Married twenty five years, and this conversation started last autumn
Posted as after_twenty_five_years
- Looking for
- a couple who opened things up later in life and survived it
- Experience
- Twenty five years married. Eight months of this, and no practice.
- Around
- the 19th, Paris
In October my wife told me something she had been carrying since before we met. Since then we have talked more honestly than we did in the previous decade, and we have also frightened ourselves several times, and we are writing here because we have run out of people to ask.
We are fifty two and fifty four, in Paris, married twenty five years, with grown children who will never know about any of this. Neither of us has any experience. What we have is eight months of reading, a lot of talking, and two attempts at something at home which were awkward in ways we did not expect and which we are still working out.
What we want is not a third person. It is a couple, roughly our age, who did this later in life and can tell us honestly what it was like. How you talked about it. What you got wrong. Whether the fear goes.
We are aware this is asking for something without offering much in return, and we would want it to be a friendship rather than a consultation, and we are perfectly good company.
She is the one who wants to submit. I am the one who is still working out whether I am capable of what she is asking for, and I am putting that in the advertisement because pretending otherwise seems like a bad way to begin. We would want to write first, at length, and meet in public, and go slowly enough to be boring about it.