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lkh_lashouts2015-04-25 05:10 pm
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Blogflog - Find the Happily Ever After that Works for You
Link: Find the Happily Ever After that Works for You
Disclaimer: This blog entry is verbatim, as originally posted on LKH's blog. Copyright belongs to Ma Petite Enterprises.
At the gym, at the women’s luncheon, hair salon, I’ve had a variant of this conversation often:
A woman in the locker room at the gym is obviously upset, so much so that she needs to vent. She and I are probably about the same age, so she sees me as a potentially sympathetic audience. She starts by saying, “My ex-husband . . .”
I admit that I, too, am divorced.
It’s a common story, we both married college sweethearts, and after sixteen years for me, and over twenty for her, the marriage ended in divorce. She goes on to talk about what seems to bother her the most. He’s married to a woman that’s over a decade younger than he is, and that much younger than she is. Sometimes the age difference between the ex-husband and the new spouse is closer to twenty years, but the story doesn’t change much except for that.
The woman is attractive, the gym workout shows, but she goes on to compare herself to the young new wife, and talks about how no one in their forties, or fifties, can compete with someone in their thirties, or twenties.
I’ve gone quiet, just letting her talk, because I’ve learned that’s my best alternative, but she finally says, “You know what I mean? We give them the best years of our life and then they leave us for some young thing, and we’re supposed to be out there dating again, but this time we’re up against the same twenty-year-olds that our husbands left us for, how unfair is that?”
I smile, trying to avoid answering, but she presses, they usually do. She wants me to stamp her ex-wife card, but I can’t.
I finally say, “Actually, I left my husband, and I’m remarried to a man that’s twelve years younger than I am.”
The look I get is never friendly at this point. The women never seem to know what to say, they thought they had a kindred spirit and somehow by me bucking the stereotype it’s like I betrayed the sisterhood. I have yet to have any of the women be happy for me, or say, “Way to go,” nope I’m suddenly lumped in with the bastard husband and the sweet young thing that stole him away. The women suddenly don’t want to talk to me anymore, because I found dating after my divorce easy, once I started dating younger men. I agreed that men in our own age group were confusing, but then I found them equally confusing in college when we were dating them in the first place.
I had the same problems with them in my thirties that I’d had in my twenties. They expected me to be a kind of cheerleader for them, their goals, their ambitions, and their careers. I’ve never been big on the rah-rah, and my own goals, ambitions and career has always interested me more than anyone else’s. By the time of my divorce, I was a New York Times bestselling author, and I actually had men totally panic when they found out, as if they had no box for the fact that I was at least as successful in my field as theirs, or more successful. Rather than seeing it as a good thing that we both had great careers, they seemed intimidated by it, or at least less interested in my job, than I was supposed to be in theirs. For the most part they bored me, just like they had in college. I perplexed them or left them looking for someone who would be a bit more adoring, again just like in college.
Men about a decade younger had usually been raised in households where both parents worked outside the house, or by single moms. They expected everyone to work and have a career of their own, in fact your job was part of what you brought to the relationship and the possible future, because it was expected to need two incomes to get to the same place that one was supposed to take us back when I was in college. The new attitude worked for me, and I had no trouble dating once I moved a decade younger.
I admit to being a little weirded out about the age difference at first, but it just worked for me. I was thirty-eight and Jonathon was twenty-six when we married. We will be celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary this year and unlike the last time I closed in on this mile marker, I’m happier now than when we first married, which is pretty awesome.
I’ve had women who are still married, or who have never married, be happy for me, and ask how I managed to marry a younger man, but never one of the women who tell me their story and find out mine is the reverse of theirs.
How did I do it? First, I wasn’t looking for someone to take care of me, not in college or a decade later. I wanted a partner, someone who would work with me, not work for me like some kind of salaried slave. I know that the women who stay at home and invest everything in this old-fashioned scenario are just as trapped, because they often haven’t had a job since soon after college, so they’re out there with no work history and are ironically competing for jobs against the very same demographics that their husbands are successfully dating. But if you listen to them talk about their ex-husbands, and the men they are trying to date, it’s like it’s all about the man’s earning potential. I’m told that the male version of this is that the woman is valued for her looks and how she being on his arm can help his career or his reputation with the other men. I’ve never bought into either mindset, so this really is second-hand information for me. It’s funny that in my fifth decade I finally understand the mystery of why I didn’t fit into my own typical generation.
