenomenon so 2009? Isn't it history yet?

Apparently not at the ad agency that put together the newest ad for Dr Pepper. Accompanied by a pop-jingle refrain "I gotta be me," people in the ad rip off their everyday clothes to reveal a red T-shirt with a self-describing logo in white. The first? "One of a Kind." The second? "I'm a dreamer." The third?

Bleech. And of course, the young hero of the ad gives our lady a second look. But! at the ad's end, he chooses the perky same-age brunette with the "I'm a Dr Pepper" Tee.

This cougar stuff? Aren't we all ready for it to end now?

Pillow talk

2012-01-10T12:12:00.003-05:00

The newest issue of Baltimore Style magazine includes conversations with married couples of severalstripes, a la the couch-couples from WhenHarry Met Sally, except they're not all old. Style's got your multiple-marrieds,your newlyweds, your younger man and older woman…

Yup. We’re included, too.

If you want to read the piece, you’ll have to buy a copyof the magazine ($3.95 at the newsstand); Styledoesn’t put all of its articles on its web site. Having already read the piece we wrote, we were more interested when Style arrived to read what other couples had to say, and thus we offer you these gems:

from Tom and Micheline McManus, who have had three weddingceremonies and plan another for 2018:

• “Getting married again (and again) is our way of saying,‘I love the person you are now and continue to become.’ And maybe that person will learn how to iron.”

• “We thought we didn’t want a big wedding, that we didn’tneed it. But we were wrong; through the warmth and laughter of the peoplegathered that day, our idea of marriage changed. There were more than two peoplein a marriage, and that was good.”

• “Each wedding has come with an expansion of the guestlist, and a reminder that as we grow and change we need to make our promisesout loud all over again.”

from Erik and Polina Hansen, married three months

Polina: “It’s always a holiday when he comes home.”

Erik: “I don’t have to impress her, but I still try.”

from Heather Moyer and Amy Sens, married in 2002, at achurch in Cambridge, Mass.

Heather: “That was before it was legal, but Massachusettssaw how amazing our wedding was and said, ‘We should legalize it!’ ”

Ron Smith and Julia Felscher, married 15 years

Ron: “I’m a real dreamer. I always want to do things withoutthinking them through. Julia is more of a realist.”

Julia: “I crush his dreams…”

Ron: “No, don’t say that!”

Julia: “I like the fact that he’s a dreamer. It brings outpossibilities that I may not think about.”

Parker Mount and Laura Calhoun, married eight years (hisfourth marriage, her second)

Laura: “For a while his family just called me ‘No. 4.’ Theydidn’t even bother to know my name.”

Parker: “They didn’t even bother with the word ‘number.’They said, ‘Four.’ ”

Laura: “I took it in stride. But they came around. You haveto have a sense of humor about it.”

Frank and Eva Manfire, married 61 years

Frank: “My grandmother used to have this woman come into thehouse to help out and she was like a fortuneteller. One day she told myfortune. She said in a few years you’re going to get married and you’re goingto have a nice wife, but, I hate to tell you, she’s going to die right away.You’re going to be living with her a few years and she’s going to pass away.Well, I guess that was wrong!”

There you go. Now, what pillow talk do you have to offer?

In Our Cups

2012-01-02T10:38:00.001-05:00

For the New Year (in which we wish you happiness) we have new cups. Readers may remember Michael’s paean to a favorite coffee mug, broken by his wife a year or so ago.

In it he revealed that our preference in cups mirrors our preference in mates:

“I like a cup that’s been around, that has character,” he wrote.“I like a cup that tells stories.”

“I like a fresh cup,” I told him after replacing his well-worn Polish National Home mug with a happy polka-dot version. “A clean one. One that’s new.”

For Christmas, Michael’s sister Susan gifted us each with a new cup suited to our tastes. A bright yellow wake-up-cheerful version for me. Perched atop the handle is a perky piece of poultry, maybe a rooster, although it’s hard to say. Sleek and tapered, the cup says “modern.”

For Michael, solid stoneware with an aqua glaze and lovely curved handle. A mellow mug with many stories, coming as it does from his parents’ cupboard, his father’s hand. What Susan didn’t realize was that the mug has even more history than that for Michael. He remembers the neighborhood women from his childhood coming home from Vermont vacations with hand-thrown mugs by Paul Gordon, of which this is one. This mug says “tradition.” It says “1970s.”

Tell me again, just who is the older person in this marriage?

Dear B-Frank...

2011-12-11T15:58:00.001-05:00

Dear Ben,

Colonial-era sexy

My history professor, who is an old woman and frankly (that’s a pun) kind of hot, had us read a letter you wrote so we could talk about how sex worked in theColonial era. I raised my hand and said that sex probably worked the same then asit does now, you know, with Jell-o shots and certain body parts, but myprofessor (did I mention that she’s hot?) means that people didn’t talk about sexthe same way or maybe have the same expectations, like the guy didn’t justleave afterward, or maybe he did, but then the next day he ignored herhand-written notes instead of pretending not to get her texts.

My professor (legs like Beyonce’s!) told me we had to writeyou a letter back. So here it is.

If you watch E! now, you’d think no one ever went out withan old woman before Demi Moore. But your letter shows that it’s old school! Iguess that proves what my professor keeps saying: history shows us we’re not so special, and whatseems new is probably just unfamiliar.

I’ll tell you what’s unfamiliar. When you say old women aregrateful that you date them, I can say honestly that is not my experience. I’vehooked up with a couple of cougars, some almost thirty-two, and it wasn’tlike they were grateful at all. B-Frank, let me tell you: My high schoolfootball coach was less demanding than them old ladies. You hook up withan old woman, you’ve got to meet some serious standards. Tuck your shirt in.Pick the French fries up off the car floor.

And Ben, I know your face is on the C-note, but I don’t thinkthat means you should call sex “commerce.” It’s funny to think of sex that way, butmostly these days it’s illegal.

So, all in all, it is an interesting letter you wrote, and I admire your sexpertise. I don't have as much personal experience as you, but I'm paying careful attention when you say that old womenget lax in the upper parts while staying plump and firm in the lowers, so youcan’t really tell a woman's age in the dark. Let’s hope that’s true for you, too,old man. Because you’re still a couple hundred years away from Viagra.

Your affectionate friend,

Zits and the Older Woman

2011-12-01T07:33:00.001-05:00

Jeremy swoons for teacher.

Find Wednesday's entire strip here.

Modern Love

2011-11-28T07:39:00.001-05:00

They sit apart in the photo and together, two artists, sheat her loom, he lighting his pipe. She is Danish, he is African-American. He is34 or 35. She is sixteen years older. They live in Denmark and have beenmarried five years.

Sheri and I saw their photo last week at an out-of-the-way museum that is also an historic estate overlooking the Rappahannock River nearFredricksburg, Virginia. The day we arrived, a traveling exhibit presented theart of William Henry Johnson, an influential Modernist who did most of his bestwork from about 1926 until the mid-1940s. He is the man Sheri and I saw in thephotograph, lighting his pipe.

Lofoten Island, 1937

And what an artist! His canvases show range, dynamism, and awillingness to explore. European expressionism in his work gave wayto something like cubism, gave way to what he called “primitive”two-dimensional art. Talented and experimental, he decided at a young age that,“I am notafraid to exaggerate a contour, a form, or anything that gives more characterand movement to the canvas.”

Born poor in South Carolina, Johnson later studied art inNew York City. A mentor helped him raise money to visit Paris in 1926, and itwas in France that he met a Danish weaver/artist named Holcha Krake. Sixteenyears apart in age, the couple married in 1930, traveled throughout Europe andNorth Africa to study art, and settled mostly in Denmark to paint and to weave.

In 1938, fearing how invading Nazis would react to a blackman married to a white woman, they moved to New York City. They continued towork, even exhibiting together, and Johnson began his shift toward colorfultwo-dimensional primitivism.

Six years later, Holcha died of breast cancer. By allreports, Johnson’s grief tipped him away from what might have already been afragile sanity. He painted a year or so more, then was institutionalized at astate mental hospital in New York, where he lived the rest of his life, neverpainting again. He died in 1970.

“Don’t let that happen to you,” Sheri said.

Jitterbugs, 1941

We were the only people in the gallery, alone with Williamand Holcha and William’s art. We left their love story and went to look again athis painting of a couple dancing the Jitterbug.

Kaput

2011-11-20T09:36:00.001-05:00

Advice from the Times of India

2011-11-13T03:02:00.001-05:00

“Would it be right,” asks the Times of India in a recent article, “to say that despite growing in numbers, theolder-woman-younger-man-relationship always comes with a very short shelflife?”

My goodness. One hopes not.

Saif and Amitra

Well, the Times offers me as proof, there is the breakup ofMadonna and Guy Ritchie. And Courtney Cox’s split from David Arquette. And ofcourse the divorce of that young pup Saif Ali Khan from his 12-years-olderwife, Amitra Singh, after a 13-year Bollywood marriage. Even that most famed ofCougar unions, DemiAshton, reports the Times, is in danger of disunion.

Oh, yes. Thefamous couples.

Putting aside the fallacy that the lives of the rich andfamous are evidence of anything except the lives of the rich and famous, I’mgoing to give writer Haimanti Mukherjee credit for interviewing a relationshipcounselor for advice that could keep a HimPlus love affair going. That advice–mostlydirected toward women–seems fairly solid. In summary, this is what the Timessuggests:

1. Women needn’t act their man’s age. They need to act theirown. He didn’t fall in love with a woman his age; he fell in love with you.

2. Just because the woman acts her own age doesn’t mean shegets to mother her man.

3. No couple does everything together, and that’s also true forolder women and younger men. So what if she wants to watch “The Breakfast Club”one more time, and he wants to run up the side of a mountain? It’s okay to letyour partner enjoy his age sometimes without you; and you can enjoy yourswithout him.

4. Refrain from asking over and over, “Why did you fall foran older woman?” If you keep asking, he might eventually wonder, too.

All good points, to which I might add only this:

Don’t fall for a movie star.

Why I Love the Man I Love

2011-10-28T12:18:00.000-04:00

And how it has nothing to do with age.

He taught me to love dogs;
Every day, he teaches me (and this is often a struggle) tobe more patient;
He eats my sour-cream-almond apple pie;
He asks for more apple pie;
He always makes the small world larger;
Watching a bird, a star, or a spider web, he can also makethe large world small;
He sometimes uses spices named “elk rub” or “venison rub” oneggs;
He looks terrific in a suit;
He knows what’s happening in Kashmir;
He loves to dance;
When I ask for the 80^th time, he turns the TV onmute to explain – for the 80^th time –what an onsides kick is;
He likes duckpin bowling;
He always knows where he’s going;
He wears a silver Hopi bracelet;
When he shot his first deer, he wanted not only to gut it,but to skin and butcher it himself, to know where the meat came from;
He did not want trophy photos of the dead deer but let hisfather take them anyway because dad was proud of son.
His sense of wonder has not diminished;
He lets me put my cold hands on his warm, bare skin;
He knows that angels can dance on the head of a pin, or to aVan Morrison song, or in a good single-malt, or in a well-turned phrase.

Is it creepy to have a crush on a 19-year-old?

2011-10-16T21:21:00.001-04:00

Yesterday,we celebrated my 47^th birthday. It’s a nothing-burger of a number,so undramatic that I actually forgot my age. Sheri had to remind me. Turns outI’m younger than I thought.

Butam I young enough to have a crush on a 19-year-old woman? Or is it creepy? Doesit make a difference if she’s my wife?

Fora month or so now, this photo has sat in a frame on my desk. Where it came fromor how it rose to the top of our pile of old photos, I’m not exactly sure. But whenI saw it, I wanted it on my desk. It’s the young woman, aged 19, who will oneday be my wife, and she’s careening down the slope of a famous Michigan sanddune named Sleeping Bear. Frankly, if Sheri were turning 19 again this year,she’d probably still be running down that slope. The more things change …

Butshe’s not 19. She’s 63. And when this photo was taken I was still pooping mypants and saying “No!” a lot.

I’vewritten before about how Sheri in her 20s would never have paid a twenty-something me much attention. Sheri at 19, though, the young woman who is hurtling downthis hill – she might have liked a 19-year-old me, and I her. She is so much thewoman I love, before she is distracted by dangerous men in her twenties. Herworld is all sun and sand and picnic benches at the hill’s bottom, and earnestjoy.

Butwe didn’t meet, and couldn’t have, and so, in a strange way, all I’m allowed isa crush on her from a distance of some 44 years.

Sheridoesn’t seem jealous of the way I fancy her younger self. That makes sense. She’sstill married to the 47-year-old me, and that won’t change. And the part of methat’s smitten with a 19-year-old Sheri isn’t the part that’s here with hernow, and married, and which on my birthday hiked alongside her for five miles overa central Maryland mountain. The part of me that’s smitten isn’t even sittingat my office desk admiring her in black-and-white. It’s 19-years-old, just asshe is, and watching her from a picnic bench in Michigan in 1967, pleased andhopeful and impossible.

True love?

2011-10-12T23:51:00.000-04:00

The most famous woman in Spain, the fabulously wealthy 85-year-old Duchess of Alba, takes a 60-year-old husband.

What is there to say about this age-gap relationship?

Tree rings and crow's feet

2011-09-30T09:21:00.000-04:00

Mary’s comment on a previous post went something exactlylike this:

“Dude. Igotta say :o, she looks younger than you do.”

