The Secret Lives of Wives by Iris Krasnow

Author:Iris Krasnow
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

This is the indescribable mystery of love, the instinctive tug that compels old lovers like Paula and Rian to get up and start dancing. It’s a spontaneous act that comes from soul-deep arousal. This is the magic that drives divorced husbands and wives to find their lost loves; this is the magic that makes trouble at high school reunions when ex-sweethearts arrive with new spouses and the one that got away seems more appealing than the one you’ve got. I interviewed one woman whose twenty-five-year marriage imploded after she spent the night with her seventh grade boyfriend at their thirty-fifth high school reunion, an event they both prophetically chose to attend solo. I met her right when it happened, and she updated me with this e-mail six months later: “I am still MADLY in LOVE! I am getting divorced and my children are still having a tough time. But I am more sure each day that I have made a good decision to be in a truly loving and fulfilling relationship, physically and emotionally! It is a dream come true! He is heaven on earth and it has been fifteen months!”

Hmm, I wonder what “MADLY in LOVE” will feel like after fifteen years, when the infatuation phase has long fizzled out.

While love has mystical components, there is no mystery as to why growing numbers of disgruntled spouses or divorced singles are reuniting with their childhood sweethearts. First off, many people have Facebook profiles and are findable with the click of a computer key. And as Paula describes, high school honeys can make you feel perpetually young and sexy. They don’t see you approaching sixty; they remember the first kiss. What boomer with acid reflux and arthritis doesn’t want that? Even if your original lover is now thirty pounds overweight and has not a hair on his head, you always see that teenager who first sent flutters throughout your body and became the ruler of your imagination. The what-ifs about the one who got away never stop tantalizing.

And if you end up back together, or if you never left each other, you are fortified by having all your life cycles linked—past, present, and future.

Marian Brandstrader Garrigan needed that spine of old love more than any other wife I know. She described the boy she met at fifteen and married at twenty as “the rock of my life” that she leaned on when the couple was dealt the cruelest blow a parent can endure. Their youngest of four daughters, Kathy, drowned at age twenty-four along with two others in a boating accident on Harding Lake near Fairbanks, Alaska, while working for AmeriCorps.

Kathy was a three-sport high school athlete and a varsity volleyball player at St. Joseph’s College, a vital and cheery young woman whom Marian called “the icing on my three-layer cake.” Three years after the tragedy, Marian is just starting to heal, warmed by the womb of the Oak Park neighborhood she was raised in and never left, and by the new life in her family, two grandchildren she takes care of while her daughters are at work.

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