In first grade I was the only child who’s parents had divorced. Now, it’s about half of most classes, or more, where children are dealing with a divorce, or maybe their parents never married, and don’t plan to, which I’d never heard of as a kid. My mother went out and worked to support me, while her mother, my grandmother, stayed home and took care of me. Again, it wasn’t the typical arrangement when I was in elementary school. By the time I was in second grade my mother had died in a car accident and it was just my grandmother and me, which again made me odd kid out. I still remember one of the little girls teasing me that my mother was dead. Anyone who says that childhood is sweet and carefree, doesn’t remember what it was really like, or their childhood was much different from mine.
I realized just a few years ago that my attitude is literally decades younger than my actual age and I now believe it is that my childhood was much more typical of the generation after mine, than my own. Is that what has made me open to the new technology? I’m just as likely to be on my smart phone as the people I’m with, and I wish my friends that are my age, or older, would text more. It’s a great way to keep up with people on a daily basis. I love sending and receiving pictures and little notes, from friends and lovers. I also keep discovering new music, new bands, and most of the people in my age group seem to have stopped at the decade they graduated from high school, or college. I totally don’t understand that, but I was raised with almost no music in the house, so I have no affection for my high school, or college, sound track. In fact, I don’t have a much of a musical reference for those years of my life. I discovered and really grew to love music after college when I started writing my first novel. Music will forever be entwined with writing for me because of that. Jonathon brought a lot of music into my life. Now, we take turns finding new music to add to our shared iTunes list. Jonathon took me to my very first concert, and yes, I was in my thirties before I ever went to a concert of any kind. I was too busy writing and trying to establish my career when I was in my teens and twenties to waste time on concerts. I was driven to succeed, that didn’t leave a lot of room for fun. Other people that we dated brought more music into our lives. New bands, new singers, and we began to make friends with some of the musicians like S.J. Tucker, or Kimberly Freeman of One-Eyed Doll. Jonathon finally learned to play the bass and, no surprise, he’s good at it. I can finally say that I’ve dated a musician.
My first marriage I earned my big white dress and thought the idea of never being with anyone but my husband a great idea. I bought into the traditional story, and when that didn’t work I threw out the storyline, because it hadn’t been true for me. I thought, if society could be that wrong about that much, then maybe what I’d been raised to believe wasn’t the only truth out there. So, in my thirties I went out into the world and tried to discover some truths that did work for me. Those of you happy in a traditional marriage, I’m happy for you, I’m only saying it did not work for me. I found that nearly everything that society expected of me didn’t work for me. I’m the major bread winner in a career I love. I make a good living at a job that is traditionally not a secure field, but I’m twenty years and counting, so I think I’ve found my career path. The men who thought I was too aggressive and masculine in my attitudes in college, can keep their own attitudes; I’ve found that men and women, a decade or two, younger than them and younger than me, are fine with my drive and ambition. When I first started dating Jonathon some of my acquaintances, and even a few friends, thought he was my boy toy, my fling after leaving my first marriage. When I decided to marry him, some of them didn’t understand. I was marrying someone the age of their children, which was a little weird even to me. You have a fling with the younger man, you don’t marry him, and he certainly isn’t your happy ever after, but it has been for me. Our girlfriend Genevieve has been part of that happily-ever-after. We will be celebrating our fifth anniversary of dating this year. Now, she’s brought her wonderful husband, Spike, into our lives. He and I will hit two years of dating later this year. I have restrained myself in all those conversations with other ex-wives in my own age group because I could have added that I’m also living with a beautiful young women in her twenties, just like their ex-husbands. I didn’t set out to date any woman, since Genevieve is my first girlfriend ever, but the fact that she was literally half my age when we met, is just another part of the wonderful weirdness in our lives. Spike is twenty years younger than I am, for those who are wondering. The four of us are living together and it works for us, but to get to this happy place I had to throw out almost everything society told me I was supposed to be. Was it scary? Yes. Did I get my heart broken along the way? Yes, several times. Was it all worth it? Yes, very yes. Could it all have blown up in my face? Hell, yes. A few times it did, but I was still happier out, than in.
