Sex and Dating After a Marriage Ends with Memoirist Laura Friedman Williams
Show Snapshot:
After decades of marriage, three kids, and years as a stay-at-home parent, Laura Friedman Williams’ marriage and world imploded.
Her upcoming book, “Available: A Memoir of Sex and Dating After a Marriage Ends” is a riveting, page-turning read that explores the modern dating scene and how when Laura was unexpectedly thrust back into it after a 22-year marriage, she reclaims her sexuality and emerges as a woman with a rich and complex private life.
In This Episode We Cover:
1. Why Laura decided to peel back the curtain on her post-divorce dating and sex life in a memoir.
2. How the book evolved from a Sex-in-the-City style romp about midlife dating to explore deeper issues of identity, sexuality, motherhood, parenting, and friendship.
3. What’s post-divorce sex really like?
4. If novelty is key to passion, can long-term couples keep the flame alive?
5. Is scheduling sex crazy smart or just crazy?
6. Why the idea of “start standing up” may be the sex life hack you didn’t know you needed.
7. Are cultural messages about being a “good mother” messing with your sex life?
8. The myth of low female libido.
9. Is prioritizing a rich personal life the key to avoiding burnout, divorce, and humdrum sex life?
Quotable:
When I first started dating, about 6 months after my husband and I split, I had no notion of what it would be like to be dating again, or no thought about it. I was just reeling from the end of my marriage. I was trying to help my children through this time. And as I started dating, some of the stories were very funny and in hindsight, some of them were a little bit heartbreaking.
When I was married, we had such a hard time. I was exhausted; by the time we got into bed at night, I just wanted to be in my bed, with my cool sheets covering my body and nobody touching me. I remember once a friend said to me that her sister gave her the advice, ‘Always start having sex standing up because then you won’t be too tired.’
I think the difference between where I was and where I am now is that I see myself as a very sexual being, and I embrace that. I’m not afraid of it anymore. I’m not embarrassed by it. I don’t find it unseemly. I think there was a part of me that believed it was just not right for a woman in her middle age with children-- it just seemed unseemly for me to want that. And I am not ashamed of it anymore.
Word of Mouth. Laura recommends:
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, by Pema Chödrö, a Buddhist writer, teacher, and educator. The basic premise of the book: when things fall apart, embrace it, because you don’t know what’s going to be on the other side of it. And it just gave me permission to know that my world had fallen apart but there might be something great on the other side of it. And Anne Lamott. She’s amazing, she’s so funny, and she’s so real and self-deprecating. And she’s very religious and spiritual, but she’s also not sanctimonious.
More Resources:
Laura’s Book
Available: A Memoir of Sex and Dating After a Marriage Ends
Follow Laura
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty (00:03):
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women on life after 50 who are unafraid to age out loud. I’m your host, Katie Fogarty.
After decades of marriage, three kids, years as a stay-at-home parent, Laura Williams’ marriage and world imploded. Her upcoming memoir, Available: A Memoir of Sex and Dating After a Marriage Ends, is a riveting, page-turning read, of navigating the modern dating scene, rediscovering sexuality, and redefining identity as the definition of wife is stripped away, the family unit morphs and shifts, and a woman with a rich and complex private life emerges. Welcome, Laura.
Laura Williams (00:42):
Thank you. And thank you for having me, I’m very excited to have a chance to talk about my book.
Katie (00:46):
I am so excited myself because I was up late last night ripping through the book which is so vivid and wonderfully written. It’s really raw, it’s often funny, at times it feels devastating. It’s truly unflinchingly honest. How and when did you decide to write this book?
Laura (01:07):
Well, when I first started dating, about 6 months after my husband and I split, I had up until the point where I started dating—really up until the first night I went out and found somebody to take me home and have sex with me—I had no even, notion of what it would be like to be dating again, or no thought about it. I was just reeling—I was reeling from the end of my marriage, I was trying to help my children through this time. And as I started dating, some of the stories were very funny and in hindsight, some of them, even when they were funny, they were a little bit heartbreaking. Because I think everybody by the time they’re coming to the table in their midlife, they’ve had so many failed relationships and difficult childhoods, and difficult marriages or estranged children, that everybody comes to the table with a pretty complete narrative, I’ll say.
