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Midlife Newsletters
Dating at Midlife Newsletters
“The wine God loves is human honesty.”
-Rumi. Translated by Coleman Barks.
This month’s poem.
The poem this month is The Man Watching, Robert Bly’s translation of
Rilke’s poem about the midlife crisis. This is an important midlife
poem.
It opens by talking about premonitions of a storm. I have spoken to so
many midlife adults and heard these premonitions. They sometimes come in
dreams. They sometimes come in strange moods. “My life should be
satisfying to me and I’m miserable.” “I don’t understand
why I am so angry.”
The reference to the Angel is to the story of Jacob at midlife. When he
was young he fast-talked his brother out of an inheritance. Then he went
away for 14 years, married two wives and was on his way back to his
father’s house. His brother was coming out to meet him with an army.
Jacob went off by himself to meditate and during the night he found
himself in a wrestling match with an Angel whom he could not defeat. He
demanded therefore that the Angel give him a blessing and along with the
blessing or maybe part of it he had his hip dislocated. For
the rest of his life he walked with a limp. When he saw he brother
the next day they reconciled.
There are many men and women who sustain profound wounds on the way to
midlife. It breaks open their pride. For some, this storm, these
wounds, turn out to be blessings.
- -- Philip Belove, Ed.D.
THE MAN WATCHING
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
-- Rilke
The Capacity for
Commitment:
The Fourth Stage Of The Midlife Transformation In Midlife Singles
By Philip Belove, Ed.D.
In the May newsletter (on the web page if you
haven’t seen it) I talked about the midlife crisis and the midlife
transformation. I said there were four stages to it. In this issue
I’m going to talk about characteristics of the fourth stage.
I’m going to claim that the mark of maturity in couples is their
ability to communicate. I’m going to borrow a phrase from Bill W.,
founder of AA, and talk about how mature couples engage in something
I’ll call “A Searching and Fearless Intimate Conversation.”
Is it really so desirable that men and women share deeply about their
lives?
Let me tell you a story. I was invited to a “salon.”
That’s what it was called. It was an evening of culture, conversation
and pot-luck at a the house of a wealthy widow. Before dinner and
conversation a man who played classical piano gave a small recital. He
played one of Satie’s pieces and before he played he gave us a little
lecture on the piece. He said, “The composer said that this
piece should be still, steady, and reliable, like the ticking of a clock
in an empty room.” And then our hostess, the widow, who was
certainly a mature woman, said, “Yes. That’s exactly how I like my
men to be.”
So there are couples who would rather not have a lot of sensitive
communication.
I realize that my own view of maturity comes from psychology. And I do
wonder about that. Is it possible that psychologists are just describing
themselves and setting themselves up as a model of maturity? I find
their case persuasive and grounded in research. You’ll have to make up
your own mind. That is the condition of being an elder. You have
to think for yourself.
The midlife transformation is a powerful developmental shift that
changes the way people think about relationships. After the
transformation they approach relationship in a more thoughtful and
mature manner. What does that look like?
In any field, it takes a bit of study just to know how good, good
is. Beginners in any field have no idea how good they are
and they tend to over-estimate themselves. It’s the same with
maturity. People tends to over-estimate their own maturity until they
understand what it is. That is why one mark of maturity is genuine
humility.
You can’t just decide to do humility. Humility comes from being
tested and taking some hard hits.
Hand in hand with Humility is Charity. I could call it Forgiveness, or
Generosity, or Good Will. This is the stuff you need to create
resiliency in relationships.
When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and think
like a child and argue like a child, but now I am mature and I’ve put
my childish ways behind me. I used to see life as through a glass
darkly, but now, I can see it face to face. I used to know things
imperfectly. But now, I understand, I know others only as fully as I
know myself. In short, there are three things that last: faith, hope and
charity; and the greatest of these is charity. (From Corinthians
2:13. My paraphrase.)
“I know others only as fully as I know myself.” There is some
dynamic connection between forgiveness, charity, humility and openness
to self-knowledge.
In mature couples, accusations are replaced by self-disclosure. Instead
of saying things like, “You always do this and you never do that,”
partners end up talking about their own fears and doubts. “I’m
always afraid you’ll do this and that.” They end up taking
responsibility for their own psychology. This is very difficult to do.
The Mark of Maturity in couples is the Searching and Fearless
Conversation.
By “searching,” I mean that they are consistently willing to look
further into each other and their relationship and thereby, into
themselves. By “fearless” I mean that they find enough humility and
charity between them that there is no topic, fact, secret, hope,
thought, wish or feeling they are not prepared, on principle, to share
with each other.
This is no small accomplishment. Listening, like
love-making, is one of those skills in which beginners grossly
over-estimate their skill. People who do listen well understand how
there is always more and more and more to it. It is a skill with
virtuosic possibilities.
Ask a beginner how he (or she) knows he is a good listener and you get a
range of answers. But when you ask virtuoso listeners they know they are
good listeners, you get the same answer from all of them: when you are a
good listener, people talk more..
A searching and fearless conversation goes deep and continues for years.
This conversation creates the mind and memory of the intimate
relationship. The conversation becomes the source of wisdom for the
relationship.
Holding the conversation becomes a wrestling match with the Angel, the
challenge that creates wisdom, charity, and humility; and, as a
consequence, enduring affection in the relationship.
Robert Frost said, “Home is where, when you have to go there, they
have to take you in.” The searching and fearless conversation becomes
the home that has to handle it all. I think about the utter thrill of
being safely and utterly furious in conversation with someone I love,
who loves me, who is equally furious back at me. To be willing to face
and contain fury like that takes devotion, both to each other and to the
relationship. I wouldn’t want to live in that fury, but knowing that,
if I have to go there, the conversation can handle it, makes all the
difference in the world.
So the mark of a mature relationship is commitment, but commitment to
what? I suggest it is to the searching and fearless intimate
conversation.
There is great joy in being able to come to someone with all your heart
and soul and might. To speak honestly about everything that really
matters and have that heard is a great gift. For some people, this is
worth more than money, fame, wealth, power or any of the common
temptations. This is held to be as good as it gets.
