When the first copy of my new book FIFTY IS THE NEW FIFTY arrived from my publisher, my emotions were mixed. On the one hand the book embodies the long-awaited launch of my ideas into the public conversation. On the other hand, it makes me vulnerable to the public’s response. Curiously, though, I feel somewhat less vulnerable this time out than when INVENTING THE REST OF OUR LIVES was published several years ago.

This is due in part to the fact that I was in my fifties when I wrote the first book and I am in my sixties now. While being in your sixties makes you more vulnerable to invisibility in some circles, it also sets you free from caring so desperately about what other people think. (And, my friend Robin always adds, caring more about what you think.) That’s part of it. But the main reason is that in the interim I have figured out a thing or two, and I am less confused about what I call Second Adulthood.

I wrote INVENTING THE REST OF OUR LIVES because I was totally bewildered about what I was feeling and experiencing. I sensed that I was entering a new stage of life, but I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to go there. In the course of many conversations with other women in the same boat, and interviews with people who seemed to have a bit of perspective on what was going on, I began to figure out that Second Adulthood might just be the best stage of all.

Now, after a little more living and many more conversations with women like me who have found real-life solutions to some of the challenges we confront, I see that while this stage of life is unique to each woman, there are patterns too. I think of FIFTY IS THE NEW FIFTY: 10 LESSONS FOR WOMEN IN SECOND ADULTHOOD as the sum total of the wisdom, insights and anecdotes I have accumulated so far.

We can only learn from each other. Because we cannot look to past generations for guidance and inspiration, we are becoming one another’s Horizontal Role Models: The woman who is giving up stiletto heels simply because they are uncomfortable. The woman who is questioning the nature of her relationships and the meaning of her work. The woman who is ready to try some new and totally out-of-character experiences on for size. They all have helpful – and hilarious – stories to tell.

Now that there are more of us making our way through Second Adulthood and now that more of us have been there long enough to look back on how they got there, we can share our Life Lessons. Whether one of us is coping with a crisis the requires adjusting to a “new normal” or laughing her head off over coffee with her female “circle of trust” or standing up for herself by saying “no” loud and clear, I believe our collective wisdom will inspire her to take charge of her life, get to know her new self – and go for it, in ways that matter to her.

So if I feel a little less vulnerable about saying what I think I know now, and a little less fearful of generating controversy, it is because those women are the strength of my convictions.

As time passed we got in the habit of feeling free to make our own plans for the evening – after checking with each other. And occasionally we would both spend an evening in one of either of our friends. Of course, we continued to double-date too. While some couples were totally compatible, others included one person we liked and one we tolerated – not always the same one for both of us.

I hadn’t really considered the differences between single friends and couple friends until recently, when my husband and I had occasion to get together with three different pairs of long-married friends – people we have known forever, and love very much, but who live in different parts of the country and aren’t on our regular social timetable. It made me think about the special relationship we have with each and both of them and how that has changed over time.

With single friends, even in a group, the intimacy is one-on-one. With couples, I once calculated, there are twelve relationships among four people – each with each (including one’s partner, whose behavior may be affected by the other people in the mix); that mathematical fact complicates the dynamic exponentially. In the past, I had been very aware of the interplay between the partners we were visiting. In one case he was very successful and she very (overly?) supportive, in another he was a kind of a stumblebum and she quite critical, and in the third she struck me as very spiritual and he not on her wavelength.

This time, though, the rough edges between them were less apparent – to me, anyway. The supportive wife seemed much more assertive and her husband more appreciative; the critical wife seemed more accepting and her husband more on top of things; the less spiritual husband revealed a deep and abiding inner life. In each of the visits, our friends spoke openly of their affection for each other; it was the first time that I could remember. They all seemed so much better suited to each other. Who knows if my original take on their relationships ever had any connection to reality – what I perceived as new compatibility may have been what they saw in each other from the first. Maybe it was something in me – that I am less dismayed by difference than I had been earlier. Maybe I see them that way because there are fewer rough edges to my own partnership.

I suspect they had similar observations to make about us. Something does happen over decades of marriage. If you are going to last this long, at some point you – I, we – close the divorce option and conclude you are in it for the duration. At the same time, if you are going to enjoy it, you stop trying to change each other – you “give up” in a way, but what is lost are unrealistic expectations and worn-out gripes; what is gained is, if you are lucky, a rediscovered appreciation for the less-flawed aspects of each other. Over all, you become more relaxed about the relationship. If this sounds boring, I guess it can be, but as I contemplated us and our friend couples, I was moved by the realization that – for better and for worse – we had each become less than two but more than one.