So, I had funny stories and I was sharing them with friends and they kept saying, “You have to write these down, they’re so funny. These things are so funny that are happening to you.” And so I thought, “Okay, you know what, maybe I’ll do a collection of, sort of, Sex and the City for a middle-aged woman. About what it’s like to be out and about” this sort of anecdotal collection of what it’s like to be out and about in the world. But as I was writing it felt false to me, because underlying that really fun part was a woman in deep pain and I felt like it was false to present this sort of fluff version of myself without talking about where I was coming from. So, over time, the book became deeper and more raw and it covered both: the fun parts and the really painful parts.
Katie (02:52):
I so agree, there are so many moving moments in this book, and I really connected to the fact that you were being so vulnerable and sort of navigating this terrain, this very unfamiliar terrain. Because you say at one point, “I haven’t been on a date since I last had a fake ID.” [laughs] So, it had been a long time but you were navigating something entirely new, while something so familiar and comforting, your old life, was ending. And you talk about how some of the women in your life, your friends that supported and lifted you up during that time, really wanted you to be sharing your stories with a wider audience. Because they had people, women in their own lives, their friends, their sisters, that weren’t making this transition to single life and a sexual life well. How do you feel that you were able to reclaim your sexuality and your desire? Was it a progression, did it…walk us through that.
Laura (03:51):
Absolutely, it was absolutely progression. And I wish I knew the lightbulb moment when I knew I could make it happen because, as I said, I wasn’t thinking about it. I was devastated and that was why when I first started writing the book—even though it was supposed to be fun, and I’m out and I’m dressed up, and men are hitting on me, or I’m going on dates—I realized I could barely drag myself out of bed in the morning. I had to coach myself every morning: put one foot on the ground, put the next foot on the ground, and start moving, you have children who need breakfast, you have children whose lunches have to be packed for school, you paste on a smile, you get them out, and then you may fall apart for six hours until it’s time to pick them up again or until they come home from school. And I had teenagers, who were very aware of what’s going on. It’s one thing, you know, my youngest daughter was maybe 7 at the time, 6 or 7. But the older kids were watching me like hawks for everything to make sure I was okay. They were scared that I wasn’t gonna be okay, but they also wanted room to fall apart and they couldn’t have me falling apart because I had to hold up this ship. So, I wasn’t thinking about dating.
Then I had this, sort of, an evening where I was trapped in my bedroom while my ex-husband and daughter were in the house somewhere and I just thought, “I can’t do this, this is not living. I have to see what’s out there, I just need to see, as an experiment.” So, I did get myself dressed up, and perfumed, and I went out to a bar in town, thinking how ridiculous I felt, and then I met somebody, it was crazy. I felt like I was in a romcom. [Katie laughs] I mean, I certainly didn’t expect to meet anybody and the whole thing felt like this weird, sort of, cheesy setup that I wouldn’t have believed if it wasn’t happening to me. And it was so empowering, so exciting, and such an amazing distraction from the misery of my actual life.
And I think after that I just wanted more of it. So, some of it I would say was just me reeling and some of it was me waking up. There were two things happening at the same time. I guess what I did, that may be different from what other women do, is I just let it be. I allowed myself to enjoy those moments, I just embraced it. Even while knowing that I might have trouble getting out of bed again the next day.
Katie (06:26):
I love the fact that you just kind of let yourself be and that you allowed yourself to enjoy. Because I feel like that’s probably an enormously core part of a positive sexual experience, no matter what, to sort of give yourself over to that moment. And you were able to do that as you shifted. Did you feel like your sex life, your sort of new sex life, was wildly different from your old sex life, in your married life?
Laura (06:55):
Oh, a hundred percent.
Katie (06:55):
Is that okay to ask? [laughs]
Laura (06:58):
No, no, no. I mean, look, you can’t write a book about your sex life and then pretend to be coy about it. So, I’m pretty honest about it. And my ex-husband and I are friends and he is actually reading the book right now, he’s about halfway through it.
Katie (07:13):
Is he shell-shocked? [laughs]
Laura (07:16):
You know what’s really funny, he’s not. So, all along, I’d been kind of priming him when I was writing the proposal, this is going back a couple of years. “I’m writing this book, and I did have a lot of sex. [Katie laughs] I just was trying to figure things out.” And he was like, “Okay, okay.” Then I gave it to him to read and there were a couple of people that he knew that I had slept with so I wanted to preface that with him to make sure that…I just didn’t want him to be surprised.
Katie (07:44):
Sure.