Why do people say I look
older than Sheri?

That bright light streaking through the heavens that youthought was a falling chunk of NASA space junk? Actually, it was an ascendingVenema–after reading that comment.

Me? I say, “Old news.”

There has always been a discrepancy between our actualbirth-certificate-certified ages and how old we look – or, more accurately, howold Sheri looks. When we started dating, I mistook her age for about a decadeyounger than she actually was. Shortly after we went public, Sheri’s friend, S.,said our age difference wasn’t visually apparent because I could pass for tenyears older and Sheri could pass for ten years younger. I could have taken thatas an insult, I suppose, but what I heard was “Michael looks mature enough to consortwith Sheri.” To which I thought, “Naturally.”

But recently, another friend–catching glimpses of us inphotos on the blog–wrote to us that “Michael is catching up” to Sheri, visually.And then there was Mary’s comment, that with fallow field atop my skull, crow’sfeet when I laugh, gray stubble on my chin, I’d passed Sheri by.

Over the last few days I’ve asked people who don’t know mewell to guess my age. The massage therapist said 45, the woman working thecounter at the Peruvian restaurant guessed 50, and the co-owner of our favoriteneighborhood restaurant said, “Hmmmm. 47.”

Those guesses were all in range, and the restaurant ownerwas scary accurate (wish me a happy 47^th on Oct. 15). Thisunscientific survey suggests that I actually do look my age.

What that means, exactly, I can’t say. How does someone look his or her age? What do we see ineach other that allows us to guess an age with remarkable accuracy, so much sothat “she doesn’t look her age” is the exception rather than the rule?

Veterinarians look at dogs’ teeth tartar to estimate years.Dendochronologists count tree rings. We humans seemed to be attuned to eachothers’ posture and hair, skin, fashion sense, and all those things add up to anumber. The number is necessary, somehow, or we wouldn’t develop the age-sense.Certainly, there are biological reasons, but perhaps we have social, tribal reasons,too.

Maybe, on some level, perceiving age is protective. On anoccasional weekend I walk across the campus where I teach, and surrounded byall that youth, I’m struck with a strange unnerving sense that the authority Ihave during the week has vanished and that I’m now an alien, an intruder, and Ithink about that famous Yeats’ line, and I leave as soon as I can, and hurryback to my wife who apparently looks my age, or younger, and with whom I alwaysfeel at ease.

Same as the Old Boss.

2011-09-19T09:41:00.000-04:00

As a friend wrote on Facebook recently, You don’t kiss andtell, and you don’t fight and tell.

Except, of course, when you write a blog.

“When are you going to write about how you two argue?” askeda young woman who is involved with an older man. She wondered whether an agegap could contribute/influence/lead to a verbal wrasslin’ match. So I said toSheri, “I think I’ll blog about how we argue.” And I mentioned something aboutauthority, etc., etc.

What happens? She steals my blog idea, and now the worldthinks I don’t know how to cut a tomato.

YOU WILL RESPECT MY AUTHORITAH!

I KNOW HOW TO CUT A TOMATO, SHERI!

You use a knife. Not a fork.

But it is true, I have more than once given way in argumentsout of a sense that Sheri is more experienced, with a better vantage from whichto see the world, and thus, bears a greater authority. From a young age I’verespected authortiy, wanting to believe whatever God, the Declaration ofIndependence, and Captain Kangaroo had to tell me. Becoming a newspaperreporter, I think, gave me a structure in which to learn to question authority.

Then came Sheri. And I had no newsroom to back up mychallenges.

Hot water in the ice cube trays makes the ice better? Coldwater in the coffee pot makes better coffee? Okey-dokey. We’ll do it your way.

And when I insisted my way was the right way, we got intosome of our most helacious cold-shouldered knockdown arguments. One was overchocolate chip cookies. I’ve never since tried to bake chocolate chip cookies.The marriage means that much to me.

But here’s something else that has happened over the years.Sheri has agreed that there are subjects in which I’m the champ. Where to getthe car fixed? Me. Installing light fixtures? Me. Picking a dog from a litterand training it? Me. Sense of direction and where we need to turn? Me.

And because she’s ceded authority to me in those spheres,I’ve found it easier and easier to speak up in other spheres when I question apoint-of-view she takes, or a method of doing things. After all, she didn’tmarry me because she wanted an employee. She wanted a husband. So now, twentyyears deep, my reactions aren’t based on a vassal-serf dynamic, nor are hers.Now, we’re better at listening to each other rather than playing semi-consciousroles.

So I get to cut the frikkin’ tomato any danged way I want.

You cut tomato, and I cut tomatoes

2011-09-10T11:26:00.000-04:00

Set your tomato preferences here

Michael told me this week that he thinks he often concedes to me in anargument. Because I’m older,because he first knew me as an authority figure (he was a reporter; I was aneditor, but not his editor), he still subconsciously believes, he says, that Imust always be right. This isn’t true all the time, but enough so that itapparently gnawed at him.

We’ve been talking about this lately because of an ongoingdiscussion regarding two rather quotidian items: how to cut tomatoes and vacuumwood floors.

Last week Michael asked me for the 875^th time inour life together how I like a tomato cut. (I like it cut across; he cuts from topto bottom). I figured he was just being passive-aggressive, because it’s notreally that hard to remember. So this time I just opted out. I don’t careanymore how you cut the blasted tomato, I said. Eureka! I realized that I really didn’t care how he cuts a tomato. It tastes the same. There is noright way.

Who's Who?

If I’m honest with myself, I can admit that having Michael think I was right all the time gave me a little ego boost. We both know I'm wrong a lot. (There was that time I was outraged in the supermarket checkout line to find David Duke, leader of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan, on the cover of a national magazine, only to have Michael tell me it was really Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman).

But we both fell for the myth (she must be right: she's older!) without even realizing it. Now, when I drag thatmyth out of the dark corner of my brain and into the light, it seems not onlysilly but dangerous.

I still think I’m right about the wood floors, though.

Getting past the fling

2011-08-29T12:21:00.000-04:00

We’ve been amazed and delighted by all the traffic on thisblog since Michael’s essay ran in AARP magazine. Andwe are tremendously moved by so many of your stories. One thing that I’venoticed as the comments have been piling up: Many of you women in relationshipswith younger men say you were more troubled by the age difference than your manwas. And some of you mention that your guy pursued you enthusiastically beforeyou believed it was for real.

Yum!

My experience was sort of the same: The age differencebothered me a lot more in the beginning than it did Michael. I felt embarrassedby it (can’t she get a guy her own age?)worried that I was making a huge mistake, and yet afraid it wouldn’t last.

On the other hand, Michael was wary about starting a newrelationship (he had recently ended a difficult one) and so he didn’t reallypursue me in the classic sense. He did bring me flowers once, but his early giftstended toward more practical things, like cheeseburgers for a late night at theoffice or the loan of a record album.

Here’s some of what our readers shared:

Practicallytwisted, who’s just starting a relationship witha man 18 years younger, said: I'm morepreoccupied with the difference than he is, I think, and I leap too far intothe future instead of remaining in the present where it is wonderful andexciting.

An anonymous poster, married to a man 12 years younger, wrote: He said to tell you he doesn't even thinkabout the age or the dying, but rather the living! I must admit that I thinkabout it though.

Dally, married to a man 9 years younger, wrote this after readingMichael’s piece: Until now I have feltrather isolated, as far as our age gap goes. But now I'm saying, "Wa-hoo!No big deal!" (which it has never been for my hubby) I'm 63 and he's 54,and we've been married 8 years.

Another anonymous commenter in a him+17 marriage for 21 years writes: I was more uncomfortable about the agedifference than he was at the start (he was 30 and I was 47) and now I can'timagine why I was so concerned.

But here’s my favorite. This, from KK, who has a younger boyfriend: I tell people that I did not rob thecradle, he robbed the grave! He pursued me until I finally gave in...thinkingit was just a whimsy and it wouldn't last.

I’m happy to know my experience wasn’t unusual. I wonder ifwe just can’t believe our good fortune in finding a soul mate and so we tampdown our expectations. I’ll just have afling, we tell ourselves, or it’ll befun as long as it lasts. And then, surprise! It lasts!

AARP's advice for Cougars

2011-08-18T22:56:00.011-04:00

How to be a cougar? First, get rid of the old-lady underwear. Go for the sexy stuff, advises AARP. Get a thong! A push-up bra! Garter belts!

AARP has joined the Cougar Nation. In “How to Be a Cougar: 7 steps to snagging a younger man,” author Pamela Satran tells older women to get flashy and trashy. Forget about “making love.” Just “have sex. ” Oh, and this: be sure to tell that young man how AWESOME he is.

“Let’s practice,” writes Satran.

Young guy: "I'm in my third year of law school." You: "Awesome!"

Young guy: "I'm into skateboarding and hanging out with my dog, Spike." You: "Awesome!"

Young guy: "Let's get naked." You: "Whoa there! I mean, awesome!"

We burned our bras 40 years ago for this?? Well, OK. I never did actually burn a bra, but I did have that “click” moment of radicalization so aptly described by Jane O’Reilly in the first issue of Ms. Magazine in 1971. (Mine wasn’t about lingerie; it was about being assigned to make coffee for the men in the office.)

Probably I never burned a bra because I had so few of them. I once had lots of lacy lingerie when I was too young to make much use of it. (Although my sister did introduce me to the man who became my first husband by saying, This is my sister who wears black underwear. That was in the pre-Gloria Steinem days. Thanks, sis.)

In the heady days of liberation, we protested being sex objects and trashed the Frederick’s-of-Hollywood look. Now, apparently, buying hot pink pushups is a way to feel good about yourself, for women young and old, married or single, cougars or not. That’s probably good, in a full-circle kind of way. But what about flaunting that slinky bustier? Some young women in the post-Steinem era seem to be reframing the underwear question in a provocative way, leaving little to wonder about. We are sexy, they say. But we are not sex objects. And we will not be told to make coffee for the guys in the next office.

Perhaps older women can take a lesson from their young sisters in the Advanced Lingerie department. But that advice about attracting a younger man by flashing your thong and pandering to his ego seems creepy to me. It prowls at the edge of an era when women thought they couldn’t be both sexy AND smart, when they believed they had to act stupid before a man would find them interesting. Really, AARP? Awesome?

That’s a little like asking, Coffee, tea, or me?

A hole in the shape of a child

2011-08-13T12:34:00.005-04:00

“Everyone has holes in their lives; mine justhappens to be child-shaped.”

That elegant description of childlessness comesfrom the blog Life Without Baby, where the writer, Lisa Manterfield, postedthis week about childlessness from a man’s perspective. She quotes me (I'm the man's perspective), and it's all part of a three-way blog conversation that began with a post published on the blog Childless by Marriage.

Childless by Marriage, in its post, referred towhat I’ve written here about how marrying an older woman meant that I’d likelynot have children (I also wrote about it here). Sheri’s written about childlessness as well. Our situation isn’t atruth for all age-gap couples, but it’s been a big part – or absence – in ourlives.

I don’t need to repeat what is in thoseposts, but for those who might be in a similar situation, this three-way blog conversationmight offer some worthwhile perspectives.

I Am Confused.

2011-08-08T22:28:00.000-04:00

Do me a favor. Read the following scenario, and note yourreaction, if any.

Woman, in a dull marriage, eats a glorious mealprepared by her son’s best friend. Her sensuous self re-awakens, and she tracksdown the young man, and begins a secret love affair.

Now, consider the same scenario, but change the sex of thecharacters. Make it a husband fooling around with his daughter’s best friend.

Are your reactions to each different? Mine are. And I’mstill trying to understand why.

The first scenario comes from the 2009 Italian film I Am Love. It’s a visually beautiful andarresting movie, an over-the-top melodrama lovingly filmed.

Emma (played by Tilda Swinton, herself at one time reportedly involved with a man 18 years younger if the Daily Mail is to be believed) is the film’s primarypoint-of-view character. Usually, we as audiences are conditioned to cheer forthe POV character, even when that person makes decisions we wouldn’t agreewith. In this case, as Emma began her adulterous affair with a younger man (herson’s best friend), I never questioned the rightness of her actions. I felthappy for her as she rediscovered joy. Apparently, her point-of-view had becomemine, because she didn’t question the rightness of her actions, either. Infact, the affair seemed right.

But as the movie reached its climax, a moment came when herhusband, still ignorant of her betrayal, treated her with as kind, generous,and loving a manner as any in the film. This startled me. Quickly retracingtheir marriage through the film, I realized that both of them lived within aconstructed life that forced them into stultifying roles. She had been left herhome and changed her name as part of the marriage contract; he had to submit tohis father’s will and share the company they’d founded with his son. Each gavepart of her or himself and in turn enjoyed great wealth and comfort. Terribleroles, terrible prices to pay. But within those roles, the movie portrayed hmas kind to her, sometimes even tender. I wondered what then had made me accept heraffair with a younger man? After all, it was a cruelty to her husband who lovedher and to her son. Perhaps it was that she was rebelling not against herhusband, but against a whole way of living.

But flipping the coin, I wondered would it have been as easyfor me to accept a movie depiction of an affair in which the circumstances were much the same butthe point-of-view character was the husband with a younger woman?

Sheri and I talked about this. The husband had the money andthe power, she said. If he had an affair, he’d still have the power. That’s onereason we cheer on Emma.

