relationships

Chip’s Note: Debra’s honest guest post about how we have to make difficult decisions in our marriages and romances is a great way to start this week of guest posts dedicated to “realationships.”

Margery Williams Blanco’s classic children’s book, “The Velveteen Rabbit,” offers an insight that ought to be plastered on every midlifer’s bathroom mirror, “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off.”

Chip’s Note: Boy, do I love Susan! If I were straight, I’d definitely ask her out for a date. It’s not just her external beauty, but it’s her internal, moral beauty that glows. I think you’ll enjoy this guest post.

I’ve written before about the fact that the only age demographic showing growth in divorce rates in the U.S. is those 55 and older, as the Gray Divorce rate is double what it was in 1990.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Donald Justice’s “Men at Forty” (see below) was written nearly sixty years ago, so maybe it should be renamed “Men at Fifty” given our extended longevity. There’s a melancholy flavor to the poem, a sense of lost youth, but also a curiosity about the second half of one’s life. I couldn’t help wondering how this poem might relate to the second half of one’s marriage. Age can affect one’s body, but also one’s relationship as marital inertia (and kids) swallows the energy of a connection.

At a time when divorce rates have been dropping for decades in the U.S., why is it that the only age group that is showing a rise in divorces is those 55 and older, as the Gray Divorce rate is double what it was in 1990?

It’s been a few weeks and I’m still reflecting on Saturday night’s high school reunion. Forty years ago, a group of 84 young women left for university believing they would seize the world. Then last Saturday, 56 of them, exactly 66%, reunited in Sydney, Australia.

When I turned 60, I hoped for a river cruise down the Seine. But instead, this midwestern wife, mother, GG to her grandbabies, devoted yogi and magazine writer discovered that her husband, the one who never looked at another woman in my presence, was leading a secret life.

Dating at any age is fraught with challenges. Dating in your fifties (and beyond), however, has its particular issues. And I’m not talking about the usual complaints about the size of the male pool versus the number of available females, or the “age-appropriate” question.