There is joy in being able to share your heart in total candor and
generosity. The challenge is being able to provide that gift to your
partner as well. It takes a while to develop this capacity. Developing
it is central to the work of the midlife transformation.
- PB
A note from Sue Price:
Thank you all for your contributions! We are still looking for more
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Please forward freely. Please give credit for all original
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and coaching.
-- Philip Belove, Ed.D.
This issue:
A poem by ee cummings. an old favorite.
This month’s brief essay: What is a midlife crisis?
An update.
Update
Hi again and thanks for subscribing.
Last month AOL picked up one of my thirdage.com articles and ran it on
their relationships page and we were suddenly swamped. The mailing
list doubled. (Welcome to you all.) In addition we received about a
hundred letters, sex survey answers and questions. It was quite
busy and fun but boy, did it throw my schedule out of whack. I
like to be able to answer all questions within 48 hours.
The second teleclass went well. We all enjoyed and learned a lot.
I have two new teleclasses I’ll be offering in June and I’ll send
out a separate notification. I just want to get May’s letter
in the mail before June.
Philip
This issue’s poem.
It’s by e.e. cummings, a poet from my youth. Here I am now, on the
far edge of mid life, trying to be wise and philosophical and
scientific about, of all things, love. I should know better by now.
I start with this poem, to remind me of the inadequacies of my work,
and because of the time of year.
- O sweet spontaneous
- Earth how often have
- The doting
-
Fingers of
- Prurient philosophers pinched
- And
- Poked
- Thee
- , has the naughty thumb
- of science prodded
- thy
- beauty . how
- often have religions taken
- thee upon their scraggy knees
- squeezing and
- buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
- gods
-
(but
- true
- to the incomparable
- couch of death they
- rhythmic
- lover
- thou answerest
them only with
- spring)
What is a midlife crisis?
“Midlife crisis” is a phrase made for comedy routines,
something women say about men when the guys start acting like
teenagers. There is truth in the accusation. At midlife people do
go through a change, one as profound as adolescence. They become
“Elders,” people with enough adult experience and judgment to
become sources of wisdom for the rest of us.
This process of becoming wise is the midlife transformation. Some
people make it smoothly and some resist it with all their might.
They need wisdom forced upon them. Such people are the ones who have
midlife crises.
Do you ask, “Why would anyone resist maturity?” If you can
sympathize with people who resist maturity, you can understand the
midlife crisis.
When I have resisted maturity it has always been because of my pride.
It can be excruciating to see how wrong I have been about certain
things. My experiences in this regard are very common.
Fortunately, God (or whatever you want to call the Deep Force Which
Shapes Our Lives) wants us to mature and get wise. And to the common,
garden variety of person like me, and many of you, there is the Gift
of the Midlife Crisis.
If the way of wisdom is humility, the stuff of midlife crises is
humiliation having humility forced upon you. As horrible as that
is, it’s still better than the alternative.
What is the alternative to maturity? Sometimes, instead of softening,
becoming forgiving, becoming charitable, some people at midlife, and
beyond, become rigid, bitter, judgmental and unpleasant. There are
wines that won’t age, that turn instead to vinegar.
For some, humiliation is a spiritual gift. William Bennett is a
famous man. He was Secretary of Education under Ronald Regan. He wrote
a best selling book called the Book of Virtues. He set himself up as a
powerful and self-righteous critic of other people. Last week, the
world came to know that, in secret, the man had an addiction to
gambling in Las Vegas and Atlantic city, losing millions of his
family’s money in the land of show girls and what he called
“sin.” This man who was so fascinated by virtue
finally has the chance to about to really learn about it. His
pride, we hope, is shattered. This is the gift of his midlife
crisis.
A real crisis is serious and scary. A real crisis is a situation from
which there is no turning back. The bridges back to “normal” are
burned. There is no way to go but on. No matter what, from now on,
everything will be different.
For all the bizarre and seemingly self-indulgent ways it manifests, a
midlife crisis really is an attack of integrity.
Sometimes people climb the ladder of success only to find that it’s
been leaned against the wrong wall. They invest so much of their soul
in being good, right, perfect and pleasing according to others that
they lose track of what their soul really wants. They live out
someone else’s dream instead of their own.
But somewhere inside, buried in their unconscious mind, are the seeds
for their own personal happiness.
“I don’t want to live my father’s dream for me. I want to live
my own dream.”
“I suddenly realized that this one and only life was the only life I
had. I think I was waiting for it to be over so I could live the life
I wanted”
“I threw a party to celebrate my 45 th
birthday and looked around and realized that not a single soul at the
party could I count as a real friend. I had to change my life.”
As birthday numbers start to total up, your unlived parts call with
greater urgency.
A crisis is a situation in which things are going to be different from
now on.
Some midlife crises seem to be started by external circumstances a
firing, a promotion, a friend’s untimely death, a near accident, a
promotion, an inheritance, or a move.
Just as often a midlife crisis is started by some strange act of
personal sabotage an affair, a career meltdown, a divorce, a
painful break-up, the eruption of a family feud, an addictive binge, a
scandal -- some combination of inner ripeness and the right opportunity.
One woman said, “ I was an accident waiting to happen.”
Being single at midlife is the aspect of the midlife transformation I
study most. I see it unfolding in stages. I believe, if it is
managed well, it need not become a crisis. Not all nuclear reactions
become bombs; under control, they provide decades of power for whole
cities.
To managing your midlife transformation and to keep it from becoming a
crisis, you must learn to notice what goes on inside you and work with
those processes. You must become thoughtful about your own
psychology. For some people, this involves acknowledging that they even
have a psychology.
Phase One: Honoring Your Inner Questions.
First there is the Storm Brewing, the gathering ripening. No crisis yet,
but it’s coming. In this phase people are confused. Their inner
awareness, their subjectivity is disturbed. They are uncomfortable and
aren’t yet sure why. They aren’t sure what they want anymore. They
are asking themselves disturbing questions. Do I want to stay
married? How unhappy am I? Often they don’t want to address those
questions until the questions become overwhelming and terrifying and
crisis-laden.
