Prime Time - Jane Fonda [81]
“Has this relieved the tension?” I asked.
“Yes, it has,” Jewelle replied with relief.
Like most women I have talked to, menopause was freeing for Jewelle. “In some weird way I got much more self-confidence,” she told me. “I don’t know whether it was hormonal or just age. But my fifties were the beginning of when I started feeling good about myself.”
When I told her that the writer Suzanne Braun Levine calls that decade the “Fuck-You Fifties,” Jewelle said, “Absolutely! I stopped caring so much how they view me.”
“ ‘They’ as in the men you work with at the bank?”
“Yes. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to get along with them at work. You have to get along in whatever environment you are in. But you can choose which environments you want to be in. That was a real eye-opener for me.”
Nat and Jewell’s marriage is a demonstration of how individuation and andogenization—gender balancing—can deepen a couple’s bonds. Generativity and passionate involvement have also had a role to play. Jewelle retired from banking in 2009. She is now working with GenSpring, a firm that focuses on wealth management, but is, nonetheless, able to spend more time with her family and grandchildren and to work with the international nonprofit organization Women for Women International, which links women in the developed world to individual women in the Global South and helps them become economically self-sufficient, primarily through microenterprise.14
“There’s no question that for marital longevity, there needs to be romance. Nat and I work to keep our romance alive,” Jewelle told me. While Jewelle has narrowed her professional life and looks to bring her skills and energy to her work with international women’s organizations, Nat has unleashed his long-hidden passion for music. He always wanted to be a composer but, knowing that his strict, emotionally remote father would never support that ambition, he set it aside for the law.
“All my life what I have done is play the piano for myself and make up things,” Nat confided, and I could hear the timbre of his voice change and the desire bleed through. “Music is my passion.”
Option to Renew
In Chapter 16 I will talk about my friends Eva and Yoel Haller, both seventy-seven years old when I interviewed them and married for twenty years. It’s his third marriage and her fifth. She calls her first three go-rounds her “training bra” marriages. Between them they have ten children and fifteen grandchildren.
They were each fifty-seven years old when they met in the back of a bus going from the famous Rancho La Puerto spa in Tecate, Mexico, to San Diego. “By the time I got off the bus,” Yoel told me, “I knew I was going to marry her.”
Eva hadn’t really wanted to get married again, feeling that it was too much of a commitment, but he pressed her and they married six months later. Now, as she looks back, she’s glad they did. She noted, “There is something about that deeper commitment—that we will spend the rest of our living days together.”
She told me that as a widow, what she missed most about being married was the “conspiracy.” When I asked her to explain, she said, “I missed a partner with whom I could share the conspiracy, the delicious nonverbal conspiracy. You know, in the midst of a party, the quiet look between us which assures us that we are together. This, for me, is the essence of togetherness, of love.”
Both Yoel and Eva evidence another characteristic of successful aging—what George Vaillant calls “future orientation: the ability to anticipate, plan and hope.”15 Yoel explained, “We sold our big home in Santa Barbara. We want to scale down. We don’t want to think about stuff.” But they have invested in a retirement home there that includes total care, for when that time comes. “We may never go there,” Eva said, “but we have it just in case. I never thought I’d live to be eighty, but then I realized that’s only two and a half years from now, so I’ve revised the formula. I now want to think of five years—a five-year plan.”
To which Yoel added,