Conventional wisdom says that women over forty years old have trouble finding sex partners. Well, I'm not Miss America and I found sex over forty. A lot of sex. I had twice as many sex partners in my forties as in my thirties. To toot my own horn a bit, I went from being an ugly ducking as a young woman to an attractive swan as a middle-aged woman. Praise the Lord, there is justice in life. If you wait long enough for it -- and work hard enough to get it. I work hard.
When I was forty six I went back to my home town of Kansas City for a visit and there, at a reunion of college buddies, I re-met a man I had not seen for twenty-seven years. Away back in Chapter One, if your recall, I mentioned a wonderful one-night stand I had when I was nineteen. That was John. But we were both cheating -- and we both had attacks of conscience and we didn't repeat the experience.
So suddenly, and by accident, I met this wonderful man again. John was happily married; he had two children, a dog named Spot, and a good job. It sounded like what Republicans call "family values" -- and was very appealing despite the different trajectory of my own life. I didn't tell him I was a recovering alcoholic nor allude to sex experiences with more than one hundred men.
The words pouring out of John. The idyllic marriage had a problem. He told me his wife had multiple sclerosis and as he talked I realized that sex in their marriage had become impossible. He was tied to his home and his needful wife, celibate through loyalty and the demands on his time of a job and his children.
He had no self-pity. It was a frank talk between people who had once been intimate and recaptured that intimacy. When we parted that day, however, his last words were what I wanted to hear. "It was so good to see you again, Becky. Can we meet again? For lunch? Or...uhh...more?"