Prime Time - Jane Fonda [75]
Obviously, though, marriage is not for everyone. If you have found that there is no room in your marriage for a fully awakened, authentic you, it may be far healthier to leave than to swallow your unhappiness and shrink yourself back into a half life. If along the way you’ve stopped facing your real feelings and needs, stopped being truthful to yourself, you will inevitably go numb—the best, most potentially vital parts of you will shut off. You will also be angry, although this, too, may be covered over. Studies show that a bad marriage, with its potentially toxic stress, is especially bad for the wife’s health. A fifteen-year Oregon study cited by Suzanne Braun Levine in Inventing the Rest of Our Lives found that “having unequal decision-making power was associated with higher health risks for women, but not for men, perhaps,” Levine conjectures, “because women don’t have the other opportunities to exercise power that men traditionally do. Powerlessness is a major contributor to stress and depression.”12 Marriage brings more benefits to men than it does to women, since women do the lion’s share of the emotional nurturing, child rearing, housekeeping, and meal cooking—which, perhaps, is why married men live longer than single men and divorced women do better than divorced men. Despite the emotional, financial, and social hardships that divorce can entail, “increasingly,” Suzanne Brown Levine notes, “women are initiating divorce and regretting it less.”13
If a woman does decide later in life to take another chance at love, it is commonly with someone she knew previously. I met my current mate, Richard Perry, thirty-seven years ago, when he helped arrange for the musical group The Manhattan Transfer, which he was producing, to perform a fund-raising concert for my then-husband, Tom Hayden, who was campaigning for U.S. Senate. Here we all are in his recording studio in 1975. Richard is kneeling next to my son, Troy, and me. Tom is standing between Janis Siegel and Laurel Massey.
Me, Troy, Richard, and Tom (back row, center) with Tim Hauser, Janis Siegel, Laurel Massey, and Alan Paul of The Manhattan Transfer.
Long-Term Relationships
I have long been fascinated by how couples in long-term marriages have managed to adjust to the dramatic shifts that occur over the years, especially in the final third. It was one thing when our life span was twenty years shorter; I find it truly miraculous when a man who was “Mr. Right” during the years of building a family and raising children is still the right partner thirty, forty, or fifty years later. I am in awe, frankly.
One such story is that of Bill and Kathy Stayton, who have been married for fifty-five years and have four children. Bill, seventy-six when I interviewed him, is an impish, courageous Baptist minister and sex therapist. I first met him a number of years ago, when I asked him to speak at a workshop on gender, sexuality, and religion at an annual conference of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention.
Kathy Stayton, seventy-four, was an athlete in her younger days, and a school leader, and has kept her trim figure and natural beauty. Sitting next to Bill, quiet and attentive, she seemed the image of an old-fashioned, take-the-backseat homemaker. During our three hours together, however, I discovered a woman who, inspired by the peace activism of her family of origin, has, from girlhood, had her own firm voice.
I interviewed Kathy and Bill in their bright, one-story home in a newish development in Atlanta’s growing suburbs.
For eleven years, Bill had been a Baptist minister in Massachusetts. He found himself unprepared for the sexuality issues that came to him from his parishioners and from people in the community. He told me, “Sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, sexual dysfunction, multiple relationships, polyamory, and open marriage were life’s experiences presented to me—stories of things I didn’t even know existed