My space, my way

"Oh, Kat.”
It was Mia on the phone, sounding stressed in a way I hadn’t heard since her rough-and-tumble divorce.
That was five years ago, and although she had her ups and down in dating and love, Mia — a smart, sassy blonde — had been seeing Rex, a good guy who adored her, for a year. He’d hung in there through her insecurities, and her through his. They approached tough things — that she made more money than he, the pains from past loves, whether they have the same goals for the future — with honesty and respect. They were each willing to look into their “baggage,” and see how it would be to place those side by side in a relationship.



It’s no wonder that all my fortysomething divorced friends and I see their relationship as a success story. It’s proof of a hope for each of us, despite the odds, of perhaps finding a life partner in midlife.
But by the way she sounded, I was fearing the worst.

“Mia, what’s wrong?’
“It’s Rex,” she sighed. I thought I detected a stuffy nose, no doubt from crying.
“Oh, no, sweetie. Please don’t tell me you guys broke up.”
“Broke up? Oh good heavens, no!” she laughed. “He wants us to live together.”
“And ….?”
“Well, that’s it!”

I almost burst out laughing. I mean, the guy you’re in love with wants to live with you, wants to take the first steps toward committing to a life together, and you’re in tears?
Am I missing something?

But the stress I was hearing in her voice was very, very real.
And, oddly enough, I know exactly why.

When our generation fell in love and married in our 20s and 30s, we were looking for someone and something much different than we are now in our 40s. We had visions of starting a family, of “playing house,” of settling down into a community. It was full of romantic, perhaps even naïve, notions, such as happily-ever-after.

There’s no way you can go through a divorce, especially in midlife, and feel the same way, no matter how much of a romantic you are — and I certainly am one.

My divorced friends and I are like lab rats that somehow survived the tests. We know that living together creates incredible intimacies and magically loving moments — like when you look at your hubby next to you in bed on a lazy Sunday morning, newspapers spread all over the covers, a few toast crumbs stuck to his lips, and he catches your glance and breaks out into that face-lighting smile that brings you back to the first time he smiled at you like that. No matter how many years you’ve been together, it’s those tiny moments that keep the connection — and, one hopes, lust — alive.

But we also know that the day-in-day-out grind can take the mystery of love and your lover away and often replace it with some really ugly behaviors. Resentments. Frustrations. Put-downs. Contempt. Anger. Competition. Deception. And I’m probably forgetting a few.

But perhaps the biggest transformation is the loss of freedom. It happened so gradually that I almost didn’t get it as I went about my daily life as the Good Wife and Mother for 15 years. But when the divorce came and I suddenly found myself with a lot of time on my hands when Trent is with his dad, it was as if someone handed me a gift, a gift I never quite allowed myself to have in my marriage. I could fill that time with anything and in any way I wanted. COM classes? Sure. Dancing at Sweetwater? Why not? Scrambled eggs for dinner? Fine. Putting on my cozy pants and curling up with a cup of green tea and my novel on my bed at 8 p.m.? Absolutely.

There was no one to tell me I couldn’t or, worse yet, shouldn’t.
I was beginning to understand why so many of the middle-aged Marin men I’ve met who never married or lived with someone probably never would: They were just so comfortable being Their Way there didn’t seem to be a reason to invite a woman in (and perhaps her kids) to turn that into Our Way, even if they said and truly believed that they were searching for a life partner.

People who are single at midlife — and of the nearly 82 million baby boomers in America, a third are — often have their own homes, career and life successes and perhaps families, and they don’t need another person for any of that. They want companionship, sex and love (or in many cases, just the sex), and they want it on their own terms.
And I realize I do, too.

Recently, Sean, the single dad I see from time to time, and his 12-year-old daughter joined Trent and me for dinner. It almost felt like the homey togetherness of life when I was married. About midnight, after a wonderful meal we all prepared together while singing sappy ’70s love songs, after an outrageous game of Monopoly in which all sorts of side deals were made, they got ready to head home.

Sean came up from behind me and, slipping his arms around my waist, whispered, “I wish the kids would go off somewhere and we could curl up in bed and I could ravish you.”

“Me, too. Wednesday?” I said, the day Trent went back to his dad.
“That’s an eternity.”
“That’s a reality.”
As much as the idea of ravishing and being ravished right then sounded delicious, so is delaying something that you want so much — and then reveling in the anticipation. That’s what helps keeps the mystery and desire alive.

It’s hard to keep that up when you live together, although I want so strongly to believe it’s not impossible.

And that, of course, was Mia’s struggle. As much as she loves Rex, she wants to keep the mystery alive as well as her freedom intact. Except her “freedom” is already kept in check by her 15-year-old son, the last of three still at home before he heads off to college.

So for now, Mia considers that her “out” — no one’s moving in with anyone as long as there’s a kid at home.

Funny how our kids once turned a couple into a family, and now they can keep us from creating a new one.

Who says kids are good for nothing nowadays?