Better to take those questions seriously more quickly. Better to ask
yourself, “Why I am so upset with my partner? Why do I hate
going to work every day? Why am I suddenly needing alcohol or
drugs to get through my day?”
Signs of this stage: Discomfort and irritability. Some handle it
by hiding; others handle it by reaching out. Better to reach out.
Second stage: Learning to Say No.
The first step in figuring out what you do want is being real clear
about what you don’t want. The risk here is to be impetuous and
impulsive. If you don’t learn to say a simple, clear,
decisive “NO,” then you’ll create a situation that says the
“No” for you, a divorce, an accident, a scandal. You’ll do
something really stupid.
If you can’t say “No” simply and precisely, you’ll do it
impulsively. You’ll burn bridges and create enemies. You’ll do
something stupid and regrettable. You’ll create a crisis. If
you’re lucky, it will only be a small one.
The alternative for this stage is to get comfortable saying all the
little ‘No’s.” For one week, don’t do anything you don’t
want to do. Say “no” simply and stick to it. This can be
surprisingly difficult, especially in close relationships.
Here’s another trick: For one week ask people for advice and notice
when your inner voices scream “NO,” to what they are saying, and
then trust your inner voices.
Usually when people bring on a crisis, for all the drama, they also feel
relief. Saying a simple “No” is easier.
Third Stage: Learning the strength of a clear and decisive
“Maybe.”
Every crisis brings opportunity, options that before were invisible.
Sometimes after a huge fight, after a lot of true, but hard things are
said, people are more forgiving. The truth does set us free. The third
phase of the transformation is the rebuilding.
This is a time for creative work. Now that you know what you don’t
want, what is it that you do want? For us ordinary people, visions
don’t emerge fully formed. We have to constantly ask ourselves, “Is
this what I want? Is this? How could it be better? What could be
even better?”
This is the artists sketch book. We are trying out designs for our
lives. Single people at midlife do a lot of dating and thinking at this
stage. Couples try out different ways of being together. It is a
time of experimentation and it has it’s own stresses. But at least the
crisis part is over.
At the fourth stage, there is a new stability, the time of authentic
commitment, a time of strength and effectiveness. Elderhood. But this is
worth a whole article on it’s own. Next time.
Midlife Men. Help.
What do you wish women understood better about men? Write me. and
include a note about which evenings you’d be free to discuss this
matter. I’ll arrange a free conference call to discuss this
matter with the guys who write. I’d really like to hear from you.
All original material in the datingatmidlife.com newsletter may
be duplicated only with attribution.
DATING AT MIDLIFE
NEWSLETTER
In this issue:
Free teleclass
Poetry
Thoughts the difference between men and women.
General News.
It must be Spring, dear friends. More thoughtful talk about
flirtation. There are other themes in the dating at midlife saga, true,
but this one seems appropriate for now. I start out with this poem by
Sharon Olds, a demonstration of female sexuality. The thoughts in the
poem are echoed in the essay that follows. The poem is from a collection
by Robert Bly called The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. Great poems
all. Buy this book.
FREE TELECLASS APRIL 14 AND 21
Monday 8-9 Eastern/NY time (one our class) Tuition: Free
Go to teleclass.com and register or email me at
drbelove@datingatmidlife.com
Predicting the Future of a Relationship
- Every person has a relationship style. And this style is there
for you to see immediately. However, this critical information is
usually obscured by the swarm of details which come at you when
you meet someone for the first time. How do you see the forest
instead of the trees? Where do you look for the big pattern? How
do you develop and work with your hunches?
- This training will help you sharpen your intuitive skills.
It will help you make better and better guesses about what will
happen. There are patterns to see if you know where to look.
In this class you'll learn five questions to ask yourself about a
possible relationship partner and how to develop those answers
without jumping to pre-mature conclusions. You'll learn how to
adjust the pace and direction of how things unfold. And how to
know when to pull the plug. For more information visit http://www.datingatmidlife.com/.
Someone in Quaker meeting talks about
greed and aggression
and I think of the way I lay the massive
weight of my body down on you
like a tiger lying down in gluttony and pleasure on the
elegant heavy body of the eland it eats
the spiral horn pointing to the sky like heaven.
Ecstasy has been given to the tiger,
forced into its nature the way the
forcemeat is cranked down the throat of the held-goose,
it cannot help it, hunger and the glory of
eating packed at the center of each
tiger cell, for the life of the tiger, so there will
always be tigers on the earth, their stripes like
stripes of night and stripes of fire-light
so if they had a God it would be striped,
burnt-gold and black, the way if
I had a God it would renew itself the
way you live and live while I take you as if
consuming you while you take me as if
consuming me, it would be a God of
love as complete satiety,
greed and fullness, aggression and fullness, the
way we once drank at the body of animal
until we were so happy we could only
faint, our mouths running into sleep.
Men, Women, and Dancing
By Philip Belove, Ed.D.
You have to imagine this scene; 500 men and women in sexy, casual dress
at a big conference hotel for three days of socializing, flirting and
dancing to swing music. This was the annual Boston Tea Party at the
Framingham, MA, Sheraton, There are weekends like this all year long,
all with the same format: lessons all day Friday and Saturday, dancing
all night, until three or four in the morning, more of the same on
Sunday.
For the lessons, the huge hotel ballrooms are cut in half by fold-out
walls and about seventy five couples are arranged in a line snaking up
and down, up and down. Skilled teachers with big personalities and
cordless headset mikes lead the crowd through new steps asking the
couples to change partners every two minutes. By the end of the lesson
every leader has danced with every follower. It’s like non-verbal
speed dating.
A good rule for meeting someone interesting is to make the first
encounter brief and pleasant. Then, when you meet them the second time,
they already know you. They are more open. Dancing with someone in a
lesson makes it easier to ask them to dance later, at the open dances.
By the end of the days’ lessons, people have had a hundred or so brief
encounters. Talk about working a room.