We certainly didn’t register at the time that we weren’t just growing up alongside one another – we were helping each other make sense of our world, establish relationships, sort out emotions and over and over again set the markers for being grown up. In other words, we were extracting lessons from what was happening to each of us and translating them into principles to live by for people our age.

That mutual demystification of life is just as important to later stages, particularly the one about aging. I have written and lectured and mused to myself about the support I get from a good laugh with my friends as we search for What’s Her Name’s name, or the strength I get from the knowing warmth of a hug for no reason, or the real know-how gathered by their mobilized problem-solving powers. But recently I have become aware of a new dimension of growing up together.

My 90-year-old mother is increasingly bewildered by the aging process. Even when I try to explain that many of the memory problems, stiff joints, skin anomalies that she is noticing are shared by much younger women, she feels blind-sided by the kinds of things my friends and I laugh about regularly. It finally dawned on me that, because she never had a close community of women, “a circle of trust” as I call them, she has grown up alone. No one bemoaned her thinning hair before my mother noticed her own. No one set a light tone for coping with the memory lapses. No one described learning to do one thing at a time as the multi-tasking mechanism shifts into low gear. No one has given her an important life lesson from the field as a friend recently did to me. “You know I’m beginning to think about things I won’t do any more,” she said. “But I’m surprised to discover that it doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.”

Growing up together is a life-long process, and we need to nurture and cherish our best friendships not only for their historical value but for the protection and guidance that our dear soul-mates contribute to coping with change and for how they make aging just one more stage of growing up.

The increasing use of both sides of the brain for cognitive processes – bilateral brain involvement – can support a more balanced perspective on life that draws on both our logical, analytical powers as well as our nonverbal, intuitive capacities…..Evidence for this kind of development comes from studies such as that from the Berkeley Institute of Personality and Social Research of women in their forties and fifties. Compared with younger women, the midlife women in this study had a stronger sense of personal identity, better self-awareness in social environments, more confidence, more control over events in their lives, and greater productivity. – The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of The Aging Brain, by Gene D. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D.

From 1970 to the late 1990’s men’s attitudes toward marriage became more favorable, while women’s became less so. By the end of the century, more men than women said that marriage was their ideal lifestyle. And on average, men become more content with their marriages over time, while women grow less so. A majority of divorced men and women report that the wife was the one who wanted out of the marriage. A recent study of divorces that occurred after age 40 found that wives initiated two-thirds of them. – The New York Times, February 19, 2006

In recent years scientists, using new imaging techniques, have been able to compare brain activity by gender. And what they have seen shows not that women worry more but that women think – and likely worry – differently than men do.
Women’s brains show more communication between the hemispheres than men’s brains, says Dr, Vesna Pirec, a psychiatrist at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago. In men’s brains, the left hemisphere – often considered the analytical part of the brain – is more active, she says “With both hemispheres activated in women, there are many more different types of emotional reactions,” she says. “And women, in times of stress, also tend to remember many more details than men would.”….
“Women have a greater tendency to brood, with a lot of [emotion] engaged in it,” says Dr, Joan Land, chairwoman of the department of psychiatry at St. Louis University School of Medicine. “Men have a tendency to be a little bit more obsessive, concentration on ‘What should I do?’ rather than ‘What am I feeling?’” – Article by Connie Lauerman, Chicago Tribune, January 18, 2006

[The online dating service] audience is skewing older than ever before: people 50 and over are the fastest growing age group using the site[s]. – The New York Times, January 13, 2006

- 65% of women who purchased a new product in the past six month were women over age 50.
- Topping the list of new purchases are technology-related products allowing 50+ women to stay connected to friends and family, including DVDs, digital cameras, wide-screen televisions, cell phones and computers. Other popular purchases include new cars, recreational products, cruises and extreme experiences.
- An overall feeling of happiness appears to grow with age – 46% of women in their 50s say they are “extremely: or “very satisfied” with their overall wellness, increasing to 50% of those in their 60s and 66% of those in their 70s. – Aging Redefine, a study by Frank About Women, a Winston-Salem, NC firm specializing in Marketing to women.