I guess what I wanted to share from my own experience is to not let age, or society, stand in your way. If you like someone, date them. If you love someone, marry them. Don’t let age, or the stuff that doesn’t matter in the end, prevent you from finding happiness. Be yourself, no matter how weird that may seem to others; it’s your life after all, not their’s. It’s alright to be afraid of taking big chances, but don’t let the fear stop you from taking the leap. I know for me, that if I’d stayed where I was behind the safe walls of my first marriage and a corporate job, I’d still be miserable, that wasn’t going to change. How sad that would have been, and oh, how much I would have missed.
Disclaimer: This blog entry is verbatim, as originally posted on LKH's blog. Copyright belongs to Ma Petite Enterprises.
At the gym, at the women’s luncheon, hair salon, I’ve had a variant of this conversation often:
A woman in the locker room at the gym is obviously upset, so much so that she needs to vent. She and I are probably about the same age, so she sees me as a potentially sympathetic audience. She starts by saying, “My ex-husband . . .”
I admit that I, too, am divorced.
It’s a common story, we both married college sweethearts, and after sixteen years for me, and over twenty for her, the marriage ended in divorce. She goes on to talk about what seems to bother her the most. He’s married to a woman that’s over a decade younger than he is, and that much younger than she is. Sometimes the age difference between the ex-husband and the new spouse is closer to twenty years, but the story doesn’t change much except for that.
The woman is attractive, the gym workout shows, but she goes on to compare herself to the young new wife, and talks about how no one in their forties, or fifties, can compete with someone in their thirties, or twenties.
I’ve gone quiet, just letting her talk, because I’ve learned that’s my best alternative, but she finally says, “You know what I mean? We give them the best years of our life and then they leave us for some young thing, and we’re supposed to be out there dating again, but this time we’re up against the same twenty-year-olds that our husbands left us for, how unfair is that?”
I smile, trying to avoid answering, but she presses, they usually do. She wants me to stamp her ex-wife card, but I can’t.
I finally say, “Actually, I left my husband, and I’m remarried to a man that’s twelve years younger than I am.”
The look I get is never friendly at this point. The women never seem to know what to say, they thought they had a kindred spirit and somehow by me bucking the stereotype it’s like I betrayed the sisterhood. I have yet to have any of the women be happy for me, or say, “Way to go,” nope I’m suddenly lumped in with the bastard husband and the sweet young thing that stole him away. The women suddenly don’t want to talk to me anymore, because I found dating after my divorce easy, once I started dating younger men. I agreed that men in our own age group were confusing, but then I found them equally confusing in college when we were dating them in the first place.
I had the same problems with them in my thirties that I’d had in my twenties. They expected me to be a kind of cheerleader for them, their goals, their ambitions, and their careers. I’ve never been big on the rah-rah, and my own goals, ambitions and career has always interested me more than anyone else’s. By the time of my divorce, I was a New York Times bestselling author, and I actually had men totally panic when they found out, as if they had no box for the fact that I was at least as successful in my field as theirs, or more successful. Rather than seeing it as a good thing that we both had great careers, they seemed intimidated by it, or at least less interested in my job, than I was supposed to be in theirs. For the most part they bored me, just like they had in college. I perplexed them or left them looking for someone who would be a bit more adoring, again just like in college.
Men about a decade younger had usually been raised in households where both parents worked outside the house, or by single moms. They expected everyone to work and have a career of their own, in fact your job was part of what you brought to the relationship and the possible future, because it was expected to need two incomes to get to the same place that one was supposed to take us back when I was in college. The new attitude worked for me, and I had no trouble dating once I moved a decade younger.
I admit to being a little weirded out about the age difference at first, but it just worked for me. I was thirty-eight and Jonathon was twenty-six when we married. We will be celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary this year and unlike the last time I closed in on this mile marker, I’m happier now than when we first married, which is pretty awesome.
I’ve had women who are still married, or who have never married, be happy for me, and ask how I managed to marry a younger man, but never one of the women who tell me their story and find out mine is the reverse of theirs.
How did I do it? First, I wasn’t looking for someone to take care of me, not in college or a decade later. I wanted a partner, someone who would work with me, not work for me like some kind of salaried slave. I know that the women who stay at home and invest everything in this old-fashioned scenario are just as trapped, because they often haven’t had a job since soon after college, so they’re out there with no work history and are ironically competing for jobs against the very same demographics that their husbands are successfully dating. But if you listen to them talk about their ex-husbands, and the men they are trying to date, it’s like it’s all about the man’s earning potential. I’m told that the male version of this is that the woman is valued for her looks and how she being on his arm can help his career or his reputation with the other men. I’ve never bought into either mindset, so this really is second-hand information for me. It’s funny that in my fifth decade I finally understand the mystery of why I didn’t fit into my own typical generation.
