Transformational periods

 I have been listening on Audible to the novel 'Long Island', which I think of as being about 'middle age'. It occurred to me that in my lifetime 'middle age' has changed. It was once thought of as in the 40s of one's life, whereas I think of it now as being later, in the 50s or even in the 60s. We remain more active and fitter for longer now, we have our children later, so I think it is all combined with living in a different world.

So, in the novel Eilish and Tony, in the throes of bringing up their children, of living very close to Tony's family, and he busy working away at his plumbing business, and Eilish working as a bookkeeper, there's a single line that reveals that they have stopped making love.

The problem set up on page 1 is that Tony has fathered a child of another woman, and the Irish husband, knowing full well it is not his (so they stopped making love too...) is planning to put the baby on Tony and Eilish's doorstep.

Eilish refuses to deal with the problem and heads off to Ireland to visit her mother for the first time in twenty years, and the way is now paved for her to have an affair with a man she once thought she might marry.

Toibin, I believe, is interested in posing an event, and then seeing what transpires, and indeed he successfully showed how the ball rolled away in an unstoppable way.

But I am interested in what started the ball rolling and it's not the man coming to tell Eilish about the infidelity. It's the fact that they stopped making love. That set it all off, most probably.

It's in 'middle age', whatever those words mean to you, when the needs of people can sometimes not be in line. It was pillow talk, this novel, last night and my husband offered, 'but in middle age the man is still busy with his work and achievement and responsibilities, and the woman is not.'

I countered, 'Eilish was working. Many women are working. Yet it's almost scientifically proven that it's women who want to reinvigorate their sex lives in middle age, it's the men who are too preoccupied to give it the necessary attention.'

But I heard him. I think he is onto something. In middle age, maybe that's a time when a man is feeling burdened by responsibility and legacy and getting it all right to pass money onto the children, when health issues may crop up.

Maybe middle age for a woman is a time of transformation; a time when she doesn't so much want to reinvent the world, or even herself, but her marriage; looking for something more heavenly, more divine, more sacred; like the love being a river that enables the love of the whole world to flow through it. This is experiential for me, by no means all the time. However, once you have tasted it, you never forget it, and maybe, just maybe this is what women intuitively know is possible.

I heard a man speak about his new woman recently in an unusual way and I think he is an unusual man for doing so. He said something like, 'you are a powerful woman, and you don't need a man, don't need men. So, to love you is not to control you. I am like the banks of the river, and you are the river that flows between the banks. And yet, you want to surrender to the maleness in me and I am trying to figure out how exactly to do this, to hold you in this way. It's not something our mothers and fathers taught us, and I am still working this all out.'

D/s has never been a perfect fit for me and perhaps that's why I am thought of as needing it "in a particular way". It's the powerful piece and the wanting to surrender piece and how they marry one another. At the end of the day, I think of it as a mutual devotion. Since I have thought of it in this way, I have felt much more at peace.