Vol. 1, Post #43 Better (Butter?) Relationships
Just call me Lady Vertical Plate. What I learned last week and my sex tips for girls* (*girls who are holding on to mid-life by a thread). A dating odyssey for Young Olds, AKA, people with readers.
^^^What exactly is Abbe doing and what does this have to do with bettering your mid-life relationship skills? Read on, Darlings.
Thanks for the wiggle room last week, Dear Readers, when I needed to take a break (and I hope you enjoyed the Whitesnake video/soft porn interlude — I also discovered that “Here I Go Again” in fact has THIS little bit of trivia associated with the song — also I promise that this is the LAST TIME that I will be invoking the name of Whitesnake in this column, but I cannot resist…screenshot from Wikipedia below, and then we can consider this subject closed:
“Hobo!!!” “HOMO????!!!!”
Ok, now that this is out of my system, let’s get back to ME helping YOU make your midlife relationships better, which begins with this article that ran in The New York Times a few months back. I bookmarked the piece for safekeeping and then last week, after a night on the town with The Boyfriend during which time a few notable events took place, I realized it was time to bring article to your attention.
Also, I think it’s important to note that while this piece in The Times is geared towards making romantic relationships better in mid-life, the six questions posed in the article can apply to almost ANY relationship in which you’d like to go the distance. Entitled, “The Midlife Marriage Tuneup,” the piece asks therapists and relationship researchers to share six questions that couples can either discuss or ponder themselves, with the goal of getting or staying closer during this life stage — and like I just wrote, I think these questions can apply to almost any good relationship that you respect and cherish. Here are the six questions:
What is our next chapter?
What are we modeling for our children?
How do I contribute to our problems?
What skills have we developed?
Is this relationship worth it?
Should we get outside help?
I’ll let you read through the article yourselves, but what really caught my attention were Questions 2 through 5. And to tell you more about this, let me share with you a few snippets from our night out last week.
We headed down to NYC to see The Boyfriend’s younger son in his senior musical, at the prestigious performing arts school which he attends. Some of our friends (Broadway Gays, they couldn’t help themselves) were joining us for the event, and we made plans to meet for an early dinner at Maison Pickle on the Upper West Side. Shout out to The Pickle — who doesn’t like a restaurant with the slogan, “Cocktails and French Dip”? The BF and I arrived a tiny bit early after securing some Very Good Parking Karma (we’ll circle back to that shortly), and sat ourselves at the bar for negronis and an appetizer — shrimp dumplings that arrived in a rich, delicious broth.
Having schnarfed down the dumplings (there were only 4 in the order), the large bowl with several inches of broth sat on the bar between me and The BF. The dumplings were White Boy Asian Delicious - in other words, they were meant to be vaguely Thai, but in fact were just dressed up shrimp potstickers with some lemongrass and galangal in the broth. No matter. We enjoyed them and then I decided to enjoy them even more. I picked up the bowl of broth and brought it to my lips and took a slurp.
The BF looked at me, bemused and (dare I say it?) impressed. “Are you drinking that broth?”
“I am,” I said. “It’s so good. Do you want some?”
He pulled out his phone. “That’s so hot. I love how you’re just ‘going there,’” he said, snapping a photo of me while I downed the rest of the broth, which, I should confess, was not just broth. It was beurre blanc sauce — butter sauce with Thai spices and, ok, SOME broth. But butter. A bowl of butter broth.
That’s me up top, slurping away.
I MEAN, CAN I EVER BREAK UP WITH THE BOYFRIEND???? THE WAY HE SAYS HE LIKED WATCHING ME SLURP DOWN THE BROTH IS REASON ALONE THAT I SHOULD MARRY HIM, RIGHT?????
And not that I’m thinking about breaking up with him — or marrying him — but if you read The Times’ piece, this is a clear-cut example of why Question #4 is a good one. The BF and I have matching skills — not just skills, but in fact zest and joy — in really getting the most out of sharing a meal together and we love dining out as almost a sport. Does that sound trite? Read the NYT article again - it’s not. So often couples start to focus on the things that bother them about each other that they forget all the good qualities, minor or major, that drew them together in the first place. I love to eat. The BF loves to eat. We actually met in a restaurant, looking across the room at one another. We love to shop at gourmet markets, cook great meals, drink good wine, try new cuisines, explore new eateries the minute they open for biz. He basically got a boner watching me slurp down a bowl of butter. That is fucking hot.
After I dazzled him with my broth-sucking abilities, we continued cocktailing and The BF brought up FOR THE THIRD OR TENTH TIME how he simply did not understand how I seemingly am able to park on the streets of Manhattan and extend my meter through my phone app. He kept saying to me, over and over again, “That’s not how it works. You only get to use the parking app for the allotted two hours” even though I also told him, over and over, that I’ve used the app to park for six or even eight hours at a time, renewing my parking space without moving my car. And when our friends arrived at Maison Pickle, he looped them into the conversation, asking if they had ever heard of such a thing — my apparently magical ability to endlessly park on the street in one spot, via an app.