That makes sense, but it doesn’t completely satisfy me. Thisis more complicated, I think, than rooting for the underdog. This isn’t anunjustly convicted prisoner and his cruel jailer. To its credit, the filmmuddies the problem. Emma is a heroine as she celebrates life with her youngerlover, but by the end you will know that she has betrayed and hurt people who love her.

Thinking about all this makes me wonder about the ways I’velearned to form opinions about people in particular roles and in particular narratives. Anolder woman rediscovering herself through a younger man is a heroine; an olderman rediscovering himself through a younger woman is silly.

Of course, as with all generalizations, that’s also toosimple. Perhaps that’s the point.

AARP readers: You’ve seen our bedroom; welcome to our blog

2011-08-02T21:44:00.003-04:00

It’s a big day here in the Venema-Downs household. We’ve learned that the latest issue of AARP the magazine, featuring Michael’s essay, is arriving in people’s mailboxes. Michelle Obama (!) is on the cover. Distraction though she might be, somehow readers are still finding the essay. Traffic is up on this blog, and we’re getting great comments from new voices. So, to all of you, welcome!

We’ve written the blog for a little more than two years, trying to mix the personal with the cultural, social, and historical aspects of love between younger men and older women. You’ll find a few movie reviews here, a few comments on the Cougar phenomenon, references to some well known couples who were our predecessors (such as Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife).

You might also like to read the story behind the photo shoot. We had to do a lot of house cleaning.

Please, look around, stay awhile. Make a comment or three; ask questions or suggest posts (we’re always looking for new topics). Sign up to follow us. Thanks for visiting, and we hope you’ll read us again.

Old Friends Not Always on Facebook

2011-07-31T16:42:00.000-04:00

I finally joined Facebook a week ago, a momentous event in our household. Michael has been on for a while, but I’ve never been much of a joiner, and so I held back until last Monday. A frenzy of fervid friending followed – former workmates and classmates, new friends, old friends, former students, neighbors, nieces and nephews.

I looked up old boyfriends. (Admit it: you’ve done this too.) Some I really don’t want to find, but others came into my life at a time when I needed something they had. Maybe they helped me find confidence, or introduced me to new ways of thinking, or helped me understand something about myself and the universe. Sergé was one of those people – a generous man who taught me to value myself, a free spirit who helped me break out of tight boundaries without harm. He wasn’t on Facebook, so I tried Google. What I found was an obituary from two months ago.

That made me sad in an odd, distant sort of way. This is part of getting older. My ex-husband died five years ago. Old boyfriends have passed on. When Michael and I talked about that sadness, we remembered another difference between us and other couples, a result of our older woman-younger man pairing.

It’s this: I had more significant relationships before we met than he did. Divorced for almost two decades when we met, I had more time to date. He had less, and therefore fewer significant others in his life. If that means something, I’m not sure what; it’s just a fact we recognize.

But as the actuarial tables start to catch up with my age group and Facebook shrinks distances, I might find I feel that odd sadness more often.

Adam didn't leave Paradise for an older woman, did he?

2011-07-07T13:41:00.001-04:00

I’m hearing rumors about a protest in Orange County, the start of a movement in New Jersey. A lot of digit-ation on the blogosphere. People are worried about this older women and younger men thing. They say it wouldn’t be bad if we didn’t flaunt ourselves. But with all the TV shows and magazine covers, Cougar this and that, blogs, voters are feeling threatened. Some are circulating petitions. Soon, we might well have a constitutional amendment.

They’ve got their arguments.

God made Adam first, they say. Eve came later, so she was younger. Clearly that means the Almighty intends for men to wed and bed only younger women. Right?

And why, they wonder, should older women and their younger husbands receive the same legal privileges as normal-aged couples? The lower insurance rates, the marriage deduction–all these are intended to promote the growth of families. But when the woman is older, the odds of biological children is small if not impossible. Maybe they have a point. Sheri and I couldn’t have kids. So why do we get the tax break? Why do we get to add each other to our employers’ insurance policies?

Hmm.

Also, they believe there is something unnatural about us. Someone told me recently that only about 2 percent of married couples involve a significant age gap between an older woman and a younger man. Statistically, there is something wrong with us. It follows that we might be a bad example for kids (that’s what they say). What would happen if all young men started falling in love with older women?

Pandemonium. Bedlam. Social disorder.

In fact, why is Sheri even allowed to teach college students? Is her college wrong to trust her around younger men? Cougars are predators, after all.

We’re grateful this movement hasn’t yet caught the national media’s attention, because once they get a hold of it, whoa! Then, our only hope if the amendments start passing will be that we might be grandfathered. After all, eighteen years ago, we did what the law allowed. We got the blood test in Pennsylvania, paid for our license, had a justice of the peace to do the deed and sign the paperwork. The government in PA says we’re married, that it sanctions our union, and in every other state where we’ve lived, the government there has agreed.

We feel fortunate to have snuck in before the backlash, because for some people it’s not so easy. We’ve got neighbors who will leave our state next month to get married, and then they’ll come back and be our neighbors again, two women who have somehow managed to love each other in a committed, mature fashion, even though one graduated from Michigan and the other from Ohio State. The legislature where we live says they can’t do that and also get married.

Some people in our legislature say that if the state or federal government allows our neighbors to get married it will cheapen the institution of marriage. But marriage isn’t like crude oil. Its value doesn’t rise with its rarity. It’s more like, oh, democracy. The more people who get to vote, the richer it becomes.

So, given that Sheri and I were able to get married despite our outlier status, I want our legislature to let our neighbors and others like them get married right here at home.

Like Dr. King said, injustice across the fence is a threat to justice everywhere.

Lead on, New York.

Out with the Old

2011-06-28T10:34:00.000-04:00

Hef with the runaway bride

Sometimes these age-gap relationships can get a little funky. Consider, for instance, the 60-year age difference between Hugh Hefner and Crystal Harris, who were scheduled to wed on June 18. If you think people whisper behind their hands about other age-gap couples – sex? parents’ reactions? common interests? just a fling? – you can imagine what might be the buzz about this kind of age chasm.

Then, four days before the wedding (at the Playboy Mansion!) Crystal called it off. Even a 6-carat diamond couldn’t persuade Playboy’s December 2009 Playmate of the Month to marry the 85-year-old Hef.

My favorite part of the New York Daily News story announcing the split:

The May-December couple had been dating for more than a year, overlapping with Hefner's relationship with the Shannon twins.

The twice-married Hefner proposed Christmas Eve, putting the 6-carat engagement ring in a Disney-themed box that played music from Harris' favorite movie, "The Little Mermaid."

The Shannon twins? The Little Mermaid? Was this a marriage made in heaven, or what? Word is that Crystal ran from the altar in favor of a younger man, and that Hef has already named his new girlfriend. She’s all of 27.

Agatha Christie: An essay assignment

2011-06-18T13:51:00.001-04:00

"An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her. "

– attributed to Agatha Christie

In your answer discuss one of the following:

1) Consider the analogy. If a husband is an archaelogist and his wife his subject, is she

a. a ruin

b. an unearthed jewel, albeit one that bears a centuries-old curse

c. a Sphinx

2) Can Christie’s argument also apply to a woman whose husband ages? If so, consider in light of the analogy as above.

3) In lieu of an archaelogist, is the next best spouse for an older or aging partner

a. an historian

b. a librarian

c. a pharmacist

d. choose another profession; be specific

AARP revisited

2011-06-15T11:36:00.002-04:00

Winter 1993, Montana

The folks at the AARP magazine say they need photos of us in the early days of our relationship, having already sent someone to take photos of us in the here and now for an essay Michael wrote for an upcoming issue.

That meant I got to spend a day hauling out dusty photo albums and envelopes – our “early days” start in 1991, when photos were actual prints from real film.

Summer 1992, with Tinker the dog, at Woodstock

One of my friends, after seeing the pictures the AARP photographer took last month, was kind enough to say that we look more the same age now than we used to. “Michael is closing that 17 year gap,” she wrote. “With every passing year, as he becomes a little older, a little greyer, a little more ‘distinguished’, you seem to be getting younger and more vibrant.” (Thanks, Linda!)

So I was trying to find pictures that showed the age difference in the early days but didn’t make us look hopelessly dorky (lots of those).

Looking at those early photos, what stays with me are a couple of things. First, how much we loved each other. You can see it in the smiles, the easy way our bodies touch. Second, how young Michael looks. Yikes!

June 19, 1993, Damascus, PA.

My favorite early photo of him is from 1992, when we visited the site of Woodstock on a summer evening. He says he looks stoned, which would have been appropriate, but he wasn’t.

How long have we been married? Long enough so that when I take pictures out of the wedding album, the plastic sheets crinkle and tear. Long enough that he’s lost the aviator glasses and some of his hair. Long enough to think we must have been mad. Long enough to know we should have had a professional photographer at the wedding. Long enough to know we did the right thing when we said I do.

Love is not all

2011-06-08T07:25:00.000-04:00

It doesn’t always end well. Let’s not kid ourselves.

This blog began with the presumption that love affairs between older woman and younger men can work, and I think we’ve made a good argument over the 2 ½ years we’ve been blogging. Sheri and I are coming up on our 18^th wedding anniversary, so we’ll keep making that argument.

George

But for the sake of balance, for the sake of gratitude for what does work, it’s worth remembering that sometimes such affairs fail. And sometimes they might even ruin a person.

This month, Open Letters Monthly, a website devoted to reviews of literature, revived the discussion of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s affair with George Dillon, 14-years her junior, and how their love may have fueled his poetry and then ended it.

Edna

It was 1928. She was 36 and famous, having already become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; he was 22 and aspiring,

having published his first book. According to Shannon McCloskey Allain, writing at Open Letter, George introduced Edna when she gave a reading. He also became infatuated–and she with him.

She was married, but that didn’t stop her from having an affair. Her husband knew and, perhaps, approved. They were a bohemian couple willing to bend rules. Maybe that’s one reason Edna never left him for George.

Edna and George each used their passionate affair to write a sequence of sonnets inspired by the pain and glory of their love. His led to a book that won him the Pulitzer Prize at age 25. She published hers in Fatal Interview, a volume some critics have called her best work, including this famous sonnet.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.

George never seemed to get used to the idea that he had to share Edna, and perhaps Edna tired of George. Their affair ended. And George never published another book of poetry.

Much has been made of that fact. A theater company even plans to produce a play around it. Allain's essay for Open Letter suggests that answers to whether Edna ruined George for poetry can be found in his verse. Her article makes an interesting case, though I’m not convinced. There are a lot of reasons not to write. It may be overstating things to say that Edna alone put an end to his books.

What happened after? George became editor of one of the country’s most prestigious literary journals. He never married, and eventually he moved in with his parents. Now and then he and Edna met, and they even translated poems together. They may have even revived the affair for a night or two, but never as it had once been. “This love is strange that does not die,” he had written in his book, according to Allain, and seemingly it never did. He added, “A man would be nothing but that he has been a lover. He is glad for that. As for the rest, it is dead.”

Laugh Track

2011-05-31T11:51:00.007-04:00

For a long time after we were married, Michael had a standard joke that went like this. We would be with other people, and I might – in passing – mention my ex-husband. Michael would feign shock. “What?!? You’ve been married before??”

It always got laughs from people who hadn’t heard it yet. But it got old for me pretty quick, and I never found the perfect comeback.

The joke was that of course he knew I’d been married before. So it was kind of a slapstick humor, which isn’t his style. So why did he do it, and why did it bug me so much?

I still don’t know why he did it (he’s not here right now for me to ask, so he can blog about that on his own time). I’m guessing there was some level of discomfort in marrying an older woman, made even more so by the fact that I had once promised myself to someone else. Maybe he didn’t want to be reminded of that.

It was a brief marriage, made when I was barely 21 and finished four years later. But those were formative years, and working through the emotional wreckage took a while. Now, that seems like another life. (And another blog post; stay tuned.)

So why did his joke bother me? Maybe because it seemed repetitious and silly. But also, it felt as though it erased part of my life and therefore part of me. My first protests about the joke were mild, but they got more vigorous when he didn’t stop.

And then he heard me, and the joke stopped. Now, heading into our 19^th year of marriage, I’m the one who’s sometimes amazed that I’ve been married before.

Our AARP photo shoot

2011-05-22T17:59:00.000-04:00

good photos by Bill Miles

I did not want our photo shoot to be on Wednesday.

Kaimin, the dog, had a surgery appointment, and my 5:30 p.m. class in longform nonfiction narrative required me to carefully read six LONG student papers. I didn’t even know what was going on in Sheri’s life; she was out of town.

“Any day after Wednesday,” is what I told the assistant photo editor at the famous national magazine. “Any day but Wednesday.”

So, of course, we decided on Wednesday. When AARP The Magazine wants your picture – like, now – it’s hard to say no.

Please wear dark washed jeans, the photo assistant instructed us. Warm tones. No logos or hats or sunglasses.

Why did AARP want our picture? I’ve written an essay for the magazine, scheduled to appear in the coming September/October issue. The essay isn’t about Sheri and me, but our age difference plays a big part. Therefore: a photo shoot.

I knew that the photog would take a few hours out of our Wednesday. What I didn’t know is how he’d change Tuesday. When the nation’s largest circulation magazine sends a photographer to take a picture inside your wife’s house, well, you’ve just made her life a whole lot busier.

