best for REAL LIFE
Mid-life women are having it all. Their husbands? According to Sally Brockway, they’d rather stay in and watch TV…
It’s a Saturday and I wake up at 7am full of energy. Our 17-year-old daughter won’t be up until lunchtime and the morning stretches ahead of me full of possibility. Should I go out for breakfast? Go on a shopping trip or maybe take in an exhibition? I decide that I’m in the mood for brunch, but I don’t even bother asking my husband Gavin if he wants to come.
He doesn’t go out much at all these days, and aside from my birthday I can’t remember the last time we went out together. After 26 years of marriage we want different things from life. Having experienced a painless menopause, I now have bags of energy and a thirst for adventure, while my 62-year-old husband prefers to stay in and watch TV. He also likes to talk endlessly about his various old-man ailments.
It’s not just me who feels this way. This seems to be a growing pattern among my mid-life friends and our nights out are almost exclusively women-only. We go to the theatre, take long walks in the countryside, enjoy weekends away, and there are times we dance until the early hours. Our husbands are all happy for us to be out having fun – as long as we’re home before midnight.
Sometimes I rock home a lot later than that and it’s all thanks to the salsa dancing I took up a year ago. I’d already been doing ballet for eight years when a leaflet from Poco Loco Salsa dropped through my door offering classes at the end of my road. I couldn’t resist! I did salsa in my 20s and early 30s when I was single, but then Gavin said it wasn’t an activity suitable for married midlifers. That was like a red rag to the proverbial bull.
I begged him to come with me to the classes, but he flatly refused and told me not to flirt with any hot young Latinos. I turned up at the lessons to find them populated by women of my age and the odd young chap who wanted to learn to dance so that he could wow young women in nightclubs. Where were all the husbands? At home Googling their ailments, clearly!
The young guys at salsa were more than happy to dance with us oldies, and we found that salsa bridges the generation gap. I’ve had so much fun with my dance buddies – young and old – and sometimes, when I roll in at 2am, I find Gavin waiting up for me. He’s always relieved that I’m safe and not about to run off with a Carlos or a Pedro. The fact is that nobody hits on me when I’m out dancing, and that makes it so much less complicated than it was when I was in my 20s. That’s not