The evenings are for dancing, performances, contests and more dancing.
Two different ballrooms, one with old fashioned, welcoming swing from
the thirties, forties, and fifties, and the other room thumping with
glitzy, do-you-want-to-do-me, eighties and nineties disco music.
It’s a study in flirtation.
With the exception fungi, which sometimes come in four sexes, almost every other
complex form of life on this planet bugs, birds, fish, reptiles,
and mammals comes in two sexes. All life forms that move do a
mating dance. To live is to reproduce. To reproduce is to flirt.
There are a lot of scientific studies of flirtation. My favorites are
listed on the web page but if you have a taste for dense reading, the
best book on it, for my money, is by (a man with the strangely resonant
name for a sex researcher) Timothy Perper. His book is called Sex
Signals. The other book I like is by David Givens and he has a great
website on non-verbal communication and his book is called Love Signals.
A mating dance is a dance that is a conversation. The little beasts and
bugs who enter it don’t know at the outset how it is going to end.
Sometimes the guys get lucky. Sometimes they get rejected. In a few
cases they get eaten. Females determine the outcome.
Despite my nerdish streak, I’m not going to say that these swing dance
weekends are “nothing but” mating dances. I will say, however,
that we spoke to Dan Metz, the capable organizer of the event and he
told me that, in the weeks after the event he gets a lot of questions
from participants along the lines of, “Who was that redhead from
Leominster, MA, with the short green dress?”
A featured competition at the dance weekends is the “Jack and Jill.”
contest. The women put their names in a fish bowl and the men draw their
partner from the bowl. So you have a contest for which contestants can
not rehearse, a contest in improvising.
You might expect this from a dance rooted in jazz. "The
innovation of jazz was that a group of people can come together and
improvise art, and can negotiate their agendas and that negotiation is
the art.” (Wynton
Marsalis)
In the Jack and Jill, men and women are negotiating their agendas. What
is that male agenda and that female agenda being negotiated here?
The Jack and Jill contests end, at 1:00 am Saturday night with a grand
and wild climax. Instead of a Jack
and Jill context, Jack and Jack, and Jill and Jill contests. Men dance
with men; women with women. Hence the name of the contest:
“Bookends.”
The contest tells you something fundamental about the difference between
the male and female approach to courtship.
What didn’t happen with the men and did happened with the women was
sexuality. These women slithered. They worked their hips, held their
backs high and their breasts raised. The room steamed. They left
their audience in wet silence. The m.c., weak in the knees, said “Uh,
could we see that last dance again?” My gorgeous female friend
said in my ear, “Women really know how to do each other, don’t
they.” Female sexuality is public; male sexuality is
private.
How would the men answer?
They didn’t get sexy. They got loony. Then, one of the guys,
build like a linebacker and coupled with guy built like a bantam-weight
wrestler, threw his partner in the air. Another tried to lift his
partner and collapsed in the process. He straightened, grabbed his
partner and spun himself and his partner through about fifteen whizzing
turns across the floor. Another guy started doing push-ups over his
partner, a clownish version of humping. Then the first two guys turned
their backs to the audience, legs apart, pulled off their belts like
strippers and see-sawed the belts up and down their crotches. Another
couple did a bawdy imitation of one of the women’s hot moves.
If the women left us silenced and breathless, the men left us laughing
and gasping. What the women showed off was sensuality and
sexuality. What men showed off was rowdy imagination and daring.
I once asked Robert Bly what about difference between men in retreats
and women. He said that after a three days the men got zany. He said
he’d spoken to women who ran women’s retreats. They said that the
women got lewd.
I saw echoes of this in gender research by Eleanor Macooby. During
nursery school free play little boys run around and bang into each
other, all in the spirit of great, good fun. Little girls, in
contrast, create scenarios and role playing games. They practice
relating.
In the sex survey on web site for the last two months, a replication of
Perper’s early work, women are much more alert, precise, specific
about what they need to do to encourage, regulate and control the sexual
activity. Men, in contrast, show up, show off and hope to get lucky.
Men take their relationship cues -- stop, go, more, less, faster, slower
-- from women. This is so deep in our culture that man who doesn’t
recognize that “no” means “no” risks gets in legal trouble.
Women know they are flirting before men realize they are being flirted
with. When some woman’s husband or boyfriend is being flirted with by
another woman, the wife or girlfriend says, “I don’t trust her.”
The man says, “Whatyamean?”
Women control sexual initiative in a relationships until the moment they
hand over control to the men. Before women hand over initiative, it’s
called flirting. After they hand over initiative, it’s called
foreplay.
And there are biological reasons for it, at least according to
evolutionary psychologists. Compared to a man, who has hundreds of
chances to father a child, a woman has maybe 12 chances in a life time.
This concentrates her mind and refines her decision making.
This is a strange kind of open secret. Men audition; women
encourage, "Show me what you got." Men find this
invitation hard to resist.
What a woman wants to know is how far will a man extend himself to
please her. What a man wants to know is how well he will be appreciated.
Some men show how much they have to give just for the joy of showing it.
Women carry a double edged sword. They must, and do, consciously, create
sexual atmosphere. Clothing, cleavage, legs, perfumes, lipstick, poses.
At the same time they are hundreds of times more particular than men
about who gets close to them.
At midlife, for the most part, the time for coupling to create families
is past. But the mechanisms and habits of flirtation and courtship
linger.
At the very least, for long term relationships, women still want men to display how much they are willing
to, and capable of, investing.
But being capable of is not the same as being willing to. How much a man
is willing to invest becomes more evident only over time.
You can see the inevitable tension. This does not change at midlife.
If any of you dear readers have some thoughts, or ideas about the
implications of what I’ve said, I would appreciate hearing from you.
And I will share some of the response in the next letter. Thanks
What’s New At Dating At Midlife.
Last month I did my first teleclass and it was, well, a learning
experience. One week the conference call line double booked us and when
we called in we were in the middle of someone else’s class. But still,
the conversations were great.