Sheri suddenly became Martha Stewart’s neater twin – on meth. She cleaned, she straightened, she eliminated the clutter of our everyday lives. Business cards on the fridge? In the drawer! The dog food containers? Banished to the basement! That bowl of coupons? Ha! We aren’t the sort of people who use coupons.

Bill with the shirt Sheri vetoed.
Photo by Michael

She even got a haircut, all while I was at school for the last day of classes. When I came home, the house was beautiful but also, in its way, naked. I found a place to hide my keys, then grabbed the vacuum cleaner and added to the spic and the span. Later we picked out our dark, washed jeans and our warm tones. Sheri vetoed the comfy old shirt I chose. “I think that nice blue one is neater,” she said. Herself, she tried on three tops before choosing the one. Sagely, I approved of all three.

The next day, Bill the Photog arrived. He brought an assistant named David, a Jeep full of photo equipment, and a perfect smile. We gave him the run of the house, and soon he’d picked out the settings for our shoot: backyard, bed, big green chair in living room. He’d also judged my shirt to be too something and asked whether I had anything else. I showed him my closet. He picked out the shirt Sheri had vetoed.

I gloated. Though maybe it’s not so good to have a better AARP fashion sense than your older wife’s.

Bill and David were fun to have around. They were efficient and pleasant. Bill has shot for some big companies, including Lexus, Land’s End, and the drug company Pfizer. He’s got the commercial photographer’s exquisite sense of how to create in one photograph a world where everything is easy with joy. He got us to laugh with each other, even after a day of manic house cleaning.

Ask your doctor.

And when he used tape to get a window blind drawstring out of the background of a shot, I knew Sheri was right to have insisted we clean up our clutter. In the world of ease and light, where we lived for a few minutes on Wednesday, the only strings allowed are the ones that make you dance.

Getting Older, Staying Young

2011-05-16T14:54:00.002-04:00

Sheri and Doss (right) on the Appalachian Trail

As older women go, my sister is fairly young. She turned 65 last month, and after pondering how to observe her birthday, she invited me and other women friends for a hike along a section of the Appalachian Trail in Connecticut.

We did the hike last weekend, a four-mile trek from Hoyt Road north to Bull’s Bridge. There were nine of us, ranging from 50-something to mid-70s. It was a great day for hiking: overcast and cool, but no rain. The muted sun made the emerging greenery more sumptuous, and we stopped for jack-in-the-pulpits, columbine and lavish displays of ferns.

Some of us faced challenges. My sister, Doss, has two artificial knees and is a breast cancer survivor. Our friend Susan has her own knees, but they don’t serve her well. Still, she gamely hiked to the top of Ten-Mile Hill and down again and discovered that her body did not let her down. Another friend, in her 60s, had never peed in the woods. This trip was her first time.

My big sister Doss has an old soul that stays young by looking for adventure (she’s been to the Ice Hotel in Sweden and followed Charles Darwin’s course in the Galapagos). But she also seeks out other points of view, listens to people’s stories, gives stuff away, finds new friends, and is willing to change her life when it’s necessary.

Not yet at the end of the trail

And whether you’re married to a younger man or not (she’s not), that willingness to reinvent is what draws people to you.

At the end of our hike, we ate lunch on a rock at the edge of the Housatonic River, near a covered bridge where George Washington had ridden. We celebrated with cupcakes. Then we asked a man to take a picture of all of us on the rock. Prehistoric rock, historic bridge, not-so-old ladies.

When he had captured our smiles and went back to his wife and young children, we could hear his wife say this: I hope I have that many friends to hike with when I’m that old. Indeed.

The HimPlus Mix-Tape

2011-05-07T21:45:00.001-04:00

Vote for your fave. And tell us which songs you would add.

1. The HimPlus Mix-Tape starts, naturally, with "Mrs. Robinson" by the Lemonheads. What? Who were you expecting?

2. "Baby Man," from the great bluesy-jazz piano player Gene Harris. It's an instrumental, so no lyrics. Probably that's a good thing. You can make up your own.

3. She'll be your pacifier. Ann Peebles says, "Come to Mama."

4. Ella Fitzgerald's first song on this list: "You Make Me Feel So Young."

5. Bonnie Raitt's "Something to Talk About" was on the radio when we started dating. We took inspiration from Bonnie's sassy ways.

6. Ella2: "They All Laughed." Ha.

7. I love Sarah Vaughn's version of "Experience Unnecessary." But this video featuring Donna Theodore is the grooviest.

8. Grand finale: Coo-coo-ca-choo.

Rock, revisited

2011-05-01T08:29:00.001-04:00

In the previous post (Rock, Paper), Michael suggests that the decision to carve our names in a rock was made impulsively on the day we came across a stone carver in rural Pennsylvania in the summer of ‘92. “What a lark! Tra-la!” he would have you think.

But his memory is flawed. We had been living together barely a month when he suggested it, and it took me another month to agree. In my journal, I put my anxiety about that rock — and a relationship with a man 17 years younger – on paper.

Wednesday, July 22, 1992

My boyfriend wants to carve our names in stone, a prospect that has filled me with angst since he first suggested it a month ago.

Etched in stone? What if we break up?

Then we walk to the middle of the Cochecton-Damascus bridge and toss it into the Delaware River, he says.

We are living on the Delaware for the summer, having taken leaves from our jobs and pooling our possessions for the first time after a year and a half. This summer arrangement isn’t really “living together,” I have told him. It’s just that we’re taking an extended three-month vacation together.

But after almost two months, I cherish the routines we’ve established together. I like the sound of him in the next room. I love hearing the door slam and knowing it is him, coming home. Mostly alone in the woods, our worst fight has been over how to make chocolate chip cookies.

Still, I haven’t thought of this as permanent. Not that I’m looking to leave. I just haven’t dared to think that a relationship of two people separated by 17 years could last.

Are you still thinking I’ll leave you when you’re 67 and I’m 50? he asked this morning.

Actually, I worry it will happen sooner than that – say, when I’m 57 and he’s 40 (midlife crisis!) or when I’m 47 and he’s 30 (reality arrives at 30!)

But he has an equanimity about these matters. And although it signifies a commitment, carving our names in stone seems a natural step to him.

I’ve thought of this as permanent for a long time now, he says.

I have found all sorts of obstacles to throw at the idea. What if we don’t live together after the summer – who gets the stone? Will it have a hyphen? I don’t want a hyphen. Where will we put it? How big will it be? I want the perfect stone. I want it this way, or that way. I’m scared.

I’m scared you’ll carve our names in stone, and then you’ll leave, or I’ll leave and that stone won’t. You could throw it in the Delaware River, but – wouldn’t you know it – the water’s shallow there at the bridge and it would land face up. Or, worse, when the water runs low it would even be uncovered, and then I’ll have to wade out there and move it.

Michael doesn’t see all these pitfalls.

If it were wood you could burn it and the letters would be no more. With stone it would take eons to wear away. There is not enough silt and grit in all the Delaware to wear away those names in my lifetime. Maybe that’s the idea.

OK. But just the names. No hearts or any of that stuff. Just the names. And no hyphen.

Rock, paper

2011-04-17T09:15:00.001-04:00

When we first lived together, we took a summer in her sister’s cabin on the Delaware River. Visiting a stone-carver’s studio one day, we impulsively paid to have our names carved together into a hunk of rough granite, sort of like love, but also, we joked, somewhat like a gravestone. She reached into her purse as I reached into my wallet. The whole thing unnerved her. What would she do with the rock after her younger man left?

When she said, I’m moving to Montana, I packed a van and drove two thousand miles, and we moved in together to a small yellow house hard against a gasoline station. We tucked the Venema Downs stone into a small garden near the front porch steps. We cooked chicken and beans together, slept together on a fold-out futon, walked the dog together – but we kept separate checking accounts. Sheri worked part time, and I worked full time, and she didn’t want to owe her younger man anything. We shared dreams sooner than money.

Then we got married, and we moved our rough granite to Arkansas where I could learn about literature and barbecue. We bought a house together and put the stone in the front yard. We cooked together, slept together, walked the dogs, Ozark and Tinker, each of us with a leash. Eventually she said, “We own a house together. It’s silly to keep separate checking accounts.”

Now, the Venema Downs stone sits in front of our house in Baltimore. Our names are on the house where we live, on our checks, and, for the first time, on advance directives, powers of attorney, wills. What’s hers is mine, what’s mine is hers – permanence in rock now as well in paper, so we know what will happen after one of us leaves.

Last Will & Testament

2011-04-10T15:01:00.000-04:00

Color is coming back to gardens all over Baltimore – the bright magenta of tulip trees, the lush yellow of daffodil beds along the highways, the soft orange of the robin’s breast. And we chose this time of year, when life emerges once again from soil and bark, to talk about death.

It was time to create our wills. Actually, it was long past time for me to write a will. For Michael, too, a little late. When should you write a will? Advice varies, but you probably want to start thinking about it when the stuff you own is valuable. A house, let’s say (we bought our first together 15 years ago). Or, when you get married (almost 18 years). Or when you have children (not). Or when you get sick (not yet, knock on wood).

I’ve been thinking about wills for a while. But we breezed through the decades of his 20s, my 40s, then our 30s/50s without acknowledging that either of us would die.

When I think about why we put off creating a will for so long , here’s what I come up with: Actually putting it on the table seemed like, well, acquiescing to age. Married to a younger man, I don’t need to remind him that I’ve lived longer than he has. He sees it every day in the wrinkles that won’t go away despite what Clinique promises, or the thumb that can’t open a new jar of mayonnaise. I avoided talking about death and wills and bequeathments because it seemed easier to pretend that really, at heart, we’re the same age. The same young age.

But that pretense couldn’t last. I’ve just made an appointment for my first colonoscopy and celebrated my sister’s 65^th birthday. Meanwhile, although Michael’s still got game on the basketball court, we both put prescription orthotics in our boots when we take the dogs out for their morning hike.

So last month, with years and the accumulation of stuff weighing more heavily on both of us, we called a lawyer. Then we opened our windows and breathed deeply of the spring air, and asked the other: What if I die first; what if you do? What if we die together?

Now that I’ve acknowledged I’ll likely die before he does, it’s clear that he, of course, has known that all along. And what we both discovered is this: More important than who gets our stuff is this: Who gets the dogs?

Elizabeth Taylor's younger man

2011-03-28T21:24:00.000-04:00

was also her last husband. Larry Fortensky, poof-haired, side-burned, cleft-chinned, ever-silent, twenty years her junior when 59-year-old Liz married him in 1991. They divorced five years later.

Looking for his public comment on Taylor’s death? You won’t find it. He doesn’t talk about her, nor does he seek the camera. When the glamourous Hollywood icon married her younger teamster in 1991, People magazine reported that he never made public comments about his wife. They divorced five years later, and still, he had nothing to say. Now he’s 59, traveling around the country in a trailer, according to a tabloid’s interview with his sister. And though the website Third Age put Elizabeth Taylor in its Cougar Hall of Fame for her marriage to him, he’s never turned his five years of mega-fame as Mr. Elizabeth Taylor into a gig on Survivor or Celebrity Apprentice. Big ups to you, Larry.

But that doesn’t stop the tabloids and gossip websites from speculating about their relationship even now. Did she buy his silence? Did she help him out with house payments? Did she instruct her manager to shield her from his calls?

My problem with the tabloids and their speculations is that their imaginations are so limited. I don’t care if she bought Larry’s silence. I’d rather imagine what he said the last time they spoke. I’d like to know where he was sitting when he learned that she had died, the light by which he read it, on a computer or in the newspaper. Did he notice her name on a Fox News crawler while drinking coffee at a truckstop in New Mexico? Did one of her children call him? Or send a text? When he heard, what did he remember first? The time he first walked into a room at the Betty Ford clinic and saw her, how he tried not to stare? Or how he did stare because what else was there for him to do? When he learned about her death, did he fork another bite of spaghetti, or light a cigarette, because, what else was there to do? Did he want to tell the waitress that the way she carried herself reminded him of someone he once knew?

Tell me that, National Enquirer. Answer those questions, Daily Mail.

Sarah Palin as Cougar

2011-03-21T12:12:00.002-04:00

Cougarish?

Sarah Palin may be losing the hearts of the American people, but she has the libidos of more than a few young men all atwitter.

In a recent poll by Bloomberg News, only 28 percent of respondents in the telephone survey, taken from March 4-7, viewed the former Alaska governor favorably, at least in a political way. Sixty percent disapproved, more than half of them telling pollsters they viewed her very unfavorably.

But over at cougared.com, an online dating website matching older women and younger men, 250 young men polled in January gave Palin their top ranking as cougar fantasy woman.

Men in the survey ranged from 18 to 46+, with almost half in the 20-25 range.

Palin, 47, was the top crush for young men, with almost 1 in 4 (24%) naming her their top fantasy cougar. Respondents were asked to rank 12 older women, including tea party favorite Christine O’Donnell (2%), news anchor Diane Sawyer (3%) , and Kim Cattrall from "Sex and the City" (6%).

Right behind Palin were TV cougar Courteney Cox (21 percent) and cougar legend Demi Moore (19 percent). Madonna, at age 52, got 10 percent.

What turns on a younger guy?

Half the young men in the survey said this: maturity and confidence. Palin sure has one of those.

Would you? Could you?

2011-03-14T11:57:00.002-04:00

Picture us on our 20^th anniversary of being a couple, sitting in a candle-lit Cuban restaurant, sipping sweet-tart mojitos, talking about death.

