An older woman married to a younger man will inevitably watch him ascend to the top of his career while she is on the downhill side.
We’re not there yet — but it’s closer than I like to think about.
Since 1992, when I quit my job as a reporter at The Hartford Courant and lit out for Montana, Michael and I have traded “turns” in our professional lives. He followed me to Montana, giving up a job he loved for adventure in a place he’d never been with a woman he’d known for less than a year.
Next it was his turn. Four years in Arkansas. Then mine. Back to Montana.
During all those moves, our professional lives felt in sync. It helped that we had begun our journalism careers at roughly the same time, despite our age difference. When one of us had a reason to move (job offer, grad school, whim), the other found work. We were journalists, we were teachers; we were two train cars coupled and rolling along the same career track at the same pace.
Then Michael moved from journalism to creative writing — first the doing and then the teaching. I cheered him on, knowing it was his turn to pick where we would live next so he could do a thing he loved more than journalism. Maryland beckoned.
He moved. I followed, but it took me five months. I worried about giving up the security of a teaching job where I was on the cusp of tenure. In other words, my see-saw was still on the way up, and I was afraid it would plummet with a thunk in Maryland, tossing me either into an early retirement or a netherworld of scraping by on freelance work and adjunct teaching.
Worried for naught. A job found me, or I it. Full time. Teaching. Fine pay. Rewarding work. So far, so good. See-saw back on the upswing.
Well, here’s the honest thing. I love knowing that Michael’s headed for good things over many productive years. But I hate knowing that my up-up-and-away will slow before his, and that our trajectories, synchronized for so long, will start moving at different speeds.
I’m 44-years-old now and have been waiting for the urges that signify a man’s mid-life crisis. The age seems right. Shouldn’t I be dumping the wife, trolling the dance clubs, or at least contemplating a run for U.S. president?
Turns out I’m past all that. In a book titled Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, two evolutionary psychologists explain that a man’s mid-life crisis is linked to his wife’s menopause. Write Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa in a piece they published on Psychology Today’s online site:
From the evolutionary psychological perspective, a man's midlife crisis is precipitated by his wife's imminent menopause and end of her reproductive career, and thus his renewed need to attract younger women. Accordingly, a 50-year-old man married to a 25-year-old woman would not go through a midlife crisis, while a 25-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman would, just like a more typical 50-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman.
With Barbie now turning 50, does this mean Ken is about to trade in his classic doll for an updated version -- say, a Pussycat Doll? Does this also explain why when I turned thirty and Sheri was 47 I had an ear pierced for the first and only time? Was that the full flush of my midlife crisis? What a rip off! Why didn’t I buy a BMW convertible? I was driving a used Chevy S-10 for cripes sake! It was GRAY!
Now it’s too late. I’m 44, drive a Honda Element and like to be asleep before Letterman comes on. My life is twisted.
At least wear boxers ...
(thanks to Latte Mommy who first published the photo)
The other night, I stopped for a rack of ribs to-go and waited for them with nothing to do but page through a month-old issue of the National Enquirer.
Britney, celebrity wardrobe malfunctions, Michelle Obama’s dresses, the sorrows of Katie and Tom and toddler Suri ....
The only thing I actually read, though, was an item about how Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher plan to adopt a child. Said an anonymous source: “[A]fter all the disappointments and the IVF treatments, everyone is really excited that they are making their dream come true. It's a win-win situation.”
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Later reports in US magazine and elsewhere noted that on a Twitter page believed to be Moore’s (but how can you be sure?), the 46-year-old movie star married to the 31-year-old movie star had denied the story. “Been asked all day so to clear up rumors,” read the tweet, “we are not adopting a child but what a gift if that at some time was something we wanted to do!”
I suspect the question of more children for Moore, and a first for Kutcher, is far more complicated than a tweet can express. And if it isn’t now, it might well become that way.
We didn’t adopt, either. We talked about adoption. I read about how it works, the tens of thousands of dollars required. I knew a couple who traveled to Brazil, only to have the birth mother change her mind. We had a small window: could we even be approved if Sheri was in her fifties and me in my thirties? Adoption seemed daunting, impossible, fraught with risk; I suppose, in its way, the dull, familiar ache of childlessness was easier.
When I fell in love with Sheri, I understood the likelihood that I’d never father a child. When I was 27, that was an acceptable sacrifice for a life with a woman as remarkable as Sheri.