Web site seems to be averaging 70 hits a day. You readers seem to be
forwarding this letter and the link to your friends. It's a great vote
of confidence. thank you.
I’ve opened a new local office in town with a very gifted therapist,
Luanne Hightower. We have some very promising ways to help people
through their midlife transformation. I deeply appreciate having such a
wise collaborator.
The on-the-phone coaching and counseling practice keeps developing
steadily. In addition to regular one-on-one coaching I am now working
with small groups. The fee is less and the groups become support
groups.
Sue has a new article up. Someone wrote in and asked for a definition of
love. It prompted a good essay by her. She is also working on a piece
about how women respond to the tendency for older men to go out with
younger women. If you have any thoughts on this, please write her.
Finally, (forgive me for this) an editorial.
These are strange times. Part of maturity is the capacity to face
reality and think about it. Still, it is amazing how powerful the
invitations are to not become more mature. This week’s TV Guide,
staring at me from the Supermarket Check-out has a picture of the
cartoon character, Spongebob Squarepants, and the following headline:
“Sad? Lonely? Anxious. Watch these TV shows and feel better fast.”
__________________________________________________________
Dr.
Philip Belove, M.A., Ed.D.
VT Lic. Psychologist (Master) Specializing in The Midlife Project
"To
the blind, all things happen suddenly"
Helping midlife men and women see relationship possibilities clearly and
act effectively.
84
South Street, #201, Brattleboro, VT 05301 802/254-6221
DATING
AT MIDLIFE NEWSLETTER - March 2003
Newsletter
In this issue:
Poetry
 Let’s Talk about
Sex
General News
Poetry
(I don’t know who wrote this poem. I love this
poem. If any of you know who wrote it, please tell me. I want to read more
by this person. I want to give this poet credit.
PB)
'MAN
WHO IS A SERIOUS NOVEL WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM A WOMAN WHO IS A POEM'
(classified
advertisement, New York Review of Books)
Dear Serious Novel,
I am a terse, assured lyric with impeccable rhythmic flow, some apt and original metaphors, and a music that is all
my own.
Some people say I am beautiful.
My vital statistics are eighteen lines, divided into three-line
stanzas, with an average of four words per line.
My first husband was a cheap romance; the second was
Wisden's
Cricketers' Almanac. Most of
the men I meet
nowadays are
autobiographies, but a substantial minority
are books
about photography or trains.
I have always hoped for a relationship with an upmarket
work of
fiction. Please write and tell me more about yourself.
Yours
intensely,
Song of the First
Snowdrop
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Dear Song of
the First Snowdrop,
Many thanks
for your letter. You sound
like just the kind of
poem I am
hoping to find. I've always
preferred short, lyrical
women to the
kind who go on for page after page.
I am an
important 150,000 word comment on the dreams and
dilemmas of
twentieth-century Man. It
took six years to attain
my present
weight and stature but all the twenty-seven
publishers I
have so far approached have failed to understand
me.
I have my share of sex and violence and a very good joke
in chapter
nine, but to no avail. I am
sustained by the belief
that I am
ahead of my time.
Let's meet as
soon as possible. I am
longing for you
to read me
from cover to cover and
get to know
my every word.
Yours
impatiently,
Death of the Zeitgeist
Let’s Talk about Sex
I’m offering my first teleclass this month. We
start Thursday, March 6, at 9:00 EST and go for four weeks. I’m going to
limit the membership because I want it to be more of a group discussion
than a presentation.
The topic is sex. Email me at drbelove@datingatmidlife.com
between now and Thursday to enroll.
Lets Talk about Sex
A
four session teleclass with Philip Belove, Ed.D.
Starting
March 6 at 9:00 PM EST
To
register, send email to drbelove@datingatmidlife.com
with
subject line: Subscribe
Sex changes a relationship. How do midlife singles
make good decisions about whether or not to sexualize a relationship?
How does the biology of seduction work at midlife? Why would you
want to say no? Why would you want to say yes? How do you move an STR to
an LTR. What is the
difference between the way men and women make their decisions? All this
and more.
Here is the premise.
Midlife singles operate in a de-regulated sexual
market place. That’s a fancy way of saying, “It really is a jungle out
there.”
An anthropologist named Morris Freilich who did field
work in Trinidad said that there seemed to be two sets of rules for sexual
behavior, the proper rules and the smart rules.
Proper rules are what people say they will and won’t do;
smart rules are what they really do. The proper rules are the rules that
support family life. The smart rules are the rules which create all the
other contexts for sexual relationships.
Midlife dating is strange because people usually
aren’t looking for partners with whom to start a family. In some stages
of dating they aren’t looking for long term relationships at all. (see
my article, Stages of Dating, at http://www.datingatmidlife.com)
I think then, that midlife dating is dominated, not
by the Proper rules, but rather by the Smart rules.
Is there a way to be smart about sex when your basic
agenda is the STR?
Of course the most common question midlife single
women ask is, Is there a way to make the STR become an LTR?
So this is the stuff we will be talking about.
We really are living in a brave new world.
Sociologist Lionel Tiger reports that over half the apartments in
Manhattan are single occupancy. He said that the percentage in Stockholm
is over 75.
Half of all marriages end in divorce and two thirds
of second marriages. If you
are single at midlife, it helps to understand some of your social context.
We’ll look at that a little in the first session and we’ll compare
notes. I think it lets us off the hook a little when we see why midlife
dating is so strange and challenging for everyone.
Then we are going to take a long look at the biology
of seduction. It changes a bit at midlife but not that much.
Again, we all sort of know how it works but there is a lot of
research done on the topic and I’ve pulled together some of the most
interesting stuff I’ve found over the last five years.
For example, you probably knew that one of the big
turn-on’s for women is men’s hands. Did you know that on men’s hands
the ring finger is longer than the first finger and on women’s hands it
is the other way around? It
turns out that one of the signs of high testosterone in men is relative
length of the ring finger.
We’re going to look more carefully at the human
mating dance. I think there is some good advice to give but when you know
a little psycho-biology you can create your own good advice.
In the third week we’ll look at the non-biological
reasons why people say yes and no to relationships.