Laura (07:44):
He and I are very good friends, we’re on very good terms and I just didn’t want there to be any kind of negative surprises for him. So, I said to him, “I’m curious to know what it’s like for you to read about your wife having this incredibly passionate, diverse sex life after saying repeatedly that her married sex life was quite humdrum.” [Katie laughs] And I think in his mind… Also, in all fairness to him, he always had a much greater sex drive than I did. I think having kids, it’s always difficult for any married couple. We had three kids in the span of 11 years, so it just felt like there was always a child in our bed, forever. There just wasn’t a lot of room for intimacy. And I was not good at making room, I have to say, and I take responsibility for that. I never wanted to leave my kids. He’d invite me out on business trips with him, he was always traveling and was very like, “No, no, I have to be home with the kids, I can’t do that.” And so, I take responsibility for the fact that our sex life was humdrum, it was really on me, not on him.
Katie (08:58):
I think it’s a mutual thing. It’s a mutual thing because you know, it’s the two of you. I guess you know, he invited you places but if you were bearing the brunt of the childrearing too, then that’s on him because it does deplete you and leaves you…you’re stretched in so many different ways, it’s hard. So, do you think that—this is so interesting because I’m thinking of my own life where I have three kids and I feel stretched in a gazillion directions, and you know if I’m being totally honest, my husband would probably like to have more sex? Do you feel like it’s possible to have a really fabulous sex life when you’re in a long-term marriage or is this something that really opens up when you are divorced? Because divorce, for all of its sadness and its devastation, creates free time in your life, when you start to split up how you’re spending your days and who’s caring for the kids. What’s your take on that?
Laura (09:53):
Yeah, I think it does two things. One, it gives you free time and two, it gives you novelty. It’s very hard to sustain attraction and a vigorous sex life with somebody you’ve been sleeping with for 25 years. And I do think that sex goes from being something that’s really fun, and sexy, and intimate to practical when you’re trying to make children. And for some people like myself who had a hard time getting pregnant, it was a job, you know having sex was a job. Like, “We have to have sex tonight because I think I’m ovulating.” And that is not very sexy. And then the children come, and then you’re leaking milk, and then your body is not forming correctly, the way that you want it to. So, over time I think that gets really hard. I think it is possible, I have friends, some friends, who have really nice sex lives with their husbands. I’m gonna say that most don’t seem to have the sex lives that they once had. And I think it’s possible but I think you really have to make an effort. It’s not gonna come organically.
Katie (11:04):
But even that effort… It’s funny Laura because one of my friends has something that she calls “Tune-Up Tuesday.” [Laura laughs] When I first heard about it I was like, “What the what?” And Tune-Up Tuesday, she’s like, “It’s the gap between Saturday, of course, you’re having sex on Saturday because you go out, but then by Tuesday you need to tune it up again and make sure, you know…” And I was like, this feels too organized, I’m not sure I can get behind Tune-Up Tuesday, although Mike might be like, “All right, tune-up Tuesday.”
Laura (11:35):
[laughs] I dunno, it sounds pretty good to me. I actually, when I was married, we had such a hard time, because as you say it’s a vicious cycle. I was exhausted; by the time we got into bed at night, I just wanted to be in my bed, with my cool sheets covering my body and nobody touching me. I remember once a friend said to me that her sister gave her the advice, “Always start having sex standing up because then you won’t be too tired.” [Katie laughs] So, I used to always, [both laugh] envision that…
Katie (12:02):
“You’re like, this is a shower situation. If you wanna have sex, you better find me when I’m like, I don't have three kids hanging off of me.” That’s so funny.
Laura (12:10):
Start quickly when I'm brushing my teeth because you have an opportunity.
Katie (12:14):
Oh my God.
Laura (12:14):
And then once I’m lying in bed, it’s all over.
Katie (12:17):
Exactly.
Laura (12:17):
My eyes are gonna be closed, my body’s gonna relax and it’s just gonna be repelled by you. So, I used to always think that, “Start standing up, start standing up and I didn’t really.” So, I’m a very organized, Type A person and there did come a time where I felt the pressure to have sex every night was so intense and I was always looking for excuses, or to pretend I was asleep when he got home late. Always coming up with reasons why we couldn’t have sex so I could just be left alone. Like if I heard the door open and I was in bed reading a book, I’d turn out the light really fast [Katie laughs] and close my eyes so I would be unbothered.