In first grade I was the only child who’s parents had divorced. Now, it’s about half of most classes, or more, where children are dealing with a divorce, or maybe their parents never married, and don’t plan to, which I’d never heard of as a kid. My mother went out and worked to support me, while her mother, my grandmother, stayed home and took care of me. Again, it wasn’t the typical arrangement when I was in elementary school. By the time I was in second grade my mother had died in a car accident and it was just my grandmother and me, which again made me odd kid out. I still remember one of the little girls teasing me that my mother was dead. Anyone who says that childhood is sweet and carefree, doesn’t remember what it was really like, or their childhood was much different from mine.
I realized just a few years ago that my attitude is literally decades younger than my actual age and I now believe it is that my childhood was much more typical of the generation after mine, than my own. Is that what has made me open to the new technology? I’m just as likely to be on my smart phone as the people I’m with, and I wish my friends that are my age, or older, would text more. It’s a great way to keep up with people on a daily basis. I love sending and receiving pictures and little notes, from friends and lovers. I also keep discovering new music, new bands, and most of the people in my age group seem to have stopped at the decade they graduated from high school, or college. I totally don’t understand that, but I was raised with almost no music in the house, so I have no affection for my high school, or college, sound track. In fact, I don’t have a much of a musical reference for those years of my life. I discovered and really grew to love music after college when I started writing my first novel. Music will forever be entwined with writing for me because of that. Jonathon brought a lot of music into my life. Now, we take turns finding new music to add to our shared iTunes list. Jonathon took me to my very first concert, and yes, I was in my thirties before I ever went to a concert of any kind. I was too busy writing and trying to establish my career when I was in my teens and twenties to waste time on concerts. I was driven to succeed, that didn’t leave a lot of room for fun. Other people that we dated brought more music into our lives. New bands, new singers, and we began to make friends with some of the musicians like S.J. Tucker, or Kimberly Freeman of One-Eyed Doll. Jonathon finally learned to play the bass and, no surprise, he’s good at it. I can finally say that I’ve dated a musician.
My first marriage I earned my big white dress and thought the idea of never being with anyone but my husband a great idea. I bought into the traditional story, and when that didn’t work I threw out the storyline, because it hadn’t been true for me. I thought, if society could be that wrong about that much, then maybe what I’d been raised to believe wasn’t the only truth out there. So, in my thirties I went out into the world and tried to discover some truths that did work for me. Those of you happy in a traditional marriage, I’m happy for you, I’m only saying it did not work for me. I found that nearly everything that society expected of me didn’t work for me. I’m the major bread winner in a career I love. I make a good living at a job that is traditionally not a secure field, but I’m twenty years and counting, so I think I’ve found my career path. The men who thought I was too aggressive and masculine in my attitudes in college, can keep their own attitudes; I’ve found that men and women, a decade or two, younger than them and younger than me, are fine with my drive and ambition. When I first started dating Jonathon some of my acquaintances, and even a few friends, thought he was my boy toy, my fling after leaving my first marriage. When I decided to marry him, some of them didn’t understand. I was marrying someone the age of their children, which was a little weird even to me. You have a fling with the younger man, you don’t marry him, and he certainly isn’t your happy ever after, but it has been for me. Our girlfriend Genevieve has been part of that happily-ever-after. We will be celebrating our fifth anniversary of dating this year. Now, she’s brought her wonderful husband, Spike, into our lives. He and I will hit two years of dating later this year. I have restrained myself in all those conversations with other ex-wives in my own age group because I could have added that I’m also living with a beautiful young women in her twenties, just like their ex-husbands. I didn’t set out to date any woman, since Genevieve is my first girlfriend ever, but the fact that she was literally half my age when we met, is just another part of the wonderful weirdness in our lives. Spike is twenty years younger than I am, for those who are wondering. The four of us are living together and it works for us, but to get to this happy place I had to throw out almost everything society told me I was supposed to be. Was it scary? Yes. Did I get my heart broken along the way? Yes, several times. Was it all worth it? Yes, very yes. Could it all have blown up in my face? Hell, yes. A few times it did, but I was still happier out, than in.