This is why: Not too long from now, we’ll make our first visit to a lawyer to prepare a will. Necessarily, we’re thinking about the thereafter for each of us. If I died, would you – could you? – move? Where would you live? If I died, would you – could you? – keep working? Would you – could you? – start dating?

Our waiter in the Cuban restaurant is a gentle man wearing a white shirt and a red scarf. He brings fish and pork. A couple arrive who look as if they are in their mid-20s. He wears a black shirt and a white bow tie.

If you dated, would you – could you? – ever consider again someone so not your own age?

Sheri tilts her head, stops chewing. “I didn’t look for a younger man 20 years ago,” she says. “He just showed up.”

“Well, yes.” Michael leans closer to speak more softly. “But now you could. So the question is, would you?”

“No. I’m not feeling very cougarish these days. I can’t imagine a man your age actually seeking out a woman my age. Can you?”

“It’s possible. But it’s not so easy to imagine as when you were in your 40s and I was in my 20s. I wasn’t looking for an older woman twenty years ago, either. It just happened. It could happen again, but I think I’d seek someone more my age.”

“That’s true of me, too. If a man were younger, he’d be five years or so younger, but not seventeen. Or five years older.”

“Interesting how there is such a strong impulse to seek a partner in your own age group. Yet we fell in love anyway. And it doesn’t mean it would happen again. Probably it wouldn’t.”

“It used to be, when I imagined your life after me, should I die, it was always with a younger woman, one who could bear children. Now that you’re heading toward 50, that picture is breaking up a bit.”

“That’s because she’d have to be 17 years younger.”

The gentle waiter brings us flan, and we share, dividing the final taste into ever smaller and smaller pieces. Sheri, looking over Michael’s shoulder, notices another couple. This woman keeps looking away from her date, eyeing the well-dressed man in black shirt and white bow tie. Her date is dressed in jeans and a baggy shirt, and Sheri smiles and Michael asks “What?” and she tells him.

My Juan Williams moment

2011-03-07T12:13:00.001-05:00

(…albeit, not likely to get me fired from writing for this blog.)

You remember Juan. Longtime NPR contributor and liberal foil for Fox News? Last October, he mentioned on The O’Reilly Factor that he gets nervous on airplanes when he sees other passengers dressed in garb that, as he later wrote, “identifies them first and foremost as Muslims.” Given the situation -- a shouting match with O'Reilly and a conservative writer – what Williams had to say sounded awful. Later, he seemed to want to clarify that the airplane unease he described was unreasonable and rash and no useful tool for making decisions about policy or people. If I understand him – and maybe I'm being too generous – he was describing a human phenomenon: that we all sometimes have rash impulses about people we could describe as “other” – not us, not of our tribe, not belonging to what we know as the dominant culture or following the mainstream models of behavior. We mustn’t, however, act on these impulses. We mustn't stereotype people based on what we've seen -- real or imagined -- of others like them. We must take a deep breath and think.

But you know the rest of the story. NPR fired Williams.

Now, here I am, a guy writing a blog about his longtime love affair with his 17-years-older wife. And I get an e-mail from a 27-year-old woman saying how much she loves the blog and of course, why not, because she lives with her boyfriend who is 19 years older, which makes him, coincidentally, my age.

My rash-Juan-Williams impulse?

Yup. All the wrong stereotypes.

I’m embarrassed to admit this. Shouldn’t I (of all people!) recognize the myriad and miraculous ways love unfolds? Absolutely. But I veered right into making made-for-TV-movie stereotypes out of living, breathing, loving, complicated people. What makes my reaction more troubling is that I know this woman – I worked with her a few years ago. She’s smart and savvy. Nevertheless, for a nano-second, I had a gut reaction, for which I now apologize to Smart-and-Savvy and her older beau. My rational better angel wishes you happiness and all the strange beauty that comes with love.

So, there we go. Please don’t fire me. Instead, climb inside my head and wonder along with me: How many other people have impulsive thoughts and reactions when they meet Smart-and-Savvy and her partner? How do these people react? And what do such reactions mean for this couple as they make their way through a world where it is already much too difficult for couples to find and keep love?

What impulses have people had about Sheri and me?

Thanks, all of you, for not acting on them.

Sir Walter Scott and Me

2011-03-03T21:36:00.000-05:00

Michael, here. You all know me on this blog as the younger husband -- in love, often puzzled, hungry for a slice of pizza. But out in the world I’m also a writer, and today I'd like to pass on some good writing news.

A great independent publishing house in the UK has taken a liking to a manuscript of short stories that I’ve written. My manuscript, The Greatest Show, is on the shortlist with nine others competing for the The Scott Prize, named for Sir Walter (“I cannot tell how the truth may be; / I say the tale as ’t was said to me”). According to the site, up to four winning manuscripts are published by SALT. The shortlist includes amazing and exciting writers, and I’m feeling pretty lucky to have mine included.

You can read more about The Greatest Show and the circus fire that inspired it at my other blog, named (no surprise here) The Greatest Show.

Thanks! Now back to love and age ...

Dittos and Disney

2011-02-27T18:53:00.000-05:00

We sometimes amuse ourselves by comparing technologies.

Example: I was eight in 1955 when my family got its first television, a black-and-white set. That meant I could watch the “Mickey Mouse Club” without having to go next door to Susie Hekman’s house.

By the time Michael was eight, in 1972, he could watch “The Wonderful World of Disney” on Sunday nights – with fireworks in full exploding color.

I remember phone numbers with letters in them, like CH3-0303 , or 5473J. Michael doesn’t.

It seems a given that age-gap couples would suffer a technology gap, but ours seems to narrow with time. What we both remember: transistor radios, 45-rpm records, rotary phones, a world before hand-held calculators, and our first electric typewriters.

Technology isn’t always a reliable way to measure how we experience time. When Michael and I met in 1991, I was the one who had a CD player; he was still buying vinyl records. In 1992, when we lived along the Delaware River for a summer, we brought along Michael’s first PC – a clunky Atari – as well as a manual Royal typewriter.

In the March/April issue of Poets and Writers magazine, author Eileen Pollack recounts how she began writing stories in longhand, then moved to typewriters and finally to computers. In the article, “Track Changes: Ditto Machines to Digital Literature,” she notes that it’s now possible to write and publish entire novels without producing anything you can hold in your hand. (Irony: I can’t link you to the article. It’s available only in the magazine’s print version.)

Pollack also remembers using ditto machines, which got us thinking about them too. I last used one in 1971, teaching junior high English and handing out sweet-smelling purple-lettered papers to my students. As late as 1998, when Michael was a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Arkansas, he had to make class handouts using an aging ditto machine. Sometimes it took a screwdriver to make the thing rotate.

Now here we are in the blogosphere, yet neither of us live full-time in the digital world. Maybe we came together because we were like-minded about things: we love the smell and feel of newsprint and books, the turning of pages.

Ask Bob

2011-02-21T11:40:00.008-05:00

The other night, Sheri and I argued over potatoes. She had made meatloaf. It was a great meatloaf. Boiled potatoes sat on the side.

As I forked potato and sour cream into my mouth, I said something like, “I’m not supposed to eat potatoes.”

This led to a discussion of our diets, our menus. Somewhere along the line, we misunderstood each other. Sheri thought I was criticizing our eating habits and blaming her for them (I wasn’t). I thought she didn’t believe that potatoes were bad for me. It’s true, I wasn’t explaining myself well. Sheri knows that the strange head trips I’ve had since childhood – during which the world slows its motion and objects shine brighter and my balance teeters and I become ravenous – have to do with blood sugar. To prevent my spells, I need to eat mostly protein, though some fats are okay, too, and stay away from sugars – especially high fructose corn syrup and other items high on the glycemic index. Among these are potatoes.

But when I said that potatoes had too much sugar, Sheri didn’t believe me. Her newspaper editor’s hat appeared, pulled low over her skeptical gaze.

And I remembered another time when she didn’t believe me. The details here are fuzzy, too. It had to do with a big auto crash at an intersection near the Bitterroot River in Montana, where we used to live. Driving by one day, I mentioned the smash-up. For some reason, Sheri didn’t believe it had happened. Maybe because she hadn’t heard of it elsewhere or seen it in a newspaper. A week or so later, we drove by again, this time with our friend Bob McGiffert, a curmudgeon and professor emeritus at the local university. A true gray eminence. He mentioned the accident. Sheri said, “Oh,” and she believed him. Stupefied, I protested.

Ever since, when we’ve disagreed over a fact, we’ve said to each other, “Let’s ask Bob.”

Bob died this past Christmas. He was a great good friend, among the most big-hearted men I’ve known. We miss him and his feisty, curmudgeonly zest. When we disagree, we still want to ask him – at least in spirit – to be our Google, our arbiter, to know who is right.

But we couldn’t do that over our potatoes. So I wondered aloud why Sheri had been willing to believe Bob that long-ago day, but not to believe her husband. Why is it that if Bob were here, and he said something about potatoes and blood sugar, she’d believe him?

“It’s because he was older, wasn’t it?” I said.

And she said, “That’s a blog post.”

Q & A

2011-02-13T21:07:00.026-05:00

You have questions? We have (some)
answers

We sometimes wonder: What questions do people really want to ask us about our age difference?

And over the past two years, we’ve answered most of them on the 100+ posts on this blog.

Q: How do you deal with the fact that the older woman will probably die well before the younger man?

A: Michael thinks about it a lot.

Q. What was it like to meet his/her parents?

A. A lot more stressful for Sheri than for Michael. And pretty stressful for Michael’s mom, at first.

Q. Does the older woman worry about being left for a younger woman?

A. Sometimes. See death question, above.

Q. How did you deal with not having children?

A. We are still dealing with it: Michael here….. Sheri here.

Q. In the beginning, did you think he was just a boytoy?

A. Actually, no.

Q. Have you ever been mistaken for mother and son?

A. Yes

Q. What was the sex like and has it changed?

A. This is about as close to that as we’re ready to go.

Him+17, countrified

2011-02-06T21:09:00.009-05:00

Sheri’s a merciless editor – even of her husband’s words -- and nothing I write gets out of the house without her reading it first. Likewise, I read her work. We collaborate. We butt heads. And in the end, what we write is better for our collaboration. Our marriage is, too.

So I’m rooting for Marty Stuart and Connie Smith, a husband and his seventeen-years-older wife, who right now are Grammy Award nominees for a duet called “I Run To You.” The show will be broadcast next week, on Feb. 13, 8 p.m. east coast time, on CBS. The couple are competing for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Stuart is up for another for Best Country Instrumental; both songs come from his album Ghost Train: The Studio B Sessions.

The couple married in 1997, having first met when Marty was a 12-year-old who saw Connie perform at a fair in his hometown. She forgot him, but he didn’t forget her. You can watch them perform “I Run To You” in this video.

I’m no country music expert, and the song is likable enough, but I’m saying the outfits are more fabulous than the tune. Nevertheless can’t we all agree that husband-and-wife teams with a seventeen-year age difference deserve mega-national awards? Isn’t there a Pulitzer Prize for blogging collaborations?

Can’t we also agree that I’d look yes-yes-yes in a silk scarf and sequins?

Common Grace

2011-01-30T13:17:00.038-05:00

New T-shirts didn't help; Calvin lost 76-70.

My husband – bless his heart – spent yesterday afternoon watching my alma mater’s basketball team play its arch rival.

This was not even an opportunity to sit on the bleachers and cheer on the Calvin College Knights. Instead, we viewed the game through a live TV feed to a Greene Turtle sports bar about a half-hour’s ride south of us in Hanover, Md.

The game was the latest in an epic rivalry, which has pitted Calvin against the Hope College Flying Dutchmen since either 1917 or 1921, depending on whom you ask. Dutch Calvinists make up the population of both colleges, a mere 30 miles apart in Western Michigan. And Dutch Calvinists can find excuses to argue over just about anything ( infralapsarianism vs. supralapsarianism; common grace vs. special grace; how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and should they even be dancing at all?). So even the date of the first official game is in dispute.

More than 70 watch parties were scheduled around the country, bringing Calvin and Hope grads together to watch the game, compare Dutch names ( Haverdink? Slopsema? Vlaardingerbroek?) and keep the rivalry going.

Michael, who loves basketball and loves me (maybe not in that order), thought this could be a fun afternoon among the Calvinists. We got in the spirit and went online to order Calvin T-shirts from the campus bookstore. Meanwhile, representing the class of 1969, I thought I might be the oldest Calvin grad there.

We found the bar and settled in at a table of alums from the 1980s. But if Michael (University of Arizona, 1986) was among age-appropriate fans, I was not. Then, a woman at the next table noticed my name tag and leaned toward me.

Were you class of ’69?” she asked. It took me only a second to recognize her.

“Switch chairs with me,” I said to Michael.

And while Dawn and I caught up with 40 years of life after Calvin, Michael was happy to carry on in the now, chatting with a 1980 Hope graduate as Calvin blew an 18-point lead and lost the game.

The Return of The HimPlus Roundup

2010-11-08T15:01:00.005-05:00

We’ve been bad bloggers of late. Dragged ourselves through September with only an occasional post, then October stepped up to beat us with a long-stemmed pumpkin.

There’s stuff we want to write about. Honest! Real stuff! But lately there’s been more life to live than time to write about it.

So, don’t go away, please. Don’t think we’re finished with this blog just because we’ve not shared much lately. We’re still here. The blog heart still beats.