Katie (12:55):
There are women listening to this that are nodding right now, by the way. [both laugh]
Laura (12:59):
I had so many good… When he would be like, I’m gonna be out late tonight and I would think “Hallelujah” so I could sit on the couch, “I don’t even have to pretend tonight.” So, I would, I did come to a point where I thought, scheduled sex seems pretty brilliant to me because then I know I’m on or I’m off. There’s no pressure on my off nights, I know that I’m off. And now, I know that I can’t just get into bed and hope for a quiet night on a Saturday night because that’s my on night. [0:12:59.3] So, I said okay, we’re gonna make Wednesdays and Saturdays sex nights and I thought that was pretty generous; two nights a week, for a couple with three kids who have been together for 20 something years, I thought I was knocking it out of the park. And…
Katie (13:47):
Laura did you ever see that… You’re a New Yorker, you probably have seen all the Woody Allen movies before Woody Allen got canceled. But there’s this scene in, I think it’s Annie Hall, when he and Annie are seeing therapists and it’s a split-screen and she says to them, “How many nights a week do you have sex?” And she says, “All the time, it’s like three nights a week.” And then she asks Woody Allen and he’s like, “We hardly have sex, it’s only three nights a week.” [Laura laughs] And it’s so genius because I feel like that really, I dunno, it’s just a great little snapshot sometimes of how the male and female sex drive might diverge, or not. Because you do talk in your book about how you have a new appreciation and new awareness about your sexuality. We are gonna talk about that in just a minute because we are taking a quick break.
Laura (14:36):
Okay.
[Ad break]
Katie (15:48):
Okay, Laura, we’re back. I want to, sort of, resurrect this idea that men and women in culture are often thought of as having different sex drives. Women are less into it than men and men are just really sexually driven and inspired. But your book really covers the ground that you developed these sexual appetites that you didn’t have before, or that maybe you would have had in the past but that years of mothering and parenting and marriage had kind of dampened. Can you share a little bit more about what you learned about yourself in the book?
Laura (16:22):
Yes, well it’s funny because I always thought I just didn’t have a sex drive and I just wasn’t that interested and that my husband was just, you know, always just very excited—could watch two people kissing on screen, that counted as porn for him, [Katie laughs] to wanna have sex. And for me it was just like, “Oh, how sweet. Back to bed.” I was having lunch with a friend the other day who read a galley of my book since it’s not out yet, and she said, “Really what I thought as I read it was: if I was single…” because she has been married for a long time, like I had been, “If I was single I would just be so happy to never have to have sex again. It seems exhausting, your constant being out, and looking for men, and having sex just seemed exhausting. How did you have the energy?” And I thought back to my early days when I was first sexually active when I was in my late teens, and I did love having sex. I loved my body, and I loved being intimate with men. I was always very monogamous, I didn’t sleep around. I talk about in the book how I had very limited sexual experience because I was with the first person I slept with when I was 17, 18 years old, I stayed with for a year and a half. The next person I had sex with, I stayed with for about a year and a half, and then I started dating my husband. So, I never had those early twenties, even early thirties experience that a lot of people have that they’re single, they’re dating a lot, they’re experimenting and seeing all different kinds of things, and just feeling free in their bodies, and free to do what they want to do. One night stands…I’d never had a one night stand.
So, I forgot all that. The busyness of my life as a wife and a mother and into my forties and a middle-aged woman, I’d just forgotten that early part of me existed, or I just thought that’s what it was to be 18 or 20 years old, it’s not relevant to me anymore as a forty-something woman. So, it was pretty shocking to me to discover, that first night that I had sex, I wasn’t planning on having sex, I just wanted a sort of breaking in. It was almost like, I remember very well being 18 and wanting to lose my virginity. And my best friend and I said, “This is gonna be the summer, we’re gonna just do it.” It didn’t matter with who, anybody would do, [Katie laughs] as long as we could just get it over…it was a rite of passage.
Katie (18:49):
Right, of course. We’ve all seen those teen movies, you knew it had to happen.
Laura (18:54):
Oh yeah, I mean, I grew up in the era of Molly Ringwald, I wanted it done. So, we both managed to do it within a few weeks of each other and I ended up staying with the guy that I was with, and I did really like it. So, as an adult—I guess I was 47 when I first started down this new path—I wasn’t thinking about anything other than, “I hope my body is okay, I hope that my parts are all intact. I don’t know what I don’t know. I go to my OBGYN every year for an annual, she hasn’t said anything is amiss. I’m still having sex with my husband and he’s not complaining, he’s complaining it’s not enough but he’s not complaining there’s anything wrong, but I hope somebody who hasn’t seen me isn’t gonna be horrified by what he finds down there, I don’t know.”
