Read Online Harley and Me by Bernadette Murphy - Free Book Online Page B

beyond reason about the written word. J doesn’t read—not the literature I’m dying to discuss with someone, nor even my own books and essays that are like children to me. I plan ahead and dream big. He prefers to let things unfold and settles for what life provides. I appreciate quiet and a house that’s ordered and simple. He keeps the TV on and favors piles as an organizational strategy. I strive to live within my means. He spends freely with credit cards. All these things might be surmounted, if abiding concern and kindness for the other are at the heart. But kindness and concern seem to have trickled away in recent years.
    Still, I try what I’ve been taught in therapy: using “I” statements, recognizing I’m responsible for my own happiness, trying to be the person I’d like to be paired with. The result is an ever-deepening sense of aloneness.
    By the time we make it to counseling, I am unable to picture a different outcome. We remain cordial with each other—to a fault. We’relike roommates careful to not piss the other one off. This timbre is in biting contrast to the rest of my life that, in recent years, has become increasingly rich and comfortable and nourishing. I am enjoying the first full-time job I’ve had in decades, teaching at a university, working with creative writing students. I love spending time with our teenage children and the activities we pursue together: backpacking, hiking, music, discussing books and philosophy, running. I savor the group of friends who surround me, people alert to and interested in the larger world, and who are interesting to me. I feel amazingly blessed to be accepted and loved by so many.
    But when I come home and chat with J, I feel empty. We talk about the house, or the dog, or the kids. If there is no domestic issue to discuss, we tell each other about the little stories we read online that day. Our crayon box of conversation topics holds only a few basic colors. The rest of my life is kaleidoscopic.
    And while I realize this is truly a “first-world problem,” I’m not alone with it. Turns out, this experience of dissatisfaction at midlife has a long history for men and women alike and often shows up in marital discord. In some ways, I’m right on schedule. How many movies have we seen in which a balding middle-aged man suddenly buys a sports car or begins an affair with his younger, blonde secretary? I’m not sure what the tropes are for women: Either we become the nagging housewife or the power-driven corporate woman. Or maybe we have a torrid affair.
    What does a real women struggling with these issues in midlife look like?
    â€œWomen tend to use their associations and relationships with others to gain identity and self-esteem,” I learn from Christiane Northrup, MD, author of The Wisdom of Menopause . Home and hearth often matter the most to us, even those among us with high-powered jobs or who have chosen not to marry. Men, on the other hand, derive their identity and self-esteem from the outside world during their prime years: from their job, their income, their accomplishments and accolades. But nothing stays stagnant.
    â€œFor both genders, this pattern often changes at midlife,” Northrup writes.
    In an ironic role reversal, women at midlife begin to direct their energies toward the world outside the home and family, perhaps for the first time. Men, meanwhile, are often tired of fighting the daily grind and want to draw their energies in, looking forward to retiring, caving up, staying home. Men begin to look for more satisfaction from their domestic relationships at the very moment women are biologically primed to start exploring the larger world. When the relationship is healthy and flexible, this shifting pattern can be easily absorbed. The man may cut back on working hours or retire and take up cooking and other domestic chores while supporting his partner’s new outside