Group Therapy is a relationship-based advice column that asks readers to contribute their wisdom. Each week, we offer up a problem for you to weigh in on, then publish the most lively responses, with a final word on the matter delivered by our columnist, Claudia Dey.
A reader writes: I am a well-established professional in my mid-40s and am currently going through a difficult divorce after 20 years of marriage. The first 10 years were very good, but then our relationship deteriorated and she became abusive. With the help of good counselling, I found the courage to leave. We have been separated for 10 months and I do not intend to reconcile.
Recently, I met an incredible woman. We have been dating on and off for about four months. I feel this incredible connection to her. She is, however, 20 years younger than me, but very mature for 26.
Do we have any hope for success as life partners given our disparate ages? Should I continue to pursue this relationship? And should I tell my ex? I have never lied to her, but telling her about my new love interest would destroy any chance of a negotiated divorce settlement. Any advice?
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DON'T HESITATE
I say go for it. In my experience, the age difference isn't as important as being at the same emotional level. As long as you make each other happy, that's what really matters.
Should you tell your ex? I wouldn't. At best, it won't help things. At worst, it will make your ex vindictive and possibly make the divorce proceedings more difficult. Your current love life isn't your ex's business.
Just be firm and make it clear to your ex that you want a divorce and that you have no desire to reconcile.
- Peter Stern, Mississauga
SETTLE UP WITH THE EX FIRST
As someone who experienced exactly your dilemma at age 40, I am the last guy to fault you for the triumphant chord regarding your ex-wife. Of course you want to crow publicly.
Turning the other cheek is great for Christians, but for the rest of us, sweet revenge is dinner with a hottie, hopefully witnessed by a gossipy pal of Cruella.
However, there's a man's hope and there's society. Whatever Ms. 26's private merits are, you will have also met her apple-cheeked male buddies, whose jejune chatter about hybrid bikes and the latest Wii game is fascinating to them, and may be to her. This uneasy gap stays. And grows.
I don't blame you for trying; particularly when women closer in age may keep a cabinet full of shrunken male heads called My Past Bastards. These would be the "age-appropriate women" your therapist undoubtedly encourages you to see.
My advice: Settle up with the ex-wife, and go to India for at least three months. Alone.
- Larry Frolick,
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
TAKE A YEAR TO REGROUP
You are in no condition at present, either emotionally or legally, to make any long-term decisions or commitments. Take at least a year to recuperate and to re-establish yourself as a self-confident, independent individual.
Continue to date your young friend casually, but it should not be an exclusive relationship for either of you.
Tell your ex-wife nothing. She will soon be history as far as you are concerned. You owe her nothing.
- Carolyn Tytler,
St. Catharines, Ont.
THE FINAL WORD
Dear Lucky in Love,
Kiss. But don't tell.
Huzzah, as the cowgirls say, huzzah! Luxuriate in your new paramour. You deserve her.
Fly her to the desert when the rare Mexican poppy is in bloom. Rent a cabin and fish lake trout for dinner. Recite The Cinnamon Peeler in the middle of the night. Start smoking Century Sams. Join her punk band. Surrender to the adventure and the abundance of her youth. After a decade of living in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? you are in a Noel Coward play. There is no doom. And everyone lives in bathrobes.
A new lover is the antidote to the last. After so much poison, you have found your anti-venom. While I want you to fall in love with a monk's rapturous devotion, I also want you to remember that youth has a catch: the propensity for sudden flight. Despite her maturity the world is, in her brief experience, composed only of open doors. And she must, like the heroine of her own fairy tale, walk through them and experience the contents of every room. You may be one of the rooms or you may be all of them. Only time, that belligerent truth serum, will tell.
Age gaps can be the source of some rubbernecking. People stare as though the couple, like any physical aberration, is a mismatch. When really our ages, in their crudest form, are only numbers - shapes on a page. Harold and Maude taught us that an age gap can be a prescription for living - higher than any spiritual order.
You Owe Her Nothing Tytler and Just Be Firm Stern say it: Do not tell your wife. You have no obligation. It would be like presenting a piece of heirloom lace to an ogre. She will tear it apart. Break that long-standing habit of full disclosure and finalize your settlement intact.
Jejune Chatter Frolick makes a keen point: "Go to India for at least three months. Alone." India being the catchall for seekers, I will interpret this more broadly to mean: Insist on some self-reflective solitude. Allow your paramour's appetite to be contagious. She is not the only one living in a world of open doors.
Claudia Dey's plays, Beaver, The Gwendolyn Poems and Trout Stanley, have been staged across Canada. Her first novel, Stunt, will be published by Coach House Books in the spring. Visit her website at ClaudiaDey.com
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