So, that first night that I had sex with a stranger really, I was looking for some sort of just, like losing my virginity again, like let me just check this off. But it felt so good, it felt good mentally, it felt good physically and I just wanted more of that feeling, I’d forgotten how thrilling sex could be, that sort of raw, ravenous sex that you have when you’re just hungry for somebody and actually, there’s not much of an emotional attachment. I’d really never had that. I became emotionally attached to everybody I had sex with. So, I can’t even remember how I started, I don’t even remember where this question started and what I’m trying to answer.
Katie (20:19):
No, by the way, I love where it’s ending. Who cares where it started. [both laugh]
Laura (20:23):
Okay, great.
Katie (20:25):
I love where it wended, I love the idea that you were able to just, I dunno, kind of resurrect that drive. I mean it’s called a sex drive for a reason. All the words around it, like enflamed, or just you know, that sort of passion, you were experiencing that again which is hard to experience in a long-term monogamous relationship. Do you feel that now that you’ve ignited that flame, I’m dropping into the cliche world here, is it available during all of your sexual encounters, or did even the novelty of having novelty become less novel? [laughs]
Laura (21:01):
Right, it did. Yes and no. I’m gonna say yes and no to that. I would say, I still love having sex. So it’s been about, two and a half years almost three years since I started having a lot of sex again, and I still love it. And I think the difference between where I was and where I am now is that I see myself as a very sexual being and I embrace that, I’m not afraid of it anymore, I’m not embarrassed by it, I don’t find it unseemly. I think there was a part of me that believed it was just not right for a woman in her middle age, with children, I’m a stay-at-home mom, running around the city with my Trader Joe’s grocery bags and my yoga pants, it just seemed unseemly for me to want that. And I am not ashamed of it anymore, I’m the opposite of it. I think, “Of course I am a sexual being, why shouldn’t I be, I hope into my, I’m now 50, I hope I am into my sixties and seventies. I hope I’m always going to be a sexual being.” And actually, one of the things I talk about in the book is that I’m really intrigued by knowing what sex has been like for women who are older than us. I had a conversation with my friend’s 80-year-old mother and talk about when she first met her husband and what kind of sexual experiences they had together because I realize now that so many of us are sexual beings but it’s so buried under all these layers of our identity.
So, I do think the novelty of sex is still there and also not there. So, I’ve been dating someone for a couple of years, and we still have a really good sex life, and if we didn’t, I wouldn’t stay with him even though he’s so good to me, and I love the time we spend together, it’s too important to me now to have that connection with somebody and have it be really satisfying, it’s too important to me now, I will not sacrifice that again. But I’m also very careful to protect my freedom and the fact that this is still a huge novelty for me. Being out and about—so when I first started dating, I dated a lot, I was like speed dating. I slept with a lot of people in a short amount of time and eventually by the time I got to maybe, the tenth person, I was done, I was exhausted. I was like, “I got it, I get what it is now. I see what my body can do, I kinda get what I like, I don’t need to be doing this with different people all the time.” Now in fact, if I can’t see the guy that I’m dating, I might just be happy to sit with a carton of ice cream and the remote control.
Katie (23:39):
[laughs] To Netflix and chill.
Laura (23:43):
Absolutely.
Katie (23:43):
But you learned, you learned that you have this identity that had been sublimated all these years. And I think that is a big theme of this book, it’s just about shifting identities. You know you describe yourself now as acknowledging and sort of stepping into the fact that a part of your identity is a sexual being but other parts of it really had to kind of shift; where you talked about your idea of being a good mother and how being a good mother maybe got in the way of allowing yourself to be a fully-realized sexual woman. Where have you landed on that now? Do you feel that the two are mutually exclusive or that you can be both? Because I think you can be both but I want to hear what you have to say.
Laura (24:26):
I agree with you. I think you can be both, but I think it’s really hard and I think you have to find the right balance and I would say I’m still trying to strike that balance. I believe it is essential to be both. And I wonder if I had, earlier in my marriage and in my career as a mother—if I had preserved that notion of myself as an individual person and a woman, and a sexual being, outside of being a mother and a wife—if I had been able to preserve that if I would have been happier ultimately in my marriage and would have been more giving in marriage.
