Stories About Midlife Romance

I Embarrass My Husband

The Subject is Flowers

I embarrass my husband. It’s true, I do.

It’s not my weight. My table manners. My political opinions or even my high-pitched snorting laugh. It’s gotten to the point he won’t be seen in public with me – or to be more precise – he won’t go for walks with me.

The path I take, he takes no more.

Read more

, ,

Your Dessert or Mine

Caloric Choices Create Marital Mayhem!

In the old days, my husband and I disagreed about desert vs. mountain locales, city vs. more pastoral settings. Should we live in Las Vegas or Reno? Nevada or New York City or at least Washington, D.C.? Somehow we navigated our way through the difficult marital waters of very different lifestyles and career paths and recently celebrated our 30th anniversary.

However, add an ‘s’ to desert, and we now find ourselves facing a marital incompatibility for which there may be no solution. The issue is dessert. We never saw eye-to-eye on this caloric highpoint of a meal, but when we were younger, it didn’t matter. We could eat a lot (really a lot) and it wasn’t a problem for either of us. Appetizer, bread with butter, soup, salad, big entrée, potatoes, and, of course, dessert – always dessert. We could feast and then exercise it off.

But now, in our late middle years, our “middles” reveal the excesses of our gluttony. You’ve heard the unfortunate expression “muffin top?” I think of my midriff as more of a “seven-layer-cake cascade” and Jon’s as an “ice-cream crescendo.” Read more

, ,

Are You Still Sexually Active?

And other Signs you’re not as young as you think you are.

“Are you still sexually active?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you still sexually active?” repeated the gynecologist, peering up and around my legs.

Why? I worried silently. Was she finding something ‘down there’ to indicate I wasn’t or shouldn’t be?

“Of course, I am,” I replied sharply, snapping my legs together to signal an end to that embarrassing and frankly insulting line of questioning.

Read more

, ,

These Boots are no Longer Made for Walking

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat." Rudyard Kipling

middle life crisis

I’m a city girl, as in The City, The Big Apple, New York City. He’s a western, small-town-kind-of-guy. I’m a Gucci-kind-of-girl. He’s always been a cowboy- boot-wearing-guy. And I don’t mean the fancy, handcrafted, custom-made, snakeskin, gold-and-silver encrusted Tony Lama or Lucchese kind of cowboy boots. I mean unadorned, work boots. “Shit-kickers,” as my father so eloquently – and accurately – described them.

Read more

,