Sexual chemistry is important but there is a lot more to a
relationship than sex. Like what? Tune in and hear.
In the last week we’ll talk about relationship
negotiations. This, of course, is the big trick. How do you move a
relationship from from STR to LTR?
Relationship negotiation is the midlife skill.
You’ve all heard the argument that goes like this: You
can’t change the other person, you have to change yourself.
I’m not so sure that people can or should change
themselves. Especially at midlife. My
position is this: You don’t have to change yourself or the other
person. You have to be able to change the relationship between you.
This is the key trick and we’ll talk about that in
the fourth session.
The fee for the teleclass is $99 and enrollment is
limited. If you miss this month’s, I’ll be doing it again next month.
Write to reserve your space at drbelove@datingatmidlife.com
Subject line: teleclass
Science Section
First, thanks to all of you who filled out the sex
poll. I still want more answers, especially from men.
I have a solid base of answers to these questions
from college kids. I’m trying to compare those answers to midlife
answers. I’m also trying to compare men’s answers to women’s.
Here are the questions again.
First, give us your age and sex and sexual
orientation.
Then answer these two questions.
One, assume you’ve gone out enough times with
someone that you are interested in getting sexual. How do you communicate
that to the person?
Two, same set up. You’ve gone out enough times that
something sexual would be appropriate but they want to do something and
you don’t. How do you
communicate that?
Send the answers to me at drbelove@datingatmidlife.com
Subject line: scientific poll.
General Activities
Thanks again for all your support. It’s humbling.
Requests for newsletter subscriptions come in steadily and the only
explanation I have for it so far is that people are forwarding the
newsletter to friends.
We’re getting between 50 and 70 hits daily on the
web page. During the blizzard the numbers were much higher.
I think we are doing something right. The goal has
been to try to write thoughtful pieces with real content.
The article on stages of dating at midlife is the
distillation of several years work and I only know a few others who are
doing research in this area. Many of you wrote to tell me that it made a
lot of sense to you, that it had a ring of truth, that it helped you
organize your thinking, that it helped you understand some of the
relationships you’d been in and why they went the way they went. Music
to my ears.
Sue is working on some articles and we should be
hearing from her soon. She has a strong, clear point of view and it will
be really good to have an additional perspective in this newsletter.
Free Questions
We are still introducing people to our unique
approach to counseling and coaching. Take advantage. Do you have
relationship question? Sorting out a big decision?
Wondering what just happened? Wondering what to do next? Send us a
question to me at drbelove@datingatmidlife.com
or to my colleague, Sue Price at sueprice@sover.net
Commercial
Break:
Coaching Groups.
Coaching/Counseling is $300 a month for individual
sessions and $100 a month for group coaching/counseling.
Relationship Style Assessment.
It takes about four hours, or a month’s worth of
counseling to do this but the information is incredibly valuable.
When you reach the second stage of your midlife transition you
approach relationships differently. You
start to be curious about your own relationship habits. What is it that
you are doing that makes your relationships go the way they go? What are
doing that works and what you are doing that leaves you painted into a
corner – or shot in the foot?.
Relationship Style Assessment involves the use of
Souvenir memories, some psychological tests and some conversation. When
you are done you’ll know why you are drawn to who you are drawn to,
what’s satisfying about it for you and what’s frustrating and what you
need to learn in order to expand you capacity and relationship horizons.
You’ll learn where you, uniquely, could be negotiating relationships
more to your own satisfaction.
Sometimes this information is all you need.
Thanks again, For myself and for Sue Price, M.A., at http://www.datingatmidlife.com
Philip Belove, Ed.D.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Return
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Newsletter from Datingatmidlife.com
February,
2003
Hi folks. Thanks again for
your involvement in this project. This newsletter is a bit on the long
side. I hope I’ve been able to write it so it’s easy and interesting
to read.
Here is what you are going to find.
- A quote about the midlife change.
- An essay about sex. Midlife singles will have a sex
life. What’s a good way to think about it?
- An announcement of a teleclass
- Research Project and important reader’s poll. Please
Enjoy.
Philip
(If you want to unsubscribe, return this letter to me
with the subject line “unsubscribe.”)
What does
it mean to mature?
We all struggle with this question. Here is one of my favorite quotes
about this. It’s from the movie (misleadingly named) The Big Kahuna,
written by Roger Rueff and starring Kevin Spacey and Danny Devito and
Peter Facinelli. These are the closing words of the movie:
Phil: You asked about character and the question is deeper. You
asked me if you had any character and the answer is you do not for the
simple reason that you do not regret anything.
Bob: Are you saying I do not have any character until I do
something I regret?)
Phil: No Bob, I’m saying you have already done plenty
things to regret. You just don’t know what they are.
It’s when you discover them, when you see the folly in something
you have done and you wish that you had to do it over but you know you
can’t because it’s too late so you pack that thing up and you carry it
with you to remind you that life goes on. The world will spin without you.
You really don’t matter in the end. Then you will attain character
because honesty will rush out from inside and tattoo itself across your
face. Until that day, however, you can not expect to go beyond a certain
point.
Sex for Singles at Midlife.
by Philip
Belove, Ed.D.
Some preliminary thoughts and an announcement of our first teleclass.
You can tell how midlife singles are doing in their midlife transition by
how they handle their sex lives.
The midlife transition happens in stages. In Phase One people tend
to panic or choke. Panicking and choking are opposite ways of
being ineffective.
When you panic you become impulsive. Your perception narrows. You lose
sight of the big picture. An example of this is believing the relationship
is over at the first sign of angry words.
When you choke, you over-think. You freeze up, distrust your instincts and become
controlling. An example of
this is needing to be 100% right before you ask anything for yourself in a
relationship.
Phase One is Crazy Time. People in this phase are sexually
impulsive and reckless or frightened, frozen and shut down. It’s
possible to sexy, warm, sensual and friendly and still be very responsibly
and aware of what you are doing. But not in this phase.