And to prove it, here’s a HimPlus Roundup! Betty White, Chrissie Hynde, and Time magazine’s declaration that the “Cougar” phenomenon might be a media creation …

J.P., Chrissie and the Fairground Boys

Chrissie Hynde and her new band recently ended a tour in support of their album, an album that has as its hook her love affair with a younger man. He approached her at a party. They chatted. Next thing you know, they’re together in Havana writing songs. “He was learning to stand,” Chrissie sings in the opening track, “when I was wearing my first wedding band.”

Reports Chrissie on her web site:

“We’ve been truthful on this album. We’ve proven that two people can love each other, override their base desires, and distill the love into something musical, something elevated, something rock and roll.”

I’ve listened to a few tracks, and Hynde’s voice sounds fabulous as ever. The young man, J.P., sings out of some place between Tom Waits’ growl and the earnest rasp of John “Cougar” Mellencamp.

Oh yes I did! I used "Cougar" with Mellencamp.

J.P., who is 32 and Welsh, and Chrissie, who is 58, co-wrote the album, and each track is a kind of duet. The tracks I’ve heard have energy and edge, and they’re not always pretty, but ain’t that how it goes?

SPEAKING OF WALES

A psychologist from the University of Cardiff has declared that there is no Cougar phenomenon. According to Time magazine, Michael Dunn has released a study based on his review of dating sites in which he finds a statistically insignificant portion of older women seeking younger men.

And here I go, quoting Time quoting the Australian Associated Press quoting this guy from Wales: "I do believe the cougar phenomenon is a myth and, yes, a media construct."

In its article, Time immediately notes that the phenomena DOES exist if you ask the right people, such as a woman who wrote a book called Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men.

BETTY WHITE IS NO COUGAR, BUT SHE LOOKS CUTE WITH THE EARS

And, finally, Betty White told Parade magazine in an article published a week or so ago that though she might lust for Robert Redford (14 years younger) she’s not really a Cougar … “I’ve always liked older men,” Parade quotes her as saying. “They’re just more attractive to me. Of course, at my age there aren’t that many left!”

The Twilight's Last Gleaming: His Version

2010-10-23T11:10:00.006-04:00

We’d lived in Baltimore three years without having visited Fort McHenry, one of the city’s most historic sites, and one of the places where Baltimore turned the British back during the War of 1812. So when good friends visited last month, we suggested a trip.

It was a warm day, hot when the wind quieted, and we all wore hats and carried water bottles, wondering as we entered the visitors center whether anyone inside would enforce the “no drinks” sign posted at the door. Not at all. The ranger, an elegant man with old world manners, directed us to the counter to answer our questions and take our money.

As Sheri wrote in her most recent post, “Politely, the ranger … asked whether any of us had an America the Beautiful senior pass, or whether we would like to purchase one for $10.” We asked for details, and he allowed as how the holder of such a pass would gain free access along with up to three guests to any national park in the country.

It’s almost as if that’s the only thing I heard. I love the national parks, and Sheri and I have enjoyed some of our finest times in them: watching wild horses at Theodore Roosevelt in North Dakota, hiking in Acadia in Maine, Glacier, Yellowstone … The idea of getting into all these places for free with my wife seemed to me a great gift, a reason to be happy with my government and country, and to cheer. I did cheer – a whoop or holler befitting a fort where soldiers endured a British bombardment and sent the King’s men on their way. Free admission! Great news!

We’re on the same side, Sheri and I. Yet at Fort McHenry, even though we won, we suffered a casualty. Now and then, I forget Sheri’s older. She makes it easy to do.

So as I whooped, she reached into her wallet for her driver’s license, and she glanced at me as she handed proof of her age to the ranger, her smile tight and false.

The Twilight’s Last Gleaming

2010-10-09T11:17:00.008-04:00

Of 56 national parks in the U.S., I have been to 14. My much younger husband is almost even with me at 13.

We figured this out at the beginning of the summer, on a road trip to central Virginia. While Michael drove, I discovered the national parks page at the front of our new 2010 road atlas. Ever competitive, and frequently restless during a road trip, I began counting the parks we’d been to. We’ve been together almost 20 years, so most of them have been joint trips: to Acadia in Maine, Hot Springs in Arkansas, Glacier in Montana. Our first national park together was Shenandoah.

But in my longer-than-his life, I’ve also been to the Everglades and Mount Rainier and Minnesota’s Voyageurs Park without him. He’s gawked at the redwoods in California and seen the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde without me. At the start of every one of those trips and at other historical sites, we paid our entry fee – we’ve never managed to make it on those free-admission weekends.

But no more. Last month we brought some visitors from Arkansas to see Fort McHenry, the national monument on a peninsula in the Baltimore harbor from which the flag flew during the War of 1812 that inspired Francis Scott Key to write our national anthem. The entrance fee was $7 and we all dug into our wallets.

Politely, the ranger who would receive our money asked whether any of us had an America the Beautiful senior pass, or whether we would like to purchase one for $10. Of course, I was the only one who met the age requirement, and I was way out ahead of my companions in their 40s and 30s. Such a deal for them! If I confessed my age, all three could also get in free. So at this battlefield where bombs had burst in air, I had my own internal war.

It was a war we all won when I pulled out my driver’s license to confirm my age. Buying the $10 pass means free admission for the rest of my life — for me and any three people with me — to any national park or monument or recreation site. But it also means another admission: I’m 62, drat it.

Young Viking hopes to pillage Halle Berry ...

2010-09-22T21:26:00.006-04:00

... but I think he'd do it respectfully.

Adrian Peterson, a 25-year-old running back with the Minnesota Vikings, confessed in a recent interview with Yahoo! Sports to a desire to date 44-year-old Halle Berry. "She could be like your mom!" the interviewer said. Replied Mr. Peterson, "She's a gorgeous woman, she definitely doesn't look her age, and I wouldn't hold it against her." See the interview below.

On a somewhat related topic that has little to do with younger men and older women:

Where do sportswriters find the gall to call a Mexican TV reporter unprofessional because she worked on a story that included the size of a player's biceps? How is that story less professional than the above in-depth interview about Adrian Peterson wanting to date Halle Berry?

As a former sports reporter, I worked hard to be as professional as my colleagues who covered mayors and bank presidents. But I also acknowledge that a good chunk of what is called sports journalism is really reporting-lite at best, promotion at worst. Covering sports is like covering Hollywood. While some journalists report important stories involving money, stadium construction, drug use by athletes, etc., others ask players about wanting to date Catwoman. And then there are those who are part of the sports promotion machine (I'm looking at your advertising that mixes sexy athletes and reporters ESPN!). Regardless whether Ines Sainz, the Mexican reporter covering the New York Jets, is a journalist in the Woodward-Bernstein tradition or the Access Hollywood tradition, how she dresses or the stories she covers never give lunkheaded football players permission to harass her anymore than the dress of cheerleaders gives permission for them to be harassed (it doesn't). You want shallow, unprofessional stories, you holier-than-thou sportswriters? Watch the video upstairs.

Guidelines for a HimPlus Life No. 5: Don't flinch

2010-09-12T17:46:00.002-04:00

She will tell you her age. Don’t flinch.

He will tell you his age. Don’t flinch.

She will misplace her reading glasses. Be her eyes. Each time you find the glasses – in the bathroom, beside her bed, on the passenger seat of the car – understand that you are coming to know her better.

He is a boy and he will want a dog, a puppy with feet big as softballs, and you are terrified at the prospect. Say yes anyway.

She will have had more ex-lovers than you. Find them amusing. Ask questions to show interest in her life, but don’t ask too many.

He will wake in the middle of the night, worried. Money. Or he was too loud at the party. From your vantage of years, assure him. Mention the poet you’ve both read, and quote: “Nothing matters enough to stay bent down about.”

She will be an orphan before you are. When she loses her mother, understand that she is unmoored. Though you are young and overwhelmed, keep quiet and steady. Drive the car. Help her aunt up the stairs. Set up chairs and fold them again.

He will write a great book, he’s certain. Be excited with him. Grant him the joy of hours alone at his desk. Then, later, knowing how time and disappointment work, grant him the dignity of hours alone at his desk.

Her skin will wrinkle and her hair will turn gray. Don’t flinch. Instead, check the mirror, old man.

He will meet attractive women his age. Don’t flinch.

She will feel something small and unpleasant and ancient when you meet attractive women your age. You will feel something, too, and it is also old and real. But you won’t flinch.

Guidelines for a HimPlus Life. No. 4: Choose a guy who will step into the Wayback Machine

2010-09-02T22:02:00.004-04:00

If you fall in love with a younger man, your history book will have a few more chapters than his. So pick a guy who likes to read.

When I met him, Michael’s favorite things included all eleven volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. Even better, he’d inherited all that history from a great aunt born just after the 19th century had turned into the 20th.

Some people are fascinated only by the history they’ve lived through. For Michael, all the past is alive; he loves watching how it rearranges itself in the present. He’s always been more a man who looks backward than forward, someone who’d rather study than predict. So when I came bearing stories about my college years (when he was pre-K), he was eager to hear them.

He’s most interested in the way my personal history intersects with other histories. He was in elementary school when Taxi Driver came out, and Travis Bickle scared him, so he never saw the movie. But then he learned that I went to high school and college with writer of the screenplay. The personal past and the cultural past came together, and we added the movie to our Netflix queue. Likewise, we’ve watched other movies that were seminal to my generation: Chinatown, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, The French Connection, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Belle du Jour. We’ve talked about the Viet Nam War, the Minnesota Twins World Series in 1987 (Homer Hankies!), my excitement at hearing Van Cliburn in his prime play a concert in the Michigan woods a few years after he won the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, and what it was like to have a job selling tickets to Disney World from a hotel lobby in Orlando right after the theme park opened.

OK, he doesn’t want to hear again where I was* when I heard about JFK, but he was fed up with that subject before we met.

*(At my high school locker, just before English class).

Guidelines for a HimPlus Life No. 3: Learn from Hemingway

2010-08-23T11:48:00.008-04:00

When I was 26, I received an invitation to a fancy New England wedding. Sheri wasn’t invited – we’d only started dating – but I allowed as how I planned to attend wearing my best leather jacket and my fancy silver bolo tie. I was a rube – recently arrived from Tucson – who didn’t own a sport coat or regular necktie and who didn’t want to admit the complicated confusions of class I felt in Connecticut. I wasn’t fancy New England, but I was somebody! And if snooty New England didn’t want me and my bolo tie, the heck with it. “That silver tie cost more than two hundred bucks!” I told Sheri. “It’s fancy!”

I was acting like a child.

Poor Sheri. Older and in the midst of new love, she wanted to save me from myself, but …

It was complicated.

You can’t avoid it. Couples should help each other be better people. Isn’t that a great benefit of love? But in our case, Sheri’s effort to help me dress better could have whiplashed me right into back-to-school week at Sears, and I’m in sixth grade wanting that silky polyester disco shirt while she buys me a nice cotton jersey.

So here’s what happened. Sheri demanded I buy a sport coat and tie. It was not a matter of mothering. Her message was clear: I’m a woman, you should be a man. Grow up. Be my partner; dress like you belong with me. Recognize the requirements of occasion.

There was no condescension in her demand. If anything, there was respect. “You’re better than this,” she was saying. “Rise up, young man.” I felt ashamed, sure, that I’d reached 26 and still didn’t know how to dress for a wedding. But I didn’t feel mothered as I would have had Sheri bought me the sport coat and neck tie or even had she picked it out. She stood back as I worked with the sales clerk, offering an opinion when I glanced her way and shrugged a question. It was my show with Sheri as the audience (an audience with high expectations).

In the infinite variety of human couplings, there must be some older women/younger man romances that follow a mother-son dynamic and succeed. But I imagine most to be unsatisfying with more that fail than endure. A day or so ago I came across a “Dear John” letter Ernest Hemingway received from an older woman he hoped to marry. At the time, he was 19 and Agnes Von Kurowsky was seven years his senior. She’d nursed him through war injuries, and clearly that role played into a mixed-up dynamic in which she became both lover and mother.

In the end she wrote, “Ernie, dear boy …”

Dear boy? Addressed to Hemingway? It gets worse.

“Now, after a couple of months away from you, I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart. … I am now & always will be too old, & that’s the truth, & I can’t get away from the fact that you’re just a boy – a kid.”

Then she tells Ernie how she’d tried to make this clear while they traveled together in Padua, but he had made it difficult because he’d “acted like a spoiled child.” But she prays he’ll “start a wonderful career & show what a man you really are. … Your friend, Aggie.”

Guidelines for a HimPlus life: No. 2: Don’t try to eat as much as he does

2010-08-16T21:46:00.006-04:00

Now they tell me: Eating less could help you live longer. Some experts say that cutting food consumption by 15 percent — starting at age 25! — could add four and a half years to your life.

I was fairly thin when Michael and I met, and I was way past 25. Then I quit smoking and fell in love in the same week — a sure recipe for weight gain. Eating became pure pleasure again after years of being a single smoker.

Ah, the romance of freshly made pesto! The joys of chocolate! We sampled yummy sauces, fatty cheeses, cannoli, pizza, warm breads. Desserts melted in our mouths. And cheeseburgers — we ate those too. Once, early on, when he offered to bring me one at work, I ordered it with double meat, double cheese. He ate enormous amounts, which I took as permission to eat more. Food became all about celebrating. Meanwhile, my metabolism was slowing; his was not. The result was predictable. Still, I felt so young, being in love and him younger and all.