Nearly twenty years later, I know I’ve missed out on something fundamental to human experience. Sheri has, too. Though I would not change a whit of my past if it meant losing Sheri, I sometimes try to understand who that young man was, and why he made the decisions he did. I question his motives, his wisdom. Was he selfish, not wanting to share his life with a child? Was he afraid of the responsibility? Was he immature?
Was I? Am I?
With age, I’ve found ways to bring children and young people into my life. I teach, of course, and I’ve enjoyed participating in the growth to adulthood of countless young people. I’m blessed to have a marvelous nephew and niece who live too far away and whom I wish could see more often.
I volunteered for nearly five years through Big Brothers, which brought into my life a wonderful boy who has grown into a young man I’m proud to call a friend.
All to the good. Though none of it fills a gap I feel only vaguely, that I can’t define. I see parents with children, I try to imagine how it must be. But I can’t. I’ve no frame of reference. What I know is what it means to be childless, and I know this status in a way parents never can.
In a poem called “The Block” from her book Near Changes, the poet Mona Van Duyn opens with the line “Childless, we bought the big brick house on the block, / just in case. We walked the dog.”
Like the speaker in Van Duyn’s poem, we, too, have lived in neighborhoods full of children where instead of driving a van to a soccer game we walked dogs. We have walked three. Tinker is gone, euthanized in 1999. Kaimin is seven. Ozark, crippled and exhausted, will likely be dead this Tuesday. I’ve never treated our dogs as anything but dogs, but they are beloved dogs, and I wonder whether how I love them is something like how parents love children; both kinds of love grow for a creature that has depended on you and, sometimes, wanted to please you.
“The years bloomed by,” Van Duyn writes, “the old dogs were put to sleep. We bought a scoop to walk our new pup on his leash …”
"Then the long, warm, secret descent began
and we slid along with it. ‘We need a last dog,’ I said,
‘but I can’t face it.’ "
I’ve about had it with the myth that older women are all of the following: Serene. Patient. Wise. Understanding. Mature.
What a lot of hooey.
I came across that Older-Woman-as-Super-Earth-Mother myth again recently on a Web site called “Third Age,” which markets products and advice to middle-aged men and women.
It came up in an advice column in which a 49-year-old woman asked if she should marry a 33-year-old guy. Here’s what the columnist told her about men:
Some men, like Peter Pan, never grow up. In life they look for a woman who will be both mother and wife so they never have to be a responsible adult. Other men know their own mind, appreciate the maturity of an older woman and make great husbands.
I’ll let the younger men with older women speak on that topic. Meanwhile, here’s what he said about older women:
The Wonders of an Older Woman
Some men who are comfortable with older women appreciate how understanding and tolerant they are. Older women often really understand and like men, creating a very pleasant experience for a man. Then too, some men like to be taken care of rather than do some of the difficult work of growing up and caring for others, like children or women their own age. An older woman usually knows how life works, how to keep a house, and is more forgiving of a young man's behavior or lack of ambition or diligence.
Tolerant? Ask Michael how tolerant I am, and he’ll tell you I don’t suffer fools gladly.
Understanding? I can’t claim to understand men any better now than I did 25 years ago when I was making bad choices about men. I chose better 18 years ago, but that was partly because I understood myself better.
Forgiving of a young man’s behavior? Frankly, when I was 43 and Michael was 26, I had a hard time with some of my young man’s behavior. Once, running in to him on the way to work when we were first dating, I was appalled that he was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt he got at a Grateful Dead concert. I told him so. He has since forgiven me.
Mature? For the first 10 years of our marriage, even though I complained he didn’t do enough in the kitchen, I didn’t really want him in “my” kitchen. He’s been the mature one, waiting me out and showing me just how smart a chef he is.
We are women with younger men. That doesn’t make us saints. Give us a break.
Readers of this blog have been sending e-mails since our first post, and many have acknowledged age-gap love affairs. One, a wonderful writer I've recently met, retold a story that will be part of her forthcoming book, Raw Edges (University of Nevada Press, 2009). After Phyllis Barber’s 33-year marriage ended, she writes, she began an affair with a man seventeen years her junior. It ended sadly because of his drug addiction. Nevertheless, “a big difference in age is a fascinating thing to consider/think about/ experiment with / undertake / etc." she wrote me. "It sounds as though you and Sheri have maintained well, though there is always the business of being 70 and 54, as you mention on the website. Maybe it's not easy to get it right, but where there is love....”
