In my generation, it was a given that if you got married, you took on your husband’s name. If Mary Jones married John Smith, Mary Jones dropped her maiden name and took on her husband’s last name and Mary Jones became Mary Smith or Mrs. Mary Smith. Many of these women chose to omit their own name completely and took on the full name of their husband so that every legal document was signed Mrs. John Smith. Then, for a …
Why do I think there are so many wonderful benefits of old age? Well, for one thing, I can say and do almost anything I want and no one will think anything of it. I can make an off-color comment and no one will think it’s a come-on. No wife will think that I’m trying to entice her husband and no man will feel intimidated or take it as encouragement that I’m looking for sex. At my age, everyone will …
Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and a political reformer in the 1800s, favored westward expansion and encouraged Civil War veterans to take advantage of the Homestead Act and colonize the public lands. On July 13, 1865, he wrote in his editorial, “Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the …
In the fairy tale, Cinderella, the glass slipper was symbolic of a woman finding her Prince Charming who would cherish her forever, treat her like a princess, and support her in style. The glass slipper, since it didn’t fit on any other woman’s foot except Cinderella’s, was also symbolic of a woman who was so delicate and in need of protection, that this tiny glass slipper would only fit on her foot. This was the way many men looked at …
We tend to think of women in this country as having all kinds of educational opportunities and all kinds of career opportunities. But is this really true? The majority of women have jobs; a small percentage of women have flourishing careers. It’s not necessarily that women don’t want more, that they don’t want brilliant careers, it’s more that they don’t know how to achieve those goals. They don’t know how to take those first baby steps. There are certainly more …
There must be millions of in-laws stories or jokes like if you look up the word Satan in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of my mother-in-law holding a pitchfork, with horns growing out of her head. But the reality is not humorous. Many a marriage counselor has heard stories about how the in-laws are ruining their clients’ marriages. “If only they weren’t around, we would have a wonderful life, but . . .” And many a husband or wife …
I used to tell clients not to rush into a new relationship immediately after ending an old relationship. My thoughts were that people need time to heal and to figure out what went wrong. I’ve always thought that it takes time to understand the dynamics of the one you’ve just left so that you don’t make the same mistakes the next time. Over the years, I have seen the positive and negative effects of rebound relationships and they are heavily …
We always hear people talking about falling in love, falling out of love, looking for love, looking for love in all the wrong places, or not wanting to be in love for fear of getting hurt. What we don’t hear too often is falling in like. Falling in like doesn’t give you the same sizzle as falling in love but there is still a chemistry that has to take place for the relationship to succeed. For one thing, you have …
When I was growing up, it was not uncommon to see a woman being so dependent on her husband that she could not function on her own. If she was having trouble with her car, she wasn’t the one who made the arrangements with a mechanic to fix it. When income tax time rolled around, it was her husband who took care of it. There were no credit cards at that time but there were other debts that the man …
By the time my parents had me, they had already been friends with their crowd for more than twenty years. In those days, children were seen and not heard so my parents were spared my observations of their nearest and dearest friends. One of their friends had two children, a girl and a boy and, all during the years I knew them, I never knew their names. Their mother called them Brother and Sister. She would sit there and say, …