between wives

Having just celebrated my 41st birthday, I am at that period of age where men seem to sometimes lose their minds trying to compensate for life's little inequities. Middle age crazy, I believe, was the term some years back. They even made a film by that name in 1980 with Bruce Dern as a goes-nutty 40-year-old married to Ann-Margret who wasn't completely satisfied with life. This was, quite clearly, a fantasy on the scale of Lord Of The Rings, as any man married to Ann-Margret in her prime - or hell, before or after her prime for that matter - would have been crazy NOT to be satisfied. Ann-Margret, for the uninitiated, was the Anna Nicole Smith of her day, the only differences being she was sufficiently talented as an actress and singer, and did not seem to be in a drug-induced stupor most of the time. Oh, and she didn't just start out hot, she remained hot for many a decade.

So while I am not wondering how to get back some precious, lost element of my youth, it's primarily because I never had a sufficient transitional period of single life to know what kinds of things I could be missing now anyway. After college, a period where I maintained a few steady girlfriends and interests such that I did not feel like I was wasting my time, I jumped with relative speed into husbandry twice, once by necessity and once by choice. If there is some internal mechanism that thrives on a perceived comfort or structure created by marriage, I don't know, but it doesn't always work out. That my first marriage was an error in judgement is understating things a bit; in an emotionally naive moment I allowed myself to become involved with someone who, in any other time of my life, I would have been repelled by on every level - emotionally, intellectually, culturally and most damning of all, behaviorally - and so I have only myself to blame for the loss of the six years that it consumed.

When the divorce was final, I actually had a few years between wives, but again, I did not create a commendable bachelor lifestyle. There were a few girlfriends and interests, but I became so introverted that I rarely wanted to go out, let alone be part of a crowd, and that has stayed with me ever since. Fact is, the "between wives" period should have seen me become far more adventurous socially. I should have played it up, wanting to make up for the loss of a fifth of my life, but the anger and sheer fright at having managed to allow myself to be in that position once, I believe, made me the sarcastic, displeased hermit that I was fast-tracking toward becoming. It petrified me.

Now, happy with second marriage and wife despite the setbacks of being laid off a few years back and having to essentially start a career over at a mid-point in life, I definitely feel smarter now than before. Less naive. Less likely to make snap decisions with years of my life. Yet I do regret the mistakes of my first 40 years for their impact on my next 40 years. Savings, debt, parenting, health, art...all could have been better handled sooner in my life. I claim ignorance, because I never figured that all that time could seem so precious years later.

This wasn't meant to be depressing or dull. But it also wasn't intended as an entertainment. I think I've just gotten to the point where I had to say it somewhere, so that it could be said. Let's just file it under self-therapy.

I'll find something funny for the next one to balance this out. But I don't think I'll apologize. Somehow that just wouldn't ring true.