I guess what I wanted to share from my own experience is to not let age, or society, stand in your way. If you like someone, date them. If you love someone, marry them. Don’t let age, or the stuff that doesn’t matter in the end, prevent you from finding happiness. Be yourself, no matter how weird that may seem to others; it’s your life after all, not their’s. It’s alright to be afraid of taking big chances, but don’t let the fear stop you from taking the leap. I know for me, that if I’d stayed where I was behind the safe walls of my first marriage and a corporate job, I’d still be miserable, that wasn’t going to change. How sad that would have been, and oh, how much I would have missed.
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I stopped reading after she mentioned being married to a man 12 years her junior. Because she just has to prove she's so much more well-adjusted than those OTHER women who had painful divorces, amirite?
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She is so full of shit. What I've gotten? "You go, girl." Multiple times.
But hey, I'm not Princess Specialtude Sexypants of Cougartown.
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(Not that writers always have to write about writing, but they're also not my to-go source for continuous relationship advice. Sure, she's always used to blog for personal stuff, too, but I mean, this was four posts in a row circling mostly around the same topics.)
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I think it's been more than four posts in a row. At least it feels like it, but that might just be because of all the "I'm so happy now" posts. One or two posts I could understand, but doesn't she have anything else to talk bout? She's an author, there's plenty of things she could write about related to her books and the industry.
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No you haven't. You don't live in a cheesy movie set in a small town in 1950s Alabama. The women's luncheon?
I'm over the fact that she lies all the time. She is just so terrible at making up believable lies. Which is kind of a drawback for someone who writes fiction.
The women suddenly don’t want to talk to me anymore, because I found dating after my divorce easy, once I started dating younger men.
Or because you didn't start dating Jon AFTER your divorce.
That's it, I can't read any more of this sexist fantasy. Liar liar pants on fire, Laurell.
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It's like she's living in some strange remake of The Women, isn't it?
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"So when told that a woman's husband left her for a younger woman, your response is to say you did the EXACT SAME THING to your husband by ditching him for a younger man crow how much happier you are and you did the right thing and who cares about your first husband! And you wonder why other women dislike you?"
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Oh, who am I kidding - it's not that she's a woman, it's because she's LKH, whose novels run on Protagonist-Centered Morality.
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"They expected me to be a kind of cheerleader for them, their goals, their ambitions, and their careers. I’ve never been big on the rah-rah, and my own goals, ambitions and career has always interested me more than anyone else’s"
I believe this part, I think that's a common thing that gets thrust on women, but I also expect that, given how it's painted whenever anyone other than Anita gets attention for a second, no matter how valid the reason, her standards for saying this may just be that they expected encouragement and support of any sort at any time or just wanted to talk about what they were aiming for in life when UM EXCUSE YOU THIS IS ALL ABOUT LKH!
Likewise, I do believe that her being more successful than a lot of the men she was meeting intimidated them. You'll find plenty of guys today uncomfy with the idea of their wife/girlfriend making more than they do. I just also have to wonder, again, given that it's LKH, if there weren't certain other factors driving them off instead as well. You know, like her awful personality. Because "they're just jealous!" is her usual response to that. Ah, this is turning into such a case of The LKH Who Cried Wolf...
"Men about a decade younger had usually been raised in households where both parents worked outside the house"
Actually, you'll find that in every decade. It just depends on your demographics. Women have ALWAYS worked, both in this country and throughout history in general. The women we're always thinking about times past who didn't work were just the subset who could AFFORD not to work. But women who weren't so well off (a category that overlaps quite a bit with women who weren't white) were working just as hard as their men, and sometimes even at the same jobs, in addition to being maids, nannies, etc. for those wealthy white women. I remember hearing it said once that the only reason white feminists in the 70s were able to go out on their protests and marches was because they had a black domestic worker at home, a fellow woman, to watch their kids while they did.
"I wanted a partner, someone who would work with me, not work for me like some kind of salaried slave."
Did she literally just describe husbands who are the breadwinners as slaves to their wives? This is some grade-A MRA bullshit here.
"I know that the women who stay at home and invest everything in this old-fashioned scenario are just as trapped..."
Oh, look, maybe she has SOME sympathy for them!