A marriage, I wanna say, first of all, obviously it takes two. So, back to your point about the fact that I wasn’t that giving in bed anymore but also I was depleted at the end of the day, the same is true in terms of the relationship I had with my husband. I always, with him, was a mother first. Everything was about the kids. And I wish that I had maintained a little bit more of myself. I also worked in book publishing for ten years and after I had my second child I decided to stay home, and I loved it. And when I do something I go all in, whatever it is that I’m doing. So I threw myself into motherhood; I ran every PTA and I did the auctions and the bake sales, there was never a bake sale I wasn’t selling brownies at. And I loved it, I loved those times, but I didn’t have anything else that was my focus and my passion and I think that I felt that if I did anything else it would have been selfish. It didn’t fit with my notion of what a mother should be.
Katie (26:03):
I’m curious, where do you think you got that notion, Laura? Because you know, I think that we see a lot of that in movies, in books, and in culture. Did it come from your… Because your mother, you talk about your relationship in the book and you guys have a close relationship. She wasn’t necessarily the person that was giving this. I’m curious because I know that people who are listening to this can identify with; this notion of good mothering. How do you think it got so deeply seeded in your brain?
Laura (26:33):
It’s really a great question because it didn’t come from my mother. My mother is 79 and she’s a computer scientist with a Ph.D. So, she’s very successful and she never stayed home with us, she was always working and actually got her Ph.D. when I was in high school. But the interesting thing about her was she always managed to work at home. So, she had this career where she really could work at home and then she would go to school at night, she always figured it out, but she was always available to us, she was always around, to the point where I was like, “God I wish my mom would go to work so I could just watch soap operas like my friends do.
Katie (27:11):
“So I could have sex with my seventeen-year-old boyfriend, without being afraid they were gonna walk in on me.” [both laugh]
Laura (27:19):
Right, exactly. That really would have helped me out, I probably could have been like 16, I would have been throwing myself at virginity much earlier. So, I didn’t get it from her. She was a very big supporter of: have your own thing, have your own career. But she’s also the ultimate Jewish mother. She was always there for me, she was so present as a grandmother, continues to have a huge presence in my children’s lives to the point where sometimes I’m like “Mom, we’re not co-parenting these children, they’re just mine. You’re like, the biggest cheerleader, but I get to make the calls here.”
And I think, I have to imagine that all of my feelings about that just came from what I saw in other mothers I admired maybe, books. Just this notion that the good mother is totally present in her kid’s lives. And I saw a lot of women who worked and who had careers and they would try to fit in a shift volunteering for the PTA, they would do what they could, and I had a lot of respect for them, I didn’t judge them at all thinking, “Oh wow, well she’s working.” I judged myself more, I felt kind of lame in comparison, like, “I don’t have the career so I really have to do this part well.” That may actually be what it was. If I’m not gonna have the big career and I don’t have all the credentials to my name and I was, I’m an academic person, I’m well-read, I went to college, I thought I would have a big career, and I gave it up because I really wanted to be with my kids and it just seemed too hard to have two parents who were working crazy hours. So, I think I had to prove it to myself, I think it really came from me saying, “If this is what you’re gonna do, you're gonna do it excellently, and there can be no room for failure and there can be no room for yourself because you’re gonna be the best mother ever.”
Katie (29:22):
That totally makes sense to me, this notion of excelling. We both grew up in New York City, it’s hyper, it’s phenomenal, world’s best city, but it’s also a hyper-competitive space where everyone's knocking it out of the park somehow and we’re Type A and you wanna excel and you wanna be like the awesomest at whatever it is that you’re doing. You see success all around you and you want to own that family dynamic.
I want to explore something before we begin to wrap which we’re gonna be doing in a short while but I do wanna explore… You had this shift in identity, you had a very dislocating shift in your marriage where that changed and your family unit had to reform itself in a new way. How did this—your divorce and your newfound sexual relationships—affect your personal relationships with your friends. Because I have seen sometimes, the experience of when you diverge from your peer group, some people are really excited and intrigued and wanna know more and some people are resentful. They think that what you’re doing is a judgment on like, their behavior. What was the reaction from the women in your life, specifically? Because we could talk about everybody but I wanna know about your female friends. How did they react?
Laura (30:42):
I have to say, I would’ve expected there to be more of a mixed reaction and more judgment. I happen to have really good friends. And I think that the women I surrounded myself with over the years—and this is going back from childhood friends to college friends, to work friends, to my mom friends—they really supported me and they wanted me to be happy again. I don’t remember anybody ever making me feel badly. If anything, there were two things. One I felt so much that they were my cheerleaders, that they really wanted me to thrive and for me to find my way. I think also, I had been always, I say this in the book, that there was a time when I was so heartbroken and I’d always been sort of the Dear Abby of the group, people would call me, “Dear Laura, what do I do, my teenager is acting out. Dear Laura, what do I do, I don’t want to have sex on Wednesdays and Saturdays anymore, [Katie laughs] I just wanna do it on Saturdays. How do I tell my husband?” And I always had an answer. And it was sort of weird, I always felt like I was this authority on everything that I was not an authority on. But I carried it well I guess.
