Older Women, Younger Men. Felicia Brings
Copyright © 2000 by Felicia Brings and Susan Winter
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever, including electronic, mechanical, or any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission should be addressed to:
New Horizon Press
P.O. Box 669
Far Hills, NJ 07931
Brings, Felicia and Winter, Susan
Older Women, Younger Men: New Options for Love and Romance
Cover Design: Norma Erler Rahn
Interior Design: Susan M. Sanderson
Library of Congress Control Number: 00-132571
ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-88282-507-6
New Horizon Press
2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 3 4 5 6 7
Authors’ Note
This book is based on extensive interviews of older women, younger men, their families and friends and experts in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, social work and relationship counseling. Fictitious identities and names have been given to all characters in this book—except contributing experts—in order to protect individual privacy.
Table of Contents
3 Developmentally Speaking: Men in Their Twenties and Thirties
7 Resist Becoming “The Source”
8 Too Young or Just Too Wrong?
9 Commitment: Can He or Can’t He?
10 Power
11 Equality
12 It’s Only About Sex, Isn’t It?
13 Communication in the Bedroom
14 Giving Yourself Permission
15 Taking the Lead
16 Designing the Relationship
17 His Friends/Her Friends
18 Social Functions: When to Include/When to Exclude
19 Handling His Family
20 Help! His Mother is a Pit Bull
21 Handling Her Family
22 Their Stories
23 Their Advice
24 Men Speak
25 Looking for Love
26 The Truth About Being Older
Bibliography
We would like to express our thanks and appreciation to Marianne Strong, Mai Ding Wong, Linda Miele, Dr. Kathleen Calabrese and C. David Heymann for their wonderful support and without whom this book would not have materialized.
Our heartfelt gratitude goes out to all of the individuals who participated in our research and so graciously agreed to share their lives and stories.
What’s Your Fantasy?
“Share the fantasy,” the old Chanel television commercial used to say. We reveal our fantasies in those endless checklists we keep making to describe the men we’re looking for. You know the list we mean—the one that specifies that they must be attractive, kind, loyal, have a sense of humor, be faithful, professional, successful, affluent, intelligent, etc. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But is it realistic? Is this why we’re thirty-plus, forty-plus or fifty-plus and still looking? Hunting? Sometimes desperately? It’s time for a reality check. Such men probably don’t exist—and even if they did, they may not be looking for us!
To begin with, there are considerably fewer single, middle-aged men than women. Men who are widowed or divorced tend to re-couple quickly. Furthermore, the men who are single and available are often looking for women who are ten to fifteen years younger than they are (the trophy wife).
Certainly nobody should end up with a man who isn’t loving, kind, faithful, honest and sexy. But some of our other demands and expectations need to be re-examined—not with a cynical eye, but with an open one (or two if we want to see clearly).
Born Again (This Time Without the Old Expectations)
As was the case with our beliefs in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, letting go of our old ideologies about how things should be is a necessary part of growing up. We should, in fact, be used to relinquishing the past by now, considering how much has already changed in our lives since those expectations were originally formed. Some of us watched television shows with role models that shaped our thinking: The Donna Reed Show, Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best, while others saw The Brady Bunch, Family Ties and Happy Days. Despite those falling for Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, women were changed by the feminist movement and contemporary life. This isn’t a complaint, mind you. It’s a good thing, but in the new millennium some other old patterns of belief and expectation must be exorcised before we can really come into our own. Powerful, independent AND a goddess is a brand new archetype that’s emerged fairly late in most of our lives, so we have no solid role models (except maybe Xena the Warrior Princess, but because of television mores she is portrayed by a very young woman).