".... But if you listen to them talk about their ex-husbands, and the men they are trying to date, it’s like it’s all about the man’s earning potential."
LOL NO SHE DOESN'T, THEY'RE ALL GOLD-DIGGING HOORS
So, tell me, why were they so emotionally distraught over the divorce and being left for a younger woman (implying their man never loved them all along and only cared about looks) if they didn't love the guy themselves? If it was just about money, why did the "younger" part matter? This is all such baloney and LKH is such a sexist twit.
"I’m told that the male version of this is that the woman is valued for her looks and how she being on his arm can help his career or his reputation with the other men. I’ve never bought into either mindset, so this really is second-hand information for me. It’s funny that in my fifth decade I finally understand the mystery of why I didn’t fit into my own typical generation."
YES YOU WERE THE SPECIALIST SNOWFLAKE AND THE MOST AHEAD OF YOUR TIME EVER
Notice how according to LKH, she never has to question her own mindsets and values and things she was taught and admit she was wrong and re-adjust her views? No, according to her, she was just automatically born with a perfectly egalitarian mentality and immunity to cultural indoctrination. No wonder she never notices how sexist, racist, and homophobic she really is, she legitimately thinks she CAN'T be!
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And yeah, of course they did. That's part of what marriage is: you support each other's goals, ambitions, and careers. You don't give up your own, but you do support the other person. But LKH cannot do that. It has to be all her, all the time.
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And yeah, of course they did. That's part of what marriage is: you support each other's goals, ambitions, and careers. You don't give up your own, but you do support the other person. But LKH cannot do that. It has to be all her, all the time.
ETA: WTF, LJ? How did this get double-posted fifty minutes after I first posted it?
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dafuq
look, kids are horribly cruel, but...I don't know, something about that doesn't seem right AT ALL. It sounds like the sort of thing that only happens to outcast heroines in YA novels, along with being picked on for violet eyes and liking books.
"I’m just as likely to be on my smart phone as the people I’m with, and I wish my friends that are my age, or older, would text more. It’s a great way to keep up with people on a daily basis. I love sending and receiving pictures and little notes, from friends and lovers. I also keep discovering new music, new bands, and most of the people in my age group seem to have stopped at the decade they graduated from high school, or college. I totally don’t understand that"
HOW DID WE EVEN GET HERE
ANYTHING TO SHOEHORN IN HOW SPECIAL YOU ARE
FOR LIKING NEW BANDS
WOW SO SPECIAL MUCH UNUSUAL
My parents are in their 60s and they use their phones and iPads plenty, ok? You're seriously not that unique. At all.
" Other people that we dated brought more music into our lives. New bands, new singers, and we began to make friends with some of the musicians like S.J. Tucker, or Kimberly Freeman of One-Eyed Doll."
LOL SUBTLE NAMEDROPPING SOOOO SUBTLE
" Jonathon finally learned to play the bass and, no surprise, he’s good at it. I can finally say that I’ve dated a musician"
Well I guess you can finally write about it now!
"Those of you happy in a traditional marriage, I’m happy for you, I’m only saying it did not work for me"
But also that you're a lazy gold-digging whore who only cares about money and your husband just wants a hot cheerleader on his arm
Also blah blah blah I AM THE ONLY WOMAN OF MY GENERATION WHO WORKED!
...I guess the shoe and the pumpkin is a Cinderella reference? Because reasons?
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What generation does she think she belongs to, anyway? Besides the facts you addressed above, about how only a certain demographic of women didn't work outside the home, by the time LKH got to working age, women of any demographic working outside the home was pretty much accepted. My mother's older than her and only didn't work for a salary when I was very young, and she worked with a lot of other women, and was married to a man who made a sturdy middle-class salary as well. LKH is just so wrong.
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*hobbles in on cane* In my day, missy.....
Jesus, I'm 52 and I manage to use my cell. I must be a fucking prodigy?
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She mentioned her heart being broken a few times. I'm surprised we haven't heard more about this. There seemed to be a lot of "friends" mentioned over the years that suddenly disappeared from her life. Early poly relationship drama?
And why is there a high heel and a pumpkin? Symbolic, I guess.
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Honestly, I think LKH has problems perceiving the passage of time. It sort of comes up in her books, too - the amount of time between books, or the timeline of the series don't work.
