Dear men:
You are now nearing the middle of your life. You have blissfully sailed through life. You took beer bongs in college. You ate pasta for four years. You found yourself a cute little wife and bought a cape cod and started having kids. Some of you played in basketball leagues and some of you sat on the couch and watched football every Sunday.
You raked leaves and changed oil and lifted heavy things. You received ties and cologne and wallets and ugly travel coffee cups for Father’s Day and you bought your wife an obligatory dozen roses on Valentines Day.
You have blissfully surrendered to the male machine and asked for a few hours off on Saturday afternoon to go get beers with the boys or play a round of golf once a month.
You are getting old and you have perhaps lived over half your life.
This will hit you like a ton of rocks.
All of a sudden you who never questioned anything, you who scoffed at your wife’s insistence that you reconnect with old friends, rekindle the romance or get a new hobby, you who never wanted to contemplate anything beyond your nacho toppings will all of the sudden become Socrates.
You will wake up feeling like Plato. You will question your existence, your marriage but most especially, you will question your mode of transportation. You will grow a beard and go to the gym.
You will ask yourself, “Who am I? Who are these kids and why did I have them?”
And then you will look at your wife and realize that she looks nothing like the hot co-ed you married twenty years ago. Never mind that you no longer resemble Zac Effron’s twin brother. Never mind that even after contemplating your bald spot forming in the midst of your head, you still decide you can pull off the “ruffled finger comb” style.
Instead of delving into this questioning, instead of contemplating fixing what’s broke, you may take the easy way out, because you are a man. You are not stupid and you like things uncomplicated.
Why work on your marriage when you can just start all over?
Why figure out what interests you when a fast car will do?
Some will make a drastic move and some will decide it’s just all too hard and can you pass the beer nuts and the remote.
But a few a chosen few will think for five minutes longer and decide to fix what they got.
After all, if you’re the one who went through life on cruise control is it really fair to just hit the brakes and throw out your passengers?
So much better to just pump the brakes, roll down the windows let the wind flow through your thinning hair and start to enjoy the ride.
And if you have to do that in a new convertible, my man, then I’m okay with that as long as it doesn’t stop there and as long as you accept that when my 50th hits maybe I will WANT to go to India and eat, and then pray, and then love.
But I won’t and neither should you; your kids and wife would appreciate it and at some point, so will you.
About Rebecca Suder