Phase Two is very difficult for different reasons. I know
that the name I gave it, “Quiet Time,” makes it sound rather
like “nap time.” It isn’t. It’s more like those still moments you
have just after you wake up from a disturbing dream. Whatever it is, it finally has your full attention, but you
aren’t yet sure what it is. You know you have to change something.
In order to change, in order to stop doing the things that don’t work,
you have to recognize one of two things. Either
1. You have been terribly naïve and damaged yourself. You’ve given away
something as precious as a birthright, something like, the right to be
treated with respect, or the right to make your own decisions, or the
right to receive love in return.
Or.
2. You have been selfish and
cruel to others and you have no one to blame but yourself.
Of course people resist these realizations. Not me, they say, I’m
not the one who needs to change. And yet, the path to happiness goes
through these realizations. Otherwise you are stuck in Phase One.
The most common question sent to datingatmidlife.com experts essentially
reads like this: Here’s the story on someone I’m going out with.
What’s going on and what should I do about it?
And the answer always depends on whether or not the parties involved have
gone through Phase Two. If they are not willing to look at their own
selfishness and/or naiveté they are in Stage One, if they are and have,
they are in Stage Three?
People in both stages do short term relationships. How they do them is all
the difference in the world.
Phase Three produces a very different kind of short term relationship than
the Crazy Time of Phase One. Phase three is about discovering
possibilities. It’s about safe, modest experiments. Sometimes I’ve
called this phase “Remedial Dating.” I could also call it “Maybe
Time” because people say to themselves, “Maybe this is a good idea.
I’ll try it and see.”
People in Maybe Time know how to learn from their mistakes. They have
figured out how to make policies for themselves.
What is a policy about sex?
A policy is a set of rules for making decisions. Your rules. You made
them. You can tinker with them. You can forgive yourself if blow it. But
at least you have a way to think about what you are doing.
Here is an illustration of the difference between people who know what
they are doing (Phase Three) and those who don’t (Phase One).
In the movie, Moonstruck, Rose,
a middle aged married woman, played by Olympia Dukakis, is in the
neighborhood restaurant having dinner alone. Her husband, Cosmo, is at the
opera with his mistress. Rose knows this. She knows there is a crisis in
her life.
There is a character in this restaurant, a professor of communications at
NYU. He is 50 something and we know by this time in the movie that he is a
Puer Aeternis, a Peter Pan, a man who hasn’t grown up yet. He dates his
students. We’ve already seen one of them throw a glass of water in his
face and walk out on him. He’s at the table next to Rose with another
date 30 years his junior. This time his date, before she walks out,
pours the glass of water in his lap.
Rose sees this and smiles. The man smiles too, and
invites Rose to his table to join him for dinner. Later he walks Rose
home. They stop in the street. He asks to kiss her. Rose refuses.
“Why?” he says.
Then Rose gives is the perfect one sentence summary of what it’s like to
have successfully made it to Stage Three.
She says, “Because I know who I am.”
How do you create a policy for yourself about your sex life?
First, simply notice when you panic and when you choke.
Second, there is something you know in a vague way and you want to know it
in a clear way: there are two sets of rules operating in the single
at midlife culture. One set is for finding a life partner and one is for
finding sex.
Third, there really are differences in the way
men and women approach sex. At midlife, you don’t have to be
bound by those differences.
Fourth, recognize that there are two separate
sets of calculations involved in deciding whether or not to have sex with
someone who is not necessarily going to be a life partner. There
are Hygiene reasons, all the reasons why you might want to say “No.”
And then there are Motivator reasons, all the reasons why you might
want to say “Yes.”
And for all these tools, it really helps to have an external support
system, someone to whom you are willing to answer for what you do. Simply
knowing that you will have a conversation every Friday to discuss these
things helps you become much more thoughtful and effective.
Sex
Decisions at Midlife. A teleclass in March.
The class will focus on these key ideas:
The difference between before and after the awakening.
The difference between men’s thinking and women’s
thinking.
The difference between Hygiene factors and Motivator
Factors.
The difference between thinking about what sex might
mean to the individuals and thinking about what it means for the
relationship.
Four Thursdays in March at 8:00 PM EST. Can we cover
all this stuff in four hours? I
have no idea. But I’m going to give it a try.
The price is going to be $99.00 and I’m going to limit the
enrollment to ten people. I want it to be more a conference call
discussion than a presentation.
Let me know if you are interested. First ten to sign
up are in.
Research
Project and Reader’s Poll.
I’m going to be sending you a research question in a separate email.
Give it a look and send it back. I’ll report on the results in the next
issue. Thanks.
About www.DatingAtMidlife.com
In the first two weeks after the newsletter came out we started many
requests for subscriptions. The number of visitors to the website shot up,
too. We think several of you were forwarding the newsletter to friends.
Thank you. Do it more.
The most recent article I wrote for Thirdage.com, (“Are you dating a
Werewolf”) ran on the front
page of their newsletter. It also drew a lot of mail along the lines of
“Thank you so much for confirming my intuitions.”
Also, we had several requests for individual questions, three people
arranged for one-shot phone consultations and three people signed up for
more extended individual work.
I didn’t do the introduction to dating at midlife teleclass because I
hadn’t yet worked out a way to host the class that wasn’t going to
cost me a lot of money. That problems is solved and in April I’ll start
with the short teleclass.
Thanks again.
Philip Belove, Ed.D.
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Dating At Midlife Newsletter #1, January
2003
Dear Readers,
Thanks for subscribing and for being interested in our work. If any of you
wants to unsubscribe, just send me an email with the subject line saying
“unsubscribe.”
If you like what you read here, please forward it to
others. Please visit the web site at www.datingatmidlife.com
Here is what is in this month’s newsletter:
An
introductory note from me.
News
about the Midlife Story Project: Bouillabaisse for the Soul of the Midlife
Single.
Teleclass
announcements.
A
note from my colleague, and Webmaster, Sue Price.
Introductory Note.
Happy New Year. Welcome to this first edition of the newsletter.
Dating at midlife is one of those topics where everyone who has done it
has a strong, opinion. But
there is a difference between having an opinions and having a point of
view.
