When you’re in your forties and you’ve been with the same person for longer than Friends was in prime-time, there are countless valid reasons to work at maintaining your marriage. Kids, shared real estate, affordable health insurance, longevity (married people reportedly live longer—or maybe it just feels that way) and complicated finances often top the list. Oh, and love. But here’s one you may not have considered: As long as you stay married to one person, you don’t have to get naked in front of anyone new.
That may sound enormously shallow, but I realized the validity of this argument recently when a newly divorced friend—I’ll call her Kitty, because I refuse to use that maddeningly hackneyed word—was regaling a cocktail party gathering with the very intimate details her latest hot tub tryst with a gaggle of twenty-something college men. Hell, who are we kidding? Boys. They were boys. More than a few regalees found themselves wondering if it was one of their children (children!) doing [insert unmentionable activity] with Kitty in the Jacuzzi.
As she’s telling this story, here’s a rough transcription of the frantic conversation going on inside my head: Oh my god, what would I wear? My black tankini is pretty cute, and that would be good because it covers my belly. And it would probably be nighttime, which would also work to my advantage as long as I could keep one of the boys (boys!) from turning on a light. Oh, we could light candles! I have a ton of candles and those are flattering. I even have floating candles, although they probably wouldn’t work in the hot tub. I should try that out. Shit, I should have bought those torchieres when they were on sale at Pottery Barn. Maybe they still have some online. But they wouldn’t help if I had to take the tankini off. Would I have to take it off? Oh sweet Jesus I would have to take it off!!!
Seriously, I get the part where it’s an enormous ego-boost to be hit on by the same guy who could easily—and for the price of a bottom shelf martini—score with the scantily-clad, cellulite-free, yoga-instructing co-ed to my left. And I fully appreciate how lovely it might feel to run my hands, just once and perhaps in a deliciously drunken stupor, over a meat-locker size assortment of trim, toned muscles splayed tantalizingly over an impossibly agile male form. But the benefits of dating and/or bedding a man half my age seem to end there. The drawbacks, however, are pretty compelling:
