Letters to the Editor
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To The LW
You're cool.
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Anonymous at 10:38
WTF?
She has a career, extended family, friends and interests of her own. She really doesn't need a man to help her find herself.
She doesn't need a guy in her life.
A man does not prevent a woman from dying alone. Men usually die first and women usually die "alone." She's hardly alone, anyway. She has kids and friends and extended family.
To me, it sounds like a very full life, and one that's really worth living.
Yeesh. Women really can't win. If an LW complains that she wanted to get a date and couldn't, someone would carefully explain to her that she's past her shelf life and is a narcissist for expecting a man to be interested in a woman over 40. If a LW says she's happy alone, somebody tells her she's selfish for not wanting a man. Catch 22.
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why marry?
I read these letters to Cary and the message board posts and wonder why the hell people are still getting married at all.
What makes anyone think they can beat odds? Does everyone married or getting married REALLY think they are going to be together for the next 50 years. How does anyone think that's even possible after being together for 2 years?
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Bad advice from Cary and a lot of posters soured on relationships
LW, if you listen to this advice, and continue in your present path, you will end up lonely and sexless and at a time of life when it will be far more difficult to meet anybody -- even a partner for "no strings" sex.
When an otherwise healthy and normal woman your age tells me she has no need or interest in sex, I get worried and my first thought is underlying depression and a failure to recover from a previous bad relationship. Yes, you can have underlying depression even though you have great kids, a good job, and an otherwise decent life.
Being a mom -- let alone being an employee -- is not a reason or excuse to have no relationships, no sex, and to live only for your kids. The LWs kids are 9-16, not toddlers. The oldest will leave for college in two years or less; the second will be right on his heels. Even her younger disabled child will be out of the nest in less than 10 years -- by which time, the LW (if she is vaguely waiting for this event to even think about change) will be about 55 years old.
It's not impossible to suddenly turn tail and start dating at 55, but I assure you it is much more difficult than it at 45, or it was back when you got divorced. It pretty much gets more difficult with each passing year. The pool of men available to you gets smaller, as older men begin to die off and some men your own age will choose to hook up with younger partners. If you are 45 today, the cohort of men younger than you is smaller than your own cohort, so statistically you don't have as good a chance of finding a partner that way either. If you want to make an intelligent, informed decision about waiting to date until 55, you need ASAP to talk to some single/divorced/widowed women that age and hear about their life experiences in this area. I promise you that you will rethink your decision not to date now in light of what you will hear.
BTW: don't bother ragging on me about how "people don't need to get married." I'm not even talking about marriage -- I'm talking about adult companionship, human sexuality, intimacy, trust. You can't, and you should not get all of this from your children -- not if you are a good parent who wants them to grow up emotionally healthy and free to develop their own lives. (No one seriously wants a 30 year old living in the basement and mooching your SSI check.) Your children will learn everything they will know about grown up intimate adult relationships from YOUR behavior -- right now you are telling them that intimacy is of no important, adults should have no private lives, parent/child relationships are more important than adult/adult relationships. This is wrong and unhealthy for THEM, and it's wrong and unhealthy for YOU.
The friends I have who are behaving like the LW (i.e., overly invested in the mom role, and refusing to date) are all victims of painful divorces and bad relationships. It doesn't take a shrink to figure out that their actions are a response to pain -- they are avoiding even trying again, lest they be hurt. Well, life is about getting hurt and then getting back up on the horse again. Would we be as accepting about someone who has given up on looking for a job, if his excuse was "my last job was really shitty...then I got laid off?" Of course not! We expect someone who has lost a job to buck up and get back on with life.
Four years is ample time to recover from a divorce. If not, you are in serious denial about your depression, and your need for counseling to get on with your life. I believe this is where the LW's mom is concerned -- if the LW spends her entire life in "mourning" for the lost marriage, if she can't get over the rejection or the failure of having married someone who let her down, then she is stuck. And all the good mothering, the good job, the good friends, the other very good elements of her life will eventually let her down and leave her lonely and without the normal sexual intimacy that a healthy adult needs.
I thought the days when women were supposed to "live only for their kids" was long gone. LW, the day will come and faster than you realize, when those kids will either have left or they simply will have their own friends and dates, and they won't want to bake brownies with you or watch Hitchcock films. I love both brownies AND Hitchcock, but I don't necessarily want to experience either alone. Neither should you.
Getting hurt in life does not give you permission to disengage from life. Avoiding problems does not make them go away. Most healthy adults know this. I think your mom knows this, and I think you need to listen (with some balance and a sense of humor) to her wisdom.
Just like other stuff in life -- like childbearing, jobs, education -- we only have a finite amount of time in this world to do the things that matter. No one, not even god, will put life on "standstill" for you while you work through your "issues", and decide you are ready. To every thing, there is a season.
So get on with it. Get the professional help you need to work things out (hormones maybe?), and re-engage with your own life. Let your children have their own lives.
And while you are at, read the brownie recipe on the back of the can of Hershey's or Ghiradelli cocoa -- scratch brownies are the easiest thing in the world to make and actually take no more time than a crappy mix.