A Lot Younger Than That

"Someone has a birthday coming up I see," she said as she handed back my driver's license to me. "Um, yes--a big one," I replied as I wondered how to avoid talking in cliches about birthdays and age. "Oh? What birthday is it?" she asked. "My fiftieth," I said in a normal speaking volume, not the hushed whisper often used when speaking about that particular age or cancer or something else as equally dreaded. No one was in the waiting room with me, so I was spared the admittedly ridiculous ritual of furtively looking around and lowering my voice before telling her what birthday I was soon going to mark.

She abruptly pulled her head up from the computer and stared at me for a few seconds before exclaiming, "Oh, you look a lot younger than that." I gave her a big smile and a quick thank-you, all the while praying she wouldn't get more specific. Please Lady, allow me to bask in the welcome sweet vagueness of "a lot younger than that." But she wanted to keep going. "You look like you're 42!" she gushed, as if she were giving me a great compliment. 'Aw f*ck -- there it is,' I thought.

At the risk of sounding like an ungrateful jerk, I find being tagged anywhere in my forties sounds old. Agewise, I'm now so advanced, even my age compliments sound old to me. Coming from a cute woman in her late 20s, it felt like she was really saying, 'You look like you're only *slightly* over the hill.'

I wish I could resolve my ambivalent feelings about turning the big 5 - 0. I often feel lucky when people occasionally think I look younger than my actual age. But almost as often, I feel embarrassed that I am not-so-reluctantly buying into the absurdity that it's just better to be younger -- as if one had a choice in the matter.

Are We There Yet?

"Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street," sang Taylor Swift right before I flipped the radio dial to another station. It's the only line of *any* of her songs that I like. Not that it relates to me and my life, but I appreciate a good simile when I hear it. If I were singing that song (or having that song sung about me), I would revise that line to: "Loving him is like driving an older, but well maintained, Volvo on a limited-access traffic-clogged toll road on a rain-soaked day." It's not catchy or poetic like the Maserati line, but such is my life. Twenty-five years from now, I imagine Taylor Swift's songs will be filled with similar turgid lyrics drawn from her middle-aged life.

Love -- the redux version -- is trickier in mid life. Not only do you have to go through the hard, often confusing work of finding someone with whom you might want to spend a big chunk of your future -- someone who "gets" you and won't bore or annoy the shit out of you over the long term -- but then you have the very complicated task of trying to weave together two lives already interwoven with the threads of children, making a living, and other responsibilities one accumulates as a middle-aged adult. All of these complications act as brakes on runaway love, and while that can be frustrating, it's probably a good thing.

Unlike falling in love in my 20s, second-time-around love at 49 is more cautious. It's like being a good driver who is tempted to go faster, but chooses to drive in the slower lane because it feels safer when you've got a kid or two in the Volvo with you. It'll take longer to get where I'm going, which is annoying, but that's the tradeoff -- feeling safely in control while enduring my own frequent irritating complaint, "Are we *there* yet?"

Listening to My Gut and Kim Basinger

"I feel there are two people inside me -- me and my intuition. If I go against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely." -- Kim Basinger

I think it's fair to say I'm a fair person. I've been told that I bend over backwards to be fair to other people. One might think that would be a good thing, but it's a quality that hasn't always served me well. When I was married, I always took my ex at his word, even when what he said was at odds with my nagging intuition. It felt like the "fair" thing to do, since only *he* would be able to explain the truth of *his* inner life. What I overlooked is that one must have the capability, the motivation, and the courage to be emotionally honest, and therein lies the rub. To be fair -- because it's hard *not* to be -- I don't believe that most of my ex's emotional dishonesty was deliberate, but it was a series of lies that stung me all the same. If a friend accidentally slams a car door on your hand, it still hurts like a mo-fo, even when it's not deliberate.

Education is expensive -- whether you pay in cash or in painful emotional regret. It's even more expensive if you keep taking a class and failing, as I did with Intuition 101. One of the biggest things I've learned from the breakup of my marriage is the importance of heeding my intuition. I will *never* take anyone at their word if my intuition is poking me in the stomach and telling me something else. Ignoring what my gut was telling me in favor of my ex's explanations that didn't add up was a very expensive lesson I only began to understand after we reached the fork in the road called Splitsville.

Truth reveals itself in behavior, not words. When someone's behavior and words diverge, intuition is the warning system that alerts you to that divide. If you're lucky like I am, you have at least one close friend who won't let you get away with *any* emotional bullshit created to ignore or deny the existence of that divide. But even if I weren't so fortunate, I now rely on my intuition to do the same thing. And I'm paying attention enough to be able to ace Intuition 101 this time around. Maybe I'll even go on to write the book Intuition for Dumbshits, since I lived that way most of my life.