When I asked a friend recently how she’s doing, she paused and answered, “I keep wondering if this is all there is.”
She, like me, is 50-something and like many 50-somethings we are empty-nesters or about to be empty-nesters; we’re either 20-something years into a marriage or divorced. We’re in the so-called “midlife crisis” years, a time when we question what we’ve done (and, more likely, haven’t done) and where we want to be.
It was odd timing, coming just days after I read Monique Honaman’s provocative post in the Huffington Post, I Just Wish He Would Have an Affair, in which she details how many wives have confided in her that they just don’t want to be married anymore:
“These women are done. They say they aren’t happy. They say they aren’t in love with their husbands (or any other man — they aren’t having affairs). They say they simply wish they were no longer married to him. They aren’t fulfilled. They wonder if this is how they are doomed to live the rest of their lives (and God-willing, most of them have another 40+ years ahead of them). … The common factor amongst all of these women is that they say that their husbands are really solid, good, nice men. … they just don’t want to be married to them anymore because they have fallen out of love.”