Because he’d probably kill me, I’m not going to post the VIDEO that I made of The BF telling me how this is not possible, etc., all the while as I am laughing at him and saying “You’re preposterous” because not only does NO ONE care about whether or not I have magical parking skills, the fact remains that NO ONE needs to keep talking about it. Except The BF. Hello! Paging Question #3 — The BF is obsessed with mundane quirky details in a way that I will never understand. He can talk about who was snoring louder last night — me or The Dog — with anyone who will listen, while I am rolling my eyes and saying, “Um, YOU were snoring last night, not that anyone gives a shit.” And he keeps talking. And I keep rolling my eyes. We both know that neither of us are perfect angels and both of us have learned to take the ribbing we get from each other around this. Except I really do have magical parking skills, and rarely snore. Shrugs.
Having secured our French Dips and whatnot for dinner (The BF might have brought up my parking magic with the waitress too, who knows, we all took gummies and my friends love The BF so they were gently rolling their eyes too and mouthing “Honey” at me), we strolled down Broadway towards the school, stopping at a florist that The BF likes to buy flowers for his son.
The BF asked me to pick the flowers and make up a bouquet with the florist. He knows I love flowers and he likes my taste and trusts me implicitly with things like this. And you know what? I LOVE THAT. The florist and I went into the double-doored flower cooler and pulled together a beautiful bouquet as The BF looked on. He proudly carried my floral handiwork into the school, cradling it in his arms, and presented the flowers with flourish to his son after the performance. I didn’t notice a lot of other parents bringing flowers to their sons (just to daughters) and I really liked that The BF hadn’t given that any thought; he just knew that after a great performance, you bring flowers to the actor. Nice to see you, Question #2 — being our best selves for our kids (his and mine) is something we both take very seriously. Related, I met The BF’s ex-wife at the show that night, and while he made fun of me for doing so, I brought the ex-wife a little present, because, let’s be honest. NO ONE enjoys meeting their ex-spouse’s new partner for the first time, in public, at a children’s event, with various prying eyes all around. I thought it would be nice to give her a small “proud mama” prezzie and tell her it was nice to finally meet (we actually have friends in common). She liked her gift and I liked that The BF acknowledged that while unnecessary, it was a nice gesture on my part.
Finally, after the performance, just past 10:30 p.m., we were about to start our drive back upstate, but decided we wanted coffee for the ride. “Where do you want to get coffee?” asked The BF.
“In my fantasy, I want to go to my favorite cafe in Astoria and get coffee there as well as some Greek pastries to bring back home for this weekend, but it will add another 30-45 minutes to our trip, so we can skip it,” I concluded.
“No, let’s go. I’m down,” said The BF. Off we went to Astoria.
Lefkos Pyrgos is open till midnight and no matter the time, it features some of the surliest Greek waitresses in all of Queens, and fruit tarts of the gods. Less than a half hour later, we were munching baklava and drinking STRONG coffee, and then as we drove home, The BF began suggesting songs from his playlist that had intense drum lines or drum solos in them, in case some of the tunes that he liked also appealed to me enough so that I’d want to learn them for my next show with Adult Rock Academy.
This is Question #5 in all of its glory and it’s so important, I’m going to cut-and-paste more about it from The Times directly, so hold on:
Is this relationship worth it?
With experience, most people come to understand that no one gets everything they want from one person, said Terrence Real, a family therapist and author of “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.” Which is why middle age can be a good time to have what he calls a “relational reckoning.”
“A relational reckoning is a question,” he explained, “and the question is: Am I getting enough in this relationship to make grieving what I don’t get OK with me?”
For instance, maybe you and your partner don’t have the best sex life, but you have a beautiful emotional connection and you’ve built a happy family, he said. If that trade-off is OK with you, you acknowledge that and grieve the loss of what you don’t have.
“Grieving and digesting the limits of one another’s human imperfections is a central part of long-term intimacy,” Mr. Real said.
That^^^^? That’s the mother lode of relationships in midlife — Relational Reckoning. I mean, I’m swilling bowls of butter and The BF is prattling on about parking apps. We are both Young Olds — he’s younger than me but still — and we’ve each been married and divorced and have had other partners and other fuck buddies and I’m sure both of us fantasize about other people on occasion and I’m extra sure that both of us want to murder the other person on occasion. We are imperfect humans who both value long-term intimacy.
I can’t predict what the future holds for me and The BF but I can say that this ridiculously different yet very appealing coupling seems to be worth it at this moment. I sure know that, driving back to Woodstock well past midnight on a Wednesday (for the love of god, A WEDNESDAY!), hopped up on sugar and caffeine, I might have instantly waved off The BF’s suggestion that I play some hideous song by The Who, but I sure loved the sentiment behind him suggesting it to me. Like, as much as I loved my Shrimp Pillow Dumplings, served over a ginger beurre blanc with chives.