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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.