Time. A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experience. Like a complex wine, she can be alternately sweet, tart, sparkling, mellow. She is both maternal and playful. Assured, alluring, and resourceful. She is less likely to have an agenda than a young woman—no biological clock tick-tocking beside her lover’s bed, no campaign to lead him to the altar, no rescue fantasies. The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long as she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of her life, despite failures and false starts. Single boomer women are not the only ones who are actively, even aggressively, seeking romance again, declaring their right to sexual satisfaction, and dreaming new dreams. Their boldness has caught on with “ladies” of earlier generations who were taught that their role was only to oblige their husbands and pick up after their children. Margaret, an old friend and former radical who was still married to her only husband and living in rural New Hampshire, confided to me how shocked she was to hear stories from her contemporary female friends who are divorced or widowed in their sixties or seventies. “They’re having romantic escapades with young guys, they talk about erotic discoveries, a couple of them have fallen in love again, but they want relationships beyond conventional marriage.” Margaret still thought of herself as the free spirit who had walked the wild side in the 1960s. “I was the rebel, and they were the stick-in-the-muds. Now I’m the old married fuddyduddy.” But you do not have to break up your marriage to change your life. Long-married women are also waking up to the possibilities of postmenopausal sensuality and proposing new contracts to shake the staleness out of their relationships and release their deferred creative energies?… When you stop to think about it, you probably know a seasoned woman who has embarked on a new life. Maybe it’s an old college friend. Or perhaps it’s your own mother and you’re having a “Mom’s run wild!” reverse-roles reaction. I’ve interviewed enough women whom I describe as WMDs—Women Married, Dammit!—to know that many wrestle with a rhetorical question almost as vexing as Hamlet’s dilemma: to leap or not to leap? Is it nobler for a woman to stick with a stultifying marriage or better to step off into the unknown? Or perhaps you’re widowed or divorced but not really “out there” and wondering what it’s like for women who do take the leap.
The Wild-Haired Years
The widow who first came to mind was Peggy, a professor of political science at a prestigious college, whose story I told in New Passages. A flaming redhead with an infectious laugh, Peggy waged five years of a gallant battle with her husband, Chuck, against his prostate cancer. Once widowed, Peggy was forced to learn to be alone. Her first solo vacation she spent in the Canadian Gulf Islands, plunging into the chilly sea every morning at dawn and rising, refreshed and tingling with life, like Venus from the sea. “It made me feel like I could be a spicy woman again,” she told me. “It’s ironic. When nothing bigger can happen to you in a negative sense, you feel invulnerable. Since he’s gone, I’m more methan I ever was. I dare more. My first question now is always ‘Well, why not?’ I call it my wild hair. When I don’t have my wild hair, I’m sad. But when I have it, there’s a certain elation.” After passing her 65th birthday, Peggy met an interesting man at a political rally. They saw each other a few times for dinner and conversation, though “having another romance was the furthest thing from my mind,” she told me. “But one day the fun-loving Peggy in me picked up the phone on the spur of the moment and invited this man to go to Big Sur for a weekend. I thought, ‘Well, why not?’ " When Jack pulled up at her house in his dashing black Lexus, Peggy was in jeans at her sink doing dishes. At the last moment, hearing her mother’s censorious voice in her ears, she couldn’t step over the line. She kept her hands plunged into hot soapy water and mumbled, “I can’t do this, I’m sorry.” Jack suggested that it would be just a relaxing getaway weekend. Peggy demurred: “I know, but we both know where this is going.” Jack kept gently filibustering. She asked him to wait in the car. “In a wild-haired moment, I grabbed the first thing I could find—a big black garbage bag—and stuffed some clothes inside before I could change my mind again.” When Peggy emerged from her kitchen, Jack wondered, No suitcase? Had she chickened out after all? He just hadn’t noticed what she was dragging behind her. Jack laughed. He caught her spirit of spontaneity, and on their arrival at the exclusive waterfront inn, he handed the garbage bag to the doorman with a flourish. He watched with a sexy gleam in his eye as Peggy swept into the lobby with the light-footed grandeur of a duchess. Less than a year later Peggy agreed to marry Jack, provided they both accepted an agreement: she would continue teaching, and each of them would keep their own home and sense of community. Peggy shifted her emphasis into creating reentry programs at local colleges for women who have been divorced, abandoned, or widowed and have to start over again, as she had. In their eight years together, she and her adoring new husband have traveled just about every continent and shared adventures. Most recently, they sailed the Croatian coast with Jack skippering and Peggy and her children as the crew. The most indelible change has been in Peggy herself: She hasn’t lost her wild hair again, not for a moment. MORE: 50 Things That Get Better With Age
