{"id":258,"date":"2024-02-03T14:25:03","date_gmt":"2024-02-03T14:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/omp.space\/?page_id=258"},"modified":"2024-07-24T01:06:29","modified_gmt":"2024-07-24T01:06:29","slug":"age-gap-f-m","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/age-gap-f-m\/","title":{"rendered":"Age Gap – F > M"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Response to Lisa Shapiro, The Age Gappers<\/em>, NY Magazine, Dec 20, 2023 – here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The headline image from the Shapiro article that inspired this response is abo<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We are not glamorous in sleek white sweatshirts or mottled gray sweaters but a sixty-seven year old and ninety year old in serviceable catalog clothing. Our hair is far from great. But we have had over forty years of marriage and are now working our way through unsurprising cognitive decline. My wife was recently diagnosed with dementia and has experienced the bruising loss of a driver\u2019s license and the unexpected and traumatic death of our son\/stepson. Yet we still cheer the progress towards adulthood of our grandchildren born to our daughter\/stepdaughter and her husband, who just celebrated their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. In our age gap relationship, we are twenty-four years different, the lead is the woman \u2014 and we married long before cougar meant more than a large cat native to the Americas. Ironically, the mascot for my wife\u2019s college is the Catamount; the mascot for my college is the goat. Life conspires where fiction is only make believe.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upon meeting, marriage was not an expectation for either of us. I was twenty-two, finishing the second semester of my plebe year. She was forty-six, adjusting to a new life, after a long separation, as a divorced mother with custody of a son eighteen and a daughter fifteen. A year after meeting, she was widowed, with her ex-husband dying before his fiftieth birthday. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our beginning relationship and subsequent romance was largely epistolary, which seems so quaint in an age of email and cellphones. We wrote letters, cards, and postcards, finding a public phone for a call only once a week at most. Postcards sent to me made for particular mischief at an open mail-call. An artistic nude by Edward Weston with only a pasted newspaper headline in the message area: \u201cBrett Peters Out in Virginia\u201d \u2014 in reference to hurricane Brett, my name, \u2014 is among the  more memorable. I visited J on the school holidays but extended summer visits were constrained by my summer military training. We would see each other in person at most three weeks in a year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her extended family came to know me through Christmas visits where her brothers, their wives and children, and her sister and husband, all came together. I solidified my importance to J when I helped organize her papers six months after her being widowed. In a teetering stack of bills paid, seasoned, or ignored, I discovered correspondence to entitle her and her children to Social Security survivor benefits. The twist to our relationship lay in my becoming more part of the family, both immediate and extended, long before we had even considered marriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many ways, I was more acceptable to her daughter than her mother\u2019s age appropriate dates. Mother and daughter formed a close pair, grown closer in death. Her son, away at boarding school, was a challenging adolescent whom I rarely met until we were on our path to marriage. Consequently, mother and daughter were particularly close both in their blood relationship and as roommates. Her daughter remarked that when her mother got a new boyfriend, instead of mother and daughter continuing as confidants and best friends, her daughter was relegated, resentfully, to being a child, again. Her mother\u2019s and my age differences changed expected dynamics. Upon her daughter\u2019s graduation from high school and before our marriage, I was loaned out as the date to the prom for her daughter\u2019s best friend whose parents were fiercely protective and would not let their daughter ride in a car with anyone other than an adult driving. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

J and I kept the depth of our relationship to ourselves. I was estranged from my family; J\u2019s family just regarded me as a midshipman without a home; J parried all her friend\u2019s queries with \u201cHe\u2019s just a friend\u201d. Between my junior and senior years, known as First Class Summer, I planned a swan-song trip with J to Europe, a place she had grown to know as a graduate student as well as in her first marriage when she built a home on the Franco-Italian border with her first husband. For complex reasons, our plans to travel Europe did not work out. As an alternative we travelled to the Azores, a place I had visited sailing transatlantic. There, in a wholly new environment, which we were discovering together, where we shared a hotel room and bed without sneaking around, the swan-song trip became the impetus for marriage.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the following spring break, we sounded out the idea of marriage with her daughter. The memories and retelling are confused. One story has her daughter prompting the discussion with her mother, suggesting that the two of us marry; the other has me broaching the topic with her daughter when we were alone together in a car traveling to Newport, RI. Consequently, J and I planned to marry but hold any announcement until after my graduation. Later that summer, on a Thursday, on the birthdate of one of our favorite authors, whose books we exchanged on our first meeting, we married in the back yard at J\u2019s mother\u2019s house, officiated by the minister from the town church, me in my naval whites and she in a simple, long, white, Mexican peasant style wedding dress found in a store on Martha\u2019s Vineyard. The children served as bride\u2019s maid and ring bearer.  Close family and friends bore witness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some forty years later, forced into retirement to be a care-giver, we sit in a sun filled living room on the New England coast. J is re-re-reading the same book she has been re-re-reading for the last ten days. Our dog is stretched on the carpet and our cat sits in his own chair in the sun. We are a Rockwell portrait of marital bliss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Response to Lisa Shapiro, The Age Gappers, NY Magazine, Dec 20, 2023 – here The headline image from the Shapiro article that inspired this response is abo We are not glamorous in sleek white sweatshirts or mottled gray sweaters but a sixty-seven year old and ninety year old in serviceable catalog clothing. Our hair is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-258","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/258\/revisions\/271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}