After years of academic and clinical research, after a couple hundred of
interviews and thousands of pages of outlines and notes, (I started the
Dating at Midlife (DML) research project in 1995, seven years ago) I have
developed a point of view and the web site and this newsletter reflect it.
Here then is the model which I’ve evolved for helping Midlife Singles
get what they want for themselves.
Being single at midlife is a form of midlife crisis. It doesn’t matter
whether you are the leave-r or leave-ee. The crisis may not hit you at
divorce and may wait until your second divorce. The crisis might hold off
until the break-up of your first big post-divorce love affair, the one you
thought would save you. Or the crisis may hit you when you realize you are
over 40 and never married ever.
What is a crisis?
There are doors in life that only go one way. You
walk through them, click!, and there is no going back. You are not in
Kansas anymore. The only way out is forward into the unknown. That’s a
crisis.
In the single-at-midlife crisis, you find yourself at 40 or 50-something
years old with energy, sexuality and time to spare, and single. What are
you going to do with the rest of your life? Another relationship? Never
another relationship? What?
There are recognizable stages in this crisis … or transition… or
awakening. There’s good literature on the topic and lots of names for
the event. A lot of the academic research of the DML project has been to
synthesize psychological research on the maturity process and see where it
applies to the living experience of midlife singles.
Each stage or phase has its own characteristic challenges. Each has its
own special lessons and gifts.
Here are the stages:
- Rebounding
People at this stage are just reacting, just becoming
aware that they are in a new situation. For the most part they are still
reacting to whatever just happened. It’s like waking up from a dream
with the dream lingering. You don’t quite grasp the implications of your
situation. You tend to jump into other relationships, not because there is
something you want, but rather because there is something you want to
avoid. People say, “I don’t want to be without sex.” “I
don’t want to feel like I did in that last relationship.” “I don’t
want to be alone.” They are
often hurt, angry, lonely and tantrum-y or numb. They act like they
really, really, really want a relationship and yet they aren’t at all
ready for one. They are in stormy limbo, early crisis, unclear, unreliable
as far as intimacy is concerned, and also needy.
For some people this period lasts weeks; for others, years.
- Retreat.
You can’t rebound forever. People do calm down.
Then, often, they want to stay out of relationships. And it’s different
in this phase. Instead of wanting to avoid relationships, they want to
develop a relationship with themselves.
Often they are celibate. They spend time looking in the mirror,
discovering both good and bad about themselves and learning to be
fearlessly honest with themselves. They learn to be charitable. They learn
how to say “no.” They develop integrity. They start to have a sense of
themselves as a separate individual. As one person put it, “I am who I
am, regardless of who loves me or who doesn’t.”
- Maybe
Time
Once people figure out how to say “no,” they experiment with saying
“yes.” But it is an experiment. It is the time of the Dance of Maybe.
They try out their newly developed integrity in different relationships.
They are learning again. Another term for this stage is “Remedial
Dating.” They are testing themselves, learning what they didn’t learn
as kids, and clarifying what it is they really want. Sometimes they are
healing from some old wounds. They are open to committed relationships,
but cautious.
- Co-creation.
The challenge of this stage is finally creating that
enduring relationship with another person. Not everyone goes to this stage
or needs to. But it’s surprising how many really want to. At this stage
people have learned to think in a new way that is fairly complex and
demanding and often out of reach of younger, less mature people. They
learn how to think in three dimensions.
They learn to think about both, the “Me” and the “You,” and
when they can hold those very different thoughts in their mind, they are
able to see the “We.” It’s hard but those who can do it can
co-create a relationship that is more than, smarter than, more complex
than, and wiser than either one of the parties taken individually.
It’s like jazz and improvisation. The collaborators bring out the
best in each other and create something neither could have imagined
singly.
The advantage of this way of thinking about midlife dating in four
stages.
It helps you fine-tune your decisions. Each stage has
it’s own skills that need to be learned. Each stage seems to have it’s
own gifts, challenges and lessons. You can think about people you know or
are considering dating, and you can see what the person is capable of,
what are reasonable expectations, and what are the short term
possibilities. You can also see that about yourself.
Teleclasses
There are a lot of topics we’re working on. The most important is
the Stages of Dating model I outlined above. I’m giving a free
(except for phone charges) one hour teleclasses on that one right now and
I’m still shopping for the most cost effective way to hold the classes.
First class will be in the week of Jan 20. Time to be determined.
In development is a four hour version and that will have a $100
price tag on it.
Sex Ed Seminar for midlife singles.
I have a lot of research on the sexual negotiation
that goes on in dating. The
anthropologist Morris Freilich proposed that in many cultures there are
two parallel sets of beliefs about sexual behavior. One contains the rules
for proper behavior and the other contains the strategic and practical
rules based on shrewd commonsense. He called these the Proper Rules and
the Smart Rules. An example of proper rules is the requirement in some
schools that high school kids be taught celibacy until marriage. The smart
rules, which are more common sense, recognize that kids wait until an
average age of 28 to get married and are highly unlikely to remain
celibate until that time. In
midlife dating, what are the smart rules?
What are the proper rules? Any thoughts? This is a seminar and that
means that all participants have to help develop the material. Interested?
Let me know by email. I hope
to have that class ready to roll by February.
Single at Midlife At the Movies
Dating at midlife is a great topic and there are a
few really good movies on it. I want to create a once a month movie
discussion group. I’ll review suggested movies and prepare a set of
discussion questions and then we get together once a month for an
interesting conversation. Any interest in this one? Let me know by email.
A Note from Sue Price, therapist and webmaster:
Sue says:
“I will become more active on the site this year,
and will start to write some articles, the first of which will be
"How to Find Romance, for Women over Fifty". I look forward to
your feedback on this interesting Project!” Write her at sue@datingatmidlife.com.
Do you like this newsletter?
Let me know what you think.
Forward it to someone who will enjoy it.
Thanks again to all of you for all the help and encouragement and
appreciation you’ve given me for this project.
Philip Belove, Ed.D.
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