A sentiment with which we can agree.
A man involved with a woman thirteen years his senior wrote:
Your blog was illuminating in that you pointed out, which I'd been trying to put into words, that an older woman in a relationship with a younger man has lived a life by her own rules. A life set free from the prejudices and assumptions that seem to subconsciously bind so many couples with similar ages, skin colors, backgrounds, finances, etc. … Who knows what'll happen. Your blog is testament to the fact that a relationship like this is a total mind, body, soul, life commitment.
But the note that most intrigued me did so because it’s from the perspective of someone not part of a HimPlus couple, but instead observing from the outside.
I have a friend from high school who married a woman 16 years his senior. "(He's) getting married. She's 16 years older than him" was the engagement announcement among friends. I must have heard that 20 times. They are together 10 years now, but even now people will say, "I saw (him) when I was home. He's doing this or that. Do you know his wife's 16 years older than him?" They are both successful business owners, but her age is pretty much all I know about her!
I like the exclamation point at the end. It suggests a little frustration, a little upset at how people reduce a passionate, complicated love affair to a difference in age. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t do such things. But I see no reason to worry too much about it. If people reduce Sheri and me to an age gap, such perceptions don’t change our lives. Our coupling is unusual, yes, but our love hasn’t created any crippling social stigmas. You want a love that suffers from being reduced? Think of the black man and the white woman who fell in love in 1957, or the man who held a man’s hand as they walked a city sidewalk in 1963 (or in 2003, or in 2009). Those people risked their lives to love openly. If all people can say about a couple is “He’s Mexican” or “They’re gay,” that’s reductionism worth an exclamation point. Or two.
There has been no historic prohibition to older women loving younger men (except, as with the Mary Kay Letourneaus of the world when the “him” is legally a boy). No laws have made our sharing wedding vows illegal. No one has ever threatened Sheri and me because of our love. We’ve suffered no scorn from our families. Maybe an Old Money family from the Upper West Side is tossed into a tizzy when the favorite son brings home a waitress from Brooklyn, but our families hardly blinked when Sheri brought me home and vice versa. My family warmed to Sheri, and I always felt comfortable with hers.
Perhaps someone somewhere once opted against inviting us to a party because of our age difference, but I doubt it. 
Our love carries risks, but those risks are not societal. If anything, our age difference makes us more interesting: a conversation starter. We’re a curiosity, and no danger to anyone. Maybe that’s why the Older Woman/Younger Man phenomenon carries such currency in today’s gossip columns and reality TV shows. Pop culture isn’t the place for too much daring. Only just enough to titillate.
A friend who writes for the New York Times notes a sorrowful end to a younger man-older woman love affair. Flight 3407, the Continental Connection flight that crashed outside Buffalo, carried Coleman Mellett (pictured right, from a shot captured from the Times' site). Mr. Mellett was a 33-year-old jazz guitarist who often played with Chuck Mangione and who was married to a woman 17 years older. Details in the Times' article suggest Mr. Mellett and his wife, Jeanie Bryson, shared an artistic partnership as well as a marriage.
From the Times article:
Mr. Mellett was married to Jeanie Bryson, 50, a jazz singer and the daughter of Dizzy Gillespie, with whom he would often perform. They lived in a ranch-style house in East Brunswick, N.J., a lifestyle that Mr. Mellett found ideal, far from the famed jazz clubs of Manhattan. Though he occasionally taught lessons to supplement his income, Mr. Mellett earned a steady salary from being part of Mr. Mangione’s ensemble. At Mr. Niewood’s prompting, Mr. Mellett also worked with the Radio City Music Hall orchestra during the “Christmas Spectacular” show.
As the friend who drew this article to my attention notes, Ms. Bryson likely did not expect to outlive her husband. With that age difference, it is likely Mr. Mellett is the one who anticipated grieving a spouse. Life – and death – gave them no say in who would go first, but what if some cruel God made us choose? I’d want to say “Take me first” so she could go on with all the joys of life, and I’d also want to say “Take her first,” because I can’t bear the idea of her grief. Our sympathies are with Ms. Bryson and all the families and friends mourning loved ones lost in the crash of Flight 3407.
An older woman married to a younger man will inevitably watch him ascend to the top of his career while she is on the downhill side.