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I had to stop reading at the "How did I do it?" part. I can't listen to/read her explaining how she is so special and different, without the slightest moment of realization that just because she may have grown up thinking differently from many of the people around her, it doesn't mean she is the only one ever who thought along those lines, or that, as others have mentioned, her attitudes aren't worth re-examining as much as "other women's".
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Okay but she got asked once why there's no preternatural bands/musicians in AB:VH and she answered there's none because she never dated a musician.
THERE'S STILL NO PRETERNATURAL BANDS/MUSICIANS IN AB:VH (or MG for that matter, Maeve is an actress and that's about as close as it gets - nobody else in Merry's retinue has any practical skills beyond "warrior" either. Don't get me started on the lack of trade & crafts people.) SO JON REALLY DOESN'T COUNT. LIES, LAURELL.
I don't want to touch on the rest, that way lies incoherent frothing rage.
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But yeah, that's not really an answer. Because A) the plot doesn't have to revolve around preternatural* musicians, and B) she could still do research. Which does not consist of buying a calender.
*Side note: every time I see that word I think of Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate books, which are so much better than Hamilton's tripe.
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And I can just hear the tone of voice that's said in. And exactly why these women, who are pouring their hearts out, hate her.
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I'm a millennial (and thus the cause of downfall of civilization, as the news would have me believe.) I grew up with my family just barely scraping the requirement for middle class. My father was a pastor and my mother for years and years was a teacher's aide until she could find work in the field she actually went to college for. So essentially I grew up very conservative, with parents who worked their asses of to make a better future for my sister and I. They did eventually divorce, because my dad came out of the closet. And yeah, it did upset me when he dated guys my age or younger.
What I think these women wanted (assuming these conversations ever happened, which is doubtful) was a validation that beauty standards aren't fair. A man is allowed to grow older, still be considered attractive, and still date vastly younger women. It can be difficult to get back into the dating game after so many years of marriage. Most of these women have had children, which can totally ruin your body. (At least it did mine, and I only have the one kid.) Stretch marks, incontenence, diastasis recti and more are complications of pregnancy. I actually have minor abdominal separation because of it. A good partner will overlook those things, but we're talking about guys who want pretty twenty-somethings with taut tummies, perky boobs, etc.
If you get plastic surgery to correct these things you're considered shallow. (I can't recall but I think Hamilton has sneered at plastic surgery at least once in her blogs or books.) If you don't, you're considered dumpy. It's a no-win scenario. Though there are definitely beauty standards for men, they aren't as societally enforced.
Hamilton in essence said on this blog, "Nope, I'm with your husband on this one. And I'm totally hot enough to have a young girlfriend too." (I genuinely believe these conversations never happened, and that she's just trying to humble brag about how so very, very unique she is for being poly and a woman who married a younger man. Guess what? My aunt married a man twelve years her junior too. They are very happy, so I know it happens. But it doesn't make Laurell special.)
I feel like Hamilton fundamentally misunderstands feminism, reading it as the idea that in order to be a liberated woman you essentially act like a man. Not only that, but some of the most toxic stereotypes of masculinity. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but my understanding is feminism (or egalitarianism if people prefer) is just the idea that we should all be able to make our own choices without getting shit for them. Hamilton would sneer at mine. I am a stay at home mom half the day and ghostwrite my ass off at night to make additional income, because doing daycare is damn expensive. I'm monogamous (though bisexual and we're eventually planning to have a third someday, if that's not TMI.)
In Hamilton's mind she is a special snowflake, the only woman to scoop a young hottie, be successful, and escape a sexist mindset. (hah!) My parents were born in 1970, so only six years after Hamilton. Even in their generation, it was expected both people would work. My mom and dad were each other's cheerleaders because that is what happens in a partnership. It reads to me that only Laurell is allowed to be successful and begrudges anyone else limelight, attention, or sympathy. She reads like a straight up narcassist.
Anyone else think she's just desperate to escape the label of "Boomer?" I totally know how to use my cell phone and ipad guys! (I know not all Boomers are like this but golly, does she remind me of some of them.) I totally relate to the younger generation! I am still young and hip like my protagonist! My seventy-something year old grandmother uses social media and new tech more than I do, Hamilton.
My friend suggested taking choice clips of her works and blogs and putting them on r/not like other girls. I'd kind of like to see that but not sure if it could be done without infringing on copyright.