Older people mess around. And they're doing so
in greater numbers than ever before.
My friend has been
married to the same man she met in college and fell in love with more than 45
years ago. Together, they raised a passel of children who are all adults now.
And together they have enough grandkids to field a family soccer team. Their
home, as The Highwomen song goes, has “a crowded table where there’s a place by
the fire for everyone.” Open, inclusive, warm. Safe and lasting.
If you had asked me
last month whether they were happy, my answer would have been a resounding
“yes.” But then my friend called with some shocking news. Her 69-year-old
husband told her that a few weeks earlier he had met another woman on Facebook.
The online relationship led to coffee, a walk on the beach, and intense deep
conversation.
He said that this new
woman, who is the same age as his wife lest you think that’s where this is
going, excites him in a way he had never felt — or at least could no longer
remember. He said the quandary was that he also deeply valued my friend and the
life they had built together.
And so he had a
proposal: He wanted an open marriage, one where he would spend half the week
with his wife doing the regular things they always had, and then he would spend
the balance of his time with this new woman, getting to know her better and
seeing if she was, in fact, the person he was meant to spend the rest of his
life with.
No, my friend didn’t
murder him on the spot. Instead she called her lawyer and then her therapist —
in that order.
Emotional fidelity
My friend, as of this
writing, is moving forward with a speedy divorce. She is crushed to
smithereens, but hasn’t lost her wits about her. She can think about nothing
else, she said, and ping-pongs between hating her husband for his betrayal and
hoping he comes back to her.
She has a
conversation in her head while she waits for the sleeping pill to kick in where
she debates how she would feel if he had merely been physically unfaithful to
her — say, had a one-night stand — than his emotional cheating on
her. Emotional fidelity is the glue to any marriage, she said, which is
why hers is now unraveling.
But my friend is also
a pragmatist who spent her career doing scientific research, and also told me
that what happened to her is hardly unique: Older people mess around. And they
do so in greater numbers than ever before.
Right about the time
when we accepted “70 as the new
50,” the average age at which people reported having affairs
outside their marriage rose sharply. Today, Americans aged 55 and older
report having more extramarital affairs than Americans under 55, according
to The Institute
for Family Studies. Until 2000, the opposite was true.
There are a few
reasons for that. We are talking, of course, about a generation that came of
age during the sexual revolution. Having multiple sex partners was the norm.
Some grew up with parents who were swingers.
Research says older people are less likely to dissolve their
marriages in the wake of extramarital sex.
Further, this is the
generation quite familiar with using drugs to enhance their sexual experiences.
Back then it was weed and hallucinogens. Today, drugs like Cialis and Viagra
are back in the bedroom helping things out. Men with erectile dysfunction can take
a pill, and for women with vaginal dryness, there are lubes that even come with CBD oil,
a product derived from cannabis.
My researching friend
says in her case, there was a perfect storm. Her husband is 69 — about to hit
one of those milestone
birthdays that slam you in the gut and you assess your life and
happiness and wonder if you couldn’t be doing better.
But there was one
piece of research that my friend found that gives her pause. In between calling
her husband every name in the book and saying she could never trust him again,
she found that older people are less likely to
dissolve their marriages in the wake of extramarital sex.
and forgetting and my
friend hasn’t even gotten on the road.
Ann Brenoff was
a staff writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where she won a
shared Pulitzer for coverage of the Northridge Earthquake. Most recently, she
was a senior writer and columnist for HuffPost based in Los Angeles.
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