So, for me when it turned out that my marriage had totally imploded like right under my nose, I felt like, “What a sham, I don’t have any advice to give to any of these women. They’ve been relying on me for years and it was a big scam because I am the one who got dumped.” And I dunno, I think that they really loved me these friends and they really wanted me to be happy. Most of these women, I don’t know that I lost any friends actually, I really have to think about that. But I talk a lot about my girlfriends in my book and they were really good to me. And I was really good to them. Over the years, when other friends suffered or had things going on in their lives, I was really supporting and loving with them, so I think I got back what I gave. What I will say is that there was definitely some jealousy in the sense of, “I can’t believe you get to do this.”
Katie (32:48):
You had a better sex life than everybody.
Laura (32:51):
Everybody. And I would say, they would live vicariously through me, I mean it was sort of like, if I didn’t complete the deed one night, you know if I didn’t have sex with somebody they were so disappointed the next day. Like, “That’s it, you left us hanging, we thought we were gonna have this great story.” They loved to hear the stories and a lot, what I found out in talking is first of all, because I’m so open about everything about dating and sex and the end of my marriage and how it happened when I talk to friends, stuff gets real pretty quickly, there’s really no more curtain, we just get right down to the basics of everything—of sex and relationships and who can orgasm and who can’t and who’s having sex twice a week and who’s having it every year, once a year. [Katie laughs] I’m seeing the, honestly, I empathize with all of it because I understand how hard it is. But what I’ve seen from talking to a lot of women is that more women than not have a great vibrancy to them still and know themselves much better and are also not afraid to say, “I’m 50 and I’ve got great sex drive but I don’t have a great sex life with my husband and I’m not sure what to do about it.” And, we’ve had talks about it—is it okay to have, to ask your husband’s permission for a one-night stand? To say, “This might keep our marriage alive, being open to have an open marriage.” By the way, I’ve yet to find any husband who has gone for that…
Katie (34:25):
Right. [laughs]
Laura (34:27):
…which is a shame, truly, because I often think that if I’d tried that in my marriage, maybe I’d still be married. And even now, by the way, I wanna say, I was gonna say to this before…. Even though I’ve been dating somebody for a couple of years now, we’re sort of dating exclusively, I maintain the right that I am not monogamous that I can do whatever I want, with whoever I want, whenever I want. Because I don’t want to feel that I’m in a box ever again, I don’t want there to be a chance that it becomes humdrum. My sexuality is so new to me and so precious to me that I will preserve it even if it means risking a relationship with somebody who’s really good to me and who I love. So, I haven’t, I didn’t, there was no negative fallout with my friends but I do think that the upside of this incredible heartache that I had and my life falling apart is that I get to have this now and I don’t know how you get to have that if you’ve been having sex with the same person for 25, or 30, or more years. I think it’s possible but it didn’t happen to me so I don’t know how to make it happen, but I do believe it can.
Katie (35:38):
Laura, you say in the book in one of the final chapters or two that you wouldn’t take your old life back even if it was offered to you. That you’re so, you could never have imagined, when your marriage ended so unexpectedly, but that you’re happy now.
Laura (35:59):
Yeah, I am. I mean, it’s complicated. There are days that are hard. There are days where I hear somebody tell me that their parents just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Or I see that somebody is sick and their spouse is really standing by them and I think, “Wow, that’s not gonna be me.” And that’s scary. And also it’s just sad, it’s not what I wanted for myself. But I never would have thought I’d also have the excitement of this chapter 2 now. I get to be myself now. Maybe I would have gotten there eventually anyway, maybe the kids would have left the house, and eventually, I’d be an empty nester—not till I’m like 60 because I had my last child at 40—but maybe I would have gotten there anyway.
But here I am, and I’m very grateful that my body is cooperating with me, that my mind is cooperating with me, and that I’m in a position where I can just seek out new experiences and try to make a life now for myself as an independent person and not just as a mother. By the way, being a mother is always gonna be the most important thing to me, that’s always going to be the thing I hang my hat on the most. I still love being a mother and I never wanna disappoint my children. But I understand also that I have to count in that equation. I can’t obliterate the person that I am to be the great mother I wanna be.