But feeling young isn’t fooling your body. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I figured out I didn’t need that second helping of pasta and was able to shed the extra pounds. Now, the only time I keep up with my younger man on the food front is when we eat Fricano’s pizza on our frequent trips to Michigan. Or when he offers me a Reese’s peanut butter cup.

So if you’re in love with a younger man and totally gobsmacked at your good fortune, remember that your mind may forget that age difference when you want that triple-layer chocolate cake with whipped cream, but your body will remember it.

Guidelines for a HimPlus Life -- No. 1: Let Her Be Her Own Age

2010-08-08T21:25:00.003-04:00

This last week we took a road trip, covering hundreds of miles of interstate over two days and one night. Lots of coffee. More than a few rest stops. We’ve done this dozens of times, as we both prefer to see America from blue highways than from blue skyways. Over all the years we’ve driven from Maryland to Montana, from Arizona to Arkansas, I’ve learned – at long last – how to travel with my wife, and anyway, now that I’m in my forties, she and I are in better sync than say, fifteen years ago. These days, when Sheri is at the wheel and she pulls into a rest area, I don’t say a word. I get out of the car and make the walk with her to the lavatories.

But when we started out on our earliest road trips, I used to get exasperated. “We just stopped!” I’d say. “We’ve only been driving two hours!” Callow, I wanted to be on the road, cruising. How would we get anywhere if we stopped so often?

Sheri, as is so often the case, understood better than I did that when there’s an age difference with your spouse or partner, there are accommodations to be made.

I can’t say for certain when it was that she first pointed to another woman across a nightclub table or a dance floor and told me “Go dance with so-and-so.” We like to dance together, and we’d enjoyed more than a few turns ourselves, but now her suggestion confused me. In my brief experience with women, I’d learned to not even look at another woman, let alone ask one to dance. Was this a test? Was I supposed to say, “I’d rather stay here with you”? She wasn’t testing me, of course. Sheri had seen how my knee bounced with the beat, how my head bobbed, and she knew that whatever it was that played loud in that club or dance hall – juke-joint blues or zydeco if we were out to hear a band, yet another “Love Shack” if we were at a wedding – made me, in my late twenties, want to dance. And Sheri, in her mid-forties, needed to catch her breath. In the years since, I’ve danced hundreds of turns with my wife, but also with other women – young and old, married and single – as Sheri rests her feet on a chair, her generous example showing me how youth and age become compatible.

The HimPlus17 List That Proves We’re Authorities

2010-08-08T21:14:00.004-04:00

We love lists. We make them all the time. Food for our Pantry. Errands to Run. U.S. Presidents born in Ohio.

But here at HimPlus17, we’ve avoided publishing lists of the sort you find in magazines or blogs, lists such as “Ten things younger men love about older women (!)” or “Seven Things to Remember When Meeting his Mother (!)”

We’ve shunned lists because we think love and age are too complicated to be distilled into phrases, and frankly, we’d rather tell stories. But if we were smarter about building our readership, we’d make more lists. People live for lists (see: The AP College Football Top 25, Billboard’s Hot 100, and David Letterman).

Plus, when you publish lists you seem more like an authority on things (see, for example, Moses and The Ten Commandments).

We want to be authorities on something. We also want readers to be happy. So, starting this week: a HimPlus17 list that tells stories even as it offers beginning HimPlus couples a little bit of guidance. One item, once a week for five weeks. We’ll even throw in a story or two. You could call it “The HimPlus17 List That Proves We’re Authorities,” even though it might not prove anything at all. We’re going to call it “Guidelines for a HimPlus Life.”

Stacey Anderson & Jimmy Heck, Down Under

2010-07-30T11:27:00.008-04:00

GOOD MORNING, AUSTRALIA! We see by our Web traffic that TV-Land's big hit "The Cougar" has finally made it to your country. By now you know she chose Jimmy Heck, but you can't figure out: Did they actually get married in real life?

Heck no, is my guess. But who knows? Hundreds of our readers have Googled some version of "Are Jimmy Heck and Stacey Anderson married?" And, like us, they can't find out. We suspect that's because TV-Land doesn't want us to know the answer until it has shown this piece of age-gap fluff all over the world. Thus far, at various times, our blog has seen a spike in hits from South Africa, Denmark, Sweden and Slovenia, among other countries, after the last episode airs. Of them all, Australia – Crikey! –appears to have been the most Stacey-Jimmy obsessed.

Meanwhile, you can probably figure out for yourselves what happened.

Lynne Koplitz guest post! Sort of.

2010-07-26T21:11:00.004-04:00

We got nothing.

Five days of painting the living room ("Fossil") and a stairwell ("Fennel Seed") have us tapped out. So we asked our good pal Lynne Koplitz to guest post. Except she's not our good friend, really. We just found this on Facebook. But we'll let Lynne guest post anyway. She's funnier than we are.

Jokes.com

Lynne Koplitz - Younger Guys

comedians.comedycentral.com

Futurama New Episodes

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Russell Simmons Stand-Up Comedy

Seventeen years? That’s not the biggest difference.

2010-07-18T21:15:00.005-04:00

On Saturday, we replaced the washing machine that came with our Baltimore house, the one that piddled oil on the basement floor and shut off whenever it wanted.

Sheri talked to the new machine. She smiled and said, “Hello, Washing Machine.” She ran her hands over the lid. She tucked it in and told it to sleep well.

The woman is a never-ending mystery. Her age isn’t the half of it.

The doctor's daughter sees a future

2010-07-12T11:13:00.006-04:00

My wife has a history of nosebleeds, and this week she got hit by a few gushers, including one that landed her in a hospital emergency room. Sheri’s such an old pro at nosebleeds she knows what can set them off. She told me: no bending over, no exertion, no blowing her nose.

A few days later, Sheri gave in to gardening’s temptations. She transplanted, shoveled, sneezed a time or two. Predictably, the nose bled. This one was minor, more a leak than a geyser, and after she’d pinched her nose closed for ten minutes, she found a chair in the yard and let me finish what she’d started. I planted flax, transplanted a petunia and some basil, spread mulch as needed. She pointed and watched and tried not to get frustrated. A doctor’s daughter, my wife has always been a lousy patient. Lately she’s suffered through a shoulder strain that doesn’t want to heal, a foot cramp so bad it bruised her arch, and the nosebleeds. She told me, “I feel like my body’s breaking down.”

Decades ago, a girlfriend told me that you can see how a woman will age by looking at her mother. Sheri’s mother was long-lived and robust well into her 80s, traits shared, it seems, by most women in her family. On the other hand, many of the men in my family have broken down young. Using the past to predict the future isn’t smart, but back then I figured that if you considered our age difference and our genetics, Sheri and I might fall apart at about the same time.

Now, as the younger husband carried a shovel around the yard and the older wife watched, she said something along the lines of: “This is what it’ll be like.”

She was kind of joking.

Making Babies: One Wish

2010-07-05T18:45:00.003-04:00

Starting a relationship with a younger man when you’re trying to have a child on your own as a 40-something single woman can lead to some odd moments: odd as in sit-com funny, as in strangely coincidental, as in painful.

Like the time you explain to him that you’re trying to get pregnant but then ask him to use a condom.

Like the first time you make love: You have, just that morning, paid $110 for a small vial of frozen sperm and been inseminated by a nurse under fluorescent lights.

Like secretly hoping he’ll agree to father a child the normal way even though you know he’s only 26. Meanwhile, you’re 43 and your time is running out.

A recent article in the New York Times told the unlikely story of three women who faced 40 with no man in sight. The first of the three chose an anonymous donor, but before she could use the sperm, met a man with whom she had a child. She passed on the sperm to a friend, to whom the same thing happened. That woman passed it on to a third: same result.

None of them had the odd experience, apparently, of doing it the old-fashioned and the artificial way simultaneously. But then, the men they met, had children with and eventually married? Pretty much the same age, it seems.

When Michael and I decided, one March evening in my living room, that we were more than friends, we had not even — Believe this! It’s true! — kissed each other. But we did share things we thought the other should know. Mine was that I had been, for the last year or so, trying to get pregnant through artificial insemination.

He should have run out screaming, but he might have been too young to know what could befall him. My journal for the next eight months is full of references to Clomid, daily shots of Pergonal, ultrasounds, and the anonymous blue-eyed blond donor I’d nicknamed “Sven.” One Saturday night in June, we had what Michael called his strangest date ever: to the University of Connecticut Health Center so I could get a shot of hCG, which triggers ovulation.

What the journal also records: Disappointment. Sorrow. Grief. Pain. No baby. Not then, not later, after we married and tried the old-fashioned way.

Too old? Maybe. But I didn’t stop hoping until I turned 50.

Those three women who got pregnant wrote a book about their happy endings called Three Wishes. In one of the book’s blurbs on amazon.com, a reviewer writes: “Three Wishes proves life is still a mystery and nothing, if we want it badly enough, is impossible.”

It’s true that life is a wonderful mystery, a shower of unexpected grace and delight, as Michael and I have discovered. But here’s what I’ve also learned: hoping for something — wanting it badly — can lead to action that may be empowering, but sometimes it is not enough.

Going the Distance

2010-06-27T17:16:00.015-04:00

On NPR’s “All Things Considered” yesterday, Michele Norris interviewed a blogger in her 20s who had asked older fellow-blogging women to write letters to their 20-year-old selves. Cassie Boorn wanted advice, wisdom and guidance from women who had emerged from their 20s.

I talk to my present self a lot, but talking to my younger self was a great way to take stock, to see what I would do differently — or not. It felt both nurturing and empowering, and some of it surprised me.

Dear 20-year-old Sheri,

I know you’re wavering between that nice guy you work with at summer camp and the cool guy who can dance and tell funny stories — the one you’re dating at college. Why do you think you have to choose? They both have something to offer that you can learn from and enjoy. Two years from now, when you graduate from college and think you should marry one of them, don’t. Be patient.

Swim more laps. Don’t wait until you’re in your 30s to swim farther. Learn to go the distance.

It’s OK to teach commas and "A Raisin in the Sun" to blonde-haired eighth graders for a couple of years. Just know that when you discover newspapers and the adrenaline rush of making deadline for a page-1 story, life will be more fun.

Stop thinking your finances will take care of themselves. Learn about investing.

Know that you will do some chancy stuff as a divorced woman in your 20s (and in your 30s). Rest assured that none of it will do you lasting harm. You’ll also get to sail to Key West, canoe the Boundary Waters, bike in the Netherlands.

Wear that bikini that shows off your flat stomach as often as you want.

It’s OK to throw off the religious dogma you were force-fed. But don’t shut down the spiritual you. Keep asking questions. Don’t get intimidated by people who say they have all the answers. They don't.

Get a dog, or at least make friends with some. Don’t get another cat after your soon-to-be-ex drowns those kittens.

Be patient. The man you will marry for keeps is only three years old.

Delaware River, 1993

2010-06-19T15:50:00.004-04:00

Seventeen years ago, so early she’d had to set an alarm, Sheri left her sister’s cabin on the Pennsylvania side of Delaware River and walked the bank to where I waited with a dinged-up aluminum canoe. A week of hard wedding prep had worn us raw, and we looked it. Sleep lines creased our cheeks and weariness showed in our red eyes and in our slow, careful movements. The river was calm, too, that morning, as if it had been working hard all week. Layers of foam snaked across its surface, early fog had lifted to gray the sky. The river burbled around the canoe’s bow as we slid it into the water. Sheri faced me, in a rosey T-shirt and white shorts, her hair tied in a pony tail. I paddled. The river took us; we steered a little.

I was twenty-eight; she was forty-five, married once and divorced. Look at it one way, and that age difference explained our exhaustion. While my parents were glad to cover the rehearsal dinner, Sheri’s parents had already ponied up for a long-ago wedding that hadn’t worked; we’d pay for this one. Those days we lived on my lousy newspaper salary and the few dollars she picked up as an adjunct college instructor, so we kept expenses low and relied on our own handiwork and on the loving generosity
of family and friends. Her sister and brother-in-law let us use the cabin gratis, her nephew was our DJ, she and her sisters cooked, her brother presided as celebrant, her brother-in-law and I uprooted trees to make a parking lot (and later replanted them), and a friend from the area let us raid her garden for bouquets. Ours was an old-fashioned rural American wedding with a community applying its talents to the celebration.

Downriver of the canoe, a truck rumbled over the bridge to Cochecton, New York. I don’t recall us saying much. We’d whisper to mark a bird here, some green beauty there. We grinned at each other a lot. I imagine we talked about wanting coffee.

That afternoon, in a nearby pine grove, we would meet for the “I do’s”. That was seventeen years ago, which means I’m now the same age as Sheri when she married me. Crazy woman. Part of me wants to go back in time and say to her, “You know, he’s a kid.” But another part of me figures that by this age I’ve goofed up and gotten lucky often enough to know one from the other. Sheri at the same age must have known that the canoe ride was a lucky moment, not a goofed-up one.

Me, I was plain dumbfounded.

As I write this, I can hear Sheri saying it’s too long for a blog post. She’s an unsentimental editor, and she’s right. I shouldn’t write so long. But two points.

We first lived together on that river in that cabin, a two-month retreat we owe to the kindness of her sister and brother-in-law. It’s a remote spot, and there we learned to live together without having to think too much about the age difference. We got solid in that place by giving our attention to the river and the wildlife and how best to argue with each other and deciding who would sleep on what side of the bed. No one was around to look at us as an age-aberrant sideshow or to tell us we were the wrong ages to be right.

Second, when we went back for our wedding, all that had changed. Her mother and my grandmother – Depression-era contemporaries – entertained each other on the porch. I played basketball with her nephew, not her brothers. Music choices were more Motown than CBGB. The signs were all around that we were of different generations. But in the days leading up to the wedding, no one came to us, fretting for our future. Maybe some people worried, but they kept private counsel. In that pine grove, beside that river, we felt the necessary love of those we loved. It mattered then, and it matters still. Thanks, y’all.

Coffee cups

2010-06-14T08:01:00.005-04:00

The other day Sheri dropped my favorite coffee cup. The cup was empty, because I had finished my coffee. Still, I gasped. History was crashing to the floor. The cup had belonged to my grandparents, a prize they received for donating money to the Polish National Home in Hartford, Connecticut on the occasion of its 60^th anniversary in 1990. It was a deep cup, solid and steady, with a smooth lip. It had a few scratches, but I’m a sentimental sort who likes drinking out of a cup from which his grandfather sipped.

Sheri dropped the cup and it made an awful sound against the floor tiles, but it didn’t break.

The next morning when I filled it, a puddle appeared around its base, seeping from a hairline crack. “Sheri,” I said, “I need a new favorite cup.”

So Sheri came home with one. It’s white with colorful polka dots.

“It’s happy,” she said.

“I like an old cup,” I said, pulling one from the cabinet. I picked one we’d bought at Powell’s Book Store in Oregon, a cup that’s coffee stained and scratched, a chip in the handle. “I like a cup that’s been around, that has character. I like a cup that tells stories.”

Sheri said, “I like a fresh cup. A clean one. One that’s new.”

Then we ate breakfast, neither of us realizing that we had also been talking about the reasons we married.

For Better, for Worse

2010-06-08T11:07:00.008-04:00

The Gore split first shocked people, then scared and saddened them.

But they seemed so good together! They were affectionate in public! They’d been through so much in their 40 years together! They’re throwing all of that away?!

Marriage is never a done deal, as Tara Parker-Pope notes in a New York Times piece reflecting on the breakup of Al and Tipper, who say they have simply grown apart. I read “grown apart” as meaning: We just don’t like hanging out together anymore.

Growing apart might seem like more of a bogeyman for age-gap couples like us. I’ve fretted over it, but I’ve found that sharing our different worlds has worked to our advantage.

Example: When Michael moved us from Montana to Arkansas for grad school, it had been more than dozen years since I’d gotten my own master’s degree. I was scared that his grad program would lure him away, that he’d leave me behind. So I made sure I went along for the ride. I went to work every day as a reporter and he went to learn about form and theory of fiction. But we shared the friends, the fun and, yes, the failures from our worlds. These are the tiny accretions from which a marriage grows. During our four years in Fayetteville, we watched same-age marriages crumble all around us among his fellow students. Not ours.

Parker-Pope writes that research reveals (SURPRISE!) that couples who share adventures are happier than those who live the same-old, same-old. As a quality test, she writes, people might ask themselves how many exciting experiences a partner brings to the relationship.

It seems to me it’s not so much about the number of exciting experiences Michael and I bring each other — even a Barnes & Noble date night can be exciting with him. So can watching cardinals at the bird feeder or skinny dipping in a Montana lake or listening to Van Morrison.

Rather, our 17-year age gap guarantees a life of adventures. We’ve always lived in different worlds. His career is gaining momentum; mine is winding down. He rocks out to Pearl Jam; I crank up Bob Dylan. He plays basketball; I do yoga. But those differences rooted in age keep our lives interesting: I’ve learned what a pick-and-roll is; he sometimes joins my yoga class.

O Youth and Beauty!

2010-05-29T18:17:00.004-04:00

Let me state the givens first, to get them out of the way.
Yes, Sheri and I – like many married couples – share a bed, and in bed we sometimes do a variety of those things consenting adults sometimes do which we will place under a general heading called, in this case, sex. Yes, sexual satisfaction is a measure of happiness in our marriage, but not the sole measurement. Yes, Sheri’s body is different in obvious and subtle ways from the body she had when I married her and from the bodies of many younger women. Likewise, my body is different in obvious and subtle ways from the body I had when we married and, though my role in this love affair is that of “the younger man,” my body isn’t a young man’s body anymore. Yes, like many happy people who also have sex, we realize sex is not only about the body but also about intimacy and imagination and love and fun and Gato Barbieri playing "Europa."

I’m writing about this because last week we received a comment from an “Anonymous” who tells us, basically, that younger men (meaning, Mr. Anonymous) don’t want to make love to a wrinkled old woman with a flabby stomach. He has learned about sex with older women through personal experience, he tells us; his wife is 41. And he would like for this ancient woman to set him free so he can have sex with younger women. This assumes, of course, that younger women will want to have sex with him.

Because the comment was directed to Sheri on a post she authored, she answered – in her typical no-nonsense way. But I want to answer, too. Anonymous’ views about younger men – and in particular his assumptions about me and my sex life – aren’t singular. Likeminded attitudes accompany comments on other younger men/older women blogs or on news stories about the latest HimPlus celebrity match. Clearly, some younger men get weirded out over the idea of sex with an older woman. Usually, they refer to flabby-this and wrinkled-that in their comments.

O Youth and Beauty!

That’s the title of a John Cheever short story in which a fellow tries to pretend he is not old by leaping furniture during a dinner party. It’s a silly exercise –- hurdling couches –- one that denies the obvious, and Cheever’s hero pays for it.

Here is what was obvious to me when Sheri and I married: She was older, therefore our hows and whys and whens of sex would be different. We’d have to be able to talk about those things, and we have. Also, on the verge of marriage, I asked myself a question, which, in paraphrase was something like “If sex weren’t part of your life with Sheri, would you still want her in your house, in your home, in your bed, til death do you part?” And the answer was “yes.” With Sheri in my life, the world felt more certain, I became a better person than I had any right to be, and it seemed to me that with her I could jump couches as long as I might like. Anonymous might not have asked himself that question.

Here is what’s now obvious to me: my wife is sexiest when she’s happy, and that is in moments like this one from last week, when at a beach on the Atlantic Ocean, as the tide came crashing in, she stood tall on an old piece of tree stump affixed into the sand, and from that perch she watched seawater and foam swirl around her feet. That’s the woman with whom I share a bed.

Mike 'n' Sheri, Baltimore, Md

2010-05-19T22:31:00.012-04:00

We recently had occasion to visit Michael’s family in Tucson and decided on a place to stay nearby. We didn’t realize right away what it was; the rooms looked decent online, it was close to where his parents live, and it didn’t cost that much. Plus, it had a swimming pool.

The Voyager Resort turned out to be more than just the small motel where we stayed. It was a retirement community, complete with a huge contingent of Midwest AARPers in RVs and streets called Hummingbird or Mourning Dove or Roadrunner. Next to the RV park was a section of manufactured homes with tiny, tidy cactus gardens and wooden signs: John & Bobbi, Columbus, Neb…. Jim & Mary Ruth, Waukesha, Wisc.

But it also had not just one but three — three!!! — swimming pools and two hot good-sized hot tubs. It had a bar (yes, the bar closed at 9 or 10, but still….). And we loved it. What does that say about us? It’s no secret that some of those Midwest snowbirds were near my age (or maybe younger, truth be told). But it worries me a little that Michael grooved on the place. He’s getting so old!

Meanwhile, across the pond ...

2010-05-08T09:20:00.011-04:00

A few weeks back we noticed a new square in our palette of followers. It wasn’t a face like this

or even a blogspot human representation like this

Instead, it was this.

Turns out that’s a paw print, and it belongs to a British blogger married to a “much younger man” and author of Beyond Cougar. On her site, Jo writes,

Beyond Cougar is for women, like me, who just happen to love a younger man, but can't stomach being branded as a 'Cougar'. … I write about relationship issues, and when I'm not doing that, I'm working in a senior marketing role - for now - the freelance world beckons! Enjoy your visit - I'd love to hear from you with comments and suggestions.

Jo xx

Jo's subjects have included Ten Reasons to Date a Younger Man and The Pressure of Looking Good When Dating a Younger Man. This week's topic is the backlash against Cougs.

We duck in to Beyond Cougar from time to time, and back when we first noticed it we added it to our blogroll. We’d follow Jo’s blog if it offered a function for following (it's WordPress, not blogspot).

But we notice that Beyond Cougar’s blogroll lacks any HimPlus17 action … Hey, Jo! How about a little love for the Yanks?

When age matters, when it doesn't

2010-05-01T08:38:00.003-04:00

Sheri observed, when age doesn’t matter.

Talking to me when I’m in another room. • Iris cut from the yard, arranged in a delft vase. • Spooning: “You’re breathing on the back of my neck.” • One of her thumbs is shorter than the other, by a third. • The honest grin she can’t help when the dogs stare at her. • This past month, studying Solzhenitsyn, fascinated by the guy. • Today’s newspapers, with coffee. • Wanting summer. • The socks left behind the bathroom door. • Fingers deep in dirt, making a new home for petunias, pansies, lettuce, basil, hydrangeas, tulips. • Gin and tonic! • Swam three-quarters of a mile yesterday. • Balancing the check book, but why seventeen cents off! • “I’ll let you” as in “I’m finished with the dusting. I’ll let you vacuum.” • Napping, with a basketball game in the background. • Strawberries and yogurt and granola in bed. • Editing my blog post: “This doesn’t make any sense.” • The comfort of her voice in another room.

Sheri observed, when it does:

At the grocery store, without drugstore reading glasses, can’t see to work the self-checkout. It’s the first time. • Impatience with TV beer commercials because their narratives “make no sense.” • Wants to put movies on our Netflix queue from AARP’s list of “Movies for Grownups.” • Shoulder still sore, more than a year after the fall. • The future? That’s twenty good years. What do you do with that? • Cold comfort: The old person discounts at movie theaters and museums. • Bouncing her grand niece in her lap. • Last week, said, “I want to live in a comfortable house before I die.”

The Great Car Debate

2010-04-24T10:01:00.008-04:00

Even the kind of car you buy can be an issue in a Him-plus marriage

A few years ago we were looking for a new vehicle, one that would fit both us and the dogs. We had a 1988 beater pickup truck that we dearly loved but needed replacing.

Sheri: was remembering her days traveling around the country in a Chevy van back in 1971. Yes! A van! Perfect for dogs, traveling and an aging hippie. Still a counterculture statement.

Michael: was thinking about minivans and soccer moms. A van??!! OMG! Just shoot me now, before I get any older.

Michael’s favorite car: his rag-top Jeep, which he had to leave in Arizona when he moved to New England 20 years ago. His mid-life crisis, should he ever have one, will involve, I think, a rag-top Jeep.

Sheri’s favorite: still that Chevy van, with burlap interior, a spare tire strapped to the roof, bikes strapped to the front, a bed in the back with tie-dyed sheets.

What we settled on: a Honda Element —marketed to young outdoorsy men but driven more and more by people with graying hair. The perfect choice.

Eat mor chikin

2010-04-18T10:00:00.005-04:00

Home from work the other night, I found Sheri in the kitchen working from a book called The 35-Plus Diet Cookbook. The cookbook’s pages are so yellow they’re brown, the loopy title font looks a little too disco, and the spine has been broken so often Sheri needs a rubber band to keep the pages in place. I wasn’t excited to see the book, which we once consulted nightly but has in recent years setttled near the bottom of the recipe drawer. The book reminds me of skinless chicken breasts and rice, and a time when I – a guy in his twenties – ate like a woman in her forties.

When Sheri and I met, my habit was to eat anything. Fat was best. Pizza. Hot dogs. Kielbasi. I ate enough fast-food cheeseburgers that I still moooo in my dreams.

Then comes a woman who is a bit more careful about what she eats, and she is over 35, and she has this cookbook …

And I’m eating skinless boneless chicken breasts. Baked. With rice. And a green vegetable.

A few nights later? Same thing. Substitute broccoli for asparagus.

A few nights later? Substitute green beans.

“I can’t eat more skinless boneless chicken breasts!” I’d say. “I’ll pick up a gyro.”

But then I felt guilty. Especially when Sheri would say, “Oh, get me one, too.”

Suddenly I’m the enabler. But Sheri felt guilty, too. She knew I’d rather be eating macaroni and cheese. I sacrificed for her by eating skinless and boneless; she sacrificed for me by eating a double-cheeseburger. With bacon.

It took a decade and too many of my own extra pounds to bring our eating habits in line. I cooked more often, added spices to the chicken breasts, and I figured ways to keep them a bit juicier. Sheri agreed to eat kielbasi now and then. I’ve given up fast food hamburgers.

Still, arriving home the other night to find her with that 35-plus cookbook in hand gave me the queasies. No, Sheri assured me, this is our favorite recipe. And it was! Thin slices of steak and asparagus sautéed in a goopy brown sauce. It wasn’t boring chicken!

A few bites into dinner, we agreed pizza would have been better.

Gobsmacked

2010-04-10T10:32:00.006-04:00

News Alert — In a surprise upset (a surprise for Esquire editors, at least), older foxy woman Helen Mirren crushes (66%-34%!!) younger foxy woman Megan Fox in Esquire's Sexiest Woman Alive contest.

Round Two of the voting starts Monday, when Mirren faces Ann Hathaway. Be there.