Katie (37:26):
I love that so much. It starts with you. You can’t obliterate yourself and that you are an important and critical part of the equation. I’ve seen that with my own relationships with women in my life, women who sort of prioritize what they care about and sort of a core essential self, are just happier women, which makes you a happier mother.
Laura, we’re getting ready to wrap up, but before we do I want to just ask. I usually ask guests if they have any resource, like a book or a tool that helped them with whatever it is they were experiencing that they came on to talk about. Was there something that was meaningful to you when you started navigating this transition in your marriage and in your sex life?
Laura (38:12):
Yes. I’m a huge reader and I had a very hard time after my husband and I split up, it was very hard for me to read; I couldn’t focus, the words would just sort of, blur together. So, what I started doing was listening to audios and I would listen everywhere I went and I actually loved it because I got to hear other people’s voices, and not just my own miserable voice [Katie laughs] you know, I was miserable at the time. So it was great for me because it was just constant positive feedback. And the books I listened to, there were a few that really stayed with me. One was, When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chödrön, I don’t know if I’m saying her name correctly. She is a Buddhist woman who is a writer, and a teacher, and an educator. The basic premise of her book was: when things fall apart, embrace it because you don’t know what’s going to be on the other side of it. And it just gave me permission to know that my world had fallen apart but there might be something great on the other side of it. I didn’t feel that way for a long time but I just had faith that that could happen, and that gave me a lot of hope. She talks a lot about meditation, that’s a huge part of her practice. I am a wannabe meditator and I’ve never been able to do it successfully, I can’t sit still long enough, I still aspire to it. So that book, even though it’s a lot about meditation, I just sort of didn’t really listen to that part, but the words were very important to me.
I listen to a million books but also books by, I listen to a million books but also Anne Lamott, she’s written so many books…
Katie (39:50):
So fabulous.
Laura (39:50):
…and I find her really…she’s amazing, she’s so funny and she’s so real and self-deprecating. And she’s very religious and spiritual but she’s also not sanctimonious. And I just always felt with her, "You could be a little kinder,” not she, meaning myself, I could be a little kinder. I could be a little kinder to myself, I could be a little kinder to other people. But she says it with such a great sense of humor that it didn’t feel sappy or trite it felt real like this is really how it’s gonna be. Sometimes you’re gonna be really judgmental and nasty and it’s okay, just do it and then be a nice person again.
Katie (40:29):
Move through that moment, you just have to feel all your feels and then keep going because there is a better, kinder you on the other side until you’re back again. You know, life is cyclical and it’s nice to have people mind you of that sometimes and that whatever you’re feeling…no feeling is forever.
Laura (40:48):
No feeling is forever.
Katie (40:49):
So how can our listeners keep following you Laura and learn about the book, when it drops, and keep following your writing?
Laura (40:57):
Thank you. Well, the book will be publishing next month and it will be available, it will be publishing in June. So they can find me on Amazon or on Audible, I’ve recorded an audio version of it so that they can listen if they are not horrified by my voice after this half-hour [Katie laughs] they can certainly download that and listen to me talk about, read it all out loud. I’m on Instagram @laurafriedmanwilliams, F-R-I-E-D, Friedman Williams. And I’m on Twitter at @LauraFWinNYC and those are all the places where I can be found right now. But mostly I think I’m excited to read my book and I hope that if people have personal stories that they wanna share with me, that they’ll reach out to me on any one of those Twitter or Instagram or whatever because I’m there and I would love to hear from people and hear their experiences. It’s my first time being out there with the book and I’m just excited to have these very open dialogues with people.
Katie (42:01):
You should be excited, this book is phenomenal. I’m putting all of your social handles, I’m putting the book title into the show notes. The book is called Available: A Memoir of Sex and Dating after a Marriage Ends, and you can find it on Amazon or wherever you find books in June. Laura, thank you so much for being with us today.
Laura (42:18):
Thank you Katie it was so much fun to talk to you.
Katie (42:21):
This wraps A Certain Age a show for women over 50 who are aging without apology. If you enjoyed this week’s show please take a minute to click-clack over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the pod to rate and review the show. I think this episode deserves five stars.
Join me next week when we continue to talk midlife relationships. I’m joined by sex and relationship expert, Tracey Cox, author of Great Sex Starts at 50: How to age-proof your libido. Special thanks to Michael Mancini who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time, and until then: age boldly, beauties.