At 66, my husband has finally become the man of my dreams

I’ve always loved my husband, but now that we are older and in our 60s, I definitely hate him less. Maybe I shouldn’t have had to wait 33 years – a third of a century – to hate my husband less, but time has been good to him. And it’s not just that he’s ageing better than most men this side of Richard Gere, although that doesn’t hurt. It also helped, at least from my perspective if not his, that the industry he spent most of his career in collapsed.

Now he gives more because he has more to give.

Bruce and I met in our 20s, and our relationship got off to an extremely slow start. Let’s say his courtship skills were rudimentary. For our first date, he asked me if I wanted to go “to an art opening and get some free wine.” It wasn’t until a year and a half after we met that I realised this kind, interesting and abnormally tall man was someone I could finally let my guard down around.

I had published a couple of books and was writing screenplays and teaching creative writing as an adjunct professor. Bruce got a full-time job as a magazine writer and editor. We did OK financially, especially because we didn’t have huge material needs, and we had enough free time to enjoy each other.

Then we had kids. And I became the first line of defence for two sick and ageing parents. Bruce was a committed father, but his job took up more and more of his time. Screenings, book parties, dinners with writers – the demands (his word; mine would be “benefits”) of a magazine gig in those halcyon days.

Despite being steeped in second-wave feminism, I was still stuck with a majority of the domestic grind, like every generation of women before me. I was labouring hard at my career, too. As a working-mother friend of mine recently reminisced over cocktails, “We did everything.” That was our real-world experience of the “having it all” illusion. Doing it all. We did, and we resented it.

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I wasn’t a stay-at-home mother, but I dropped off and picked up my kids from school every day, organised their activities, took them to the doctor, bought their clothes, kept them fed, homework, bath, bed, the whole schmear. (When I showed my husband this essay, he wrote in the margins, “Um, you weren’t totally on your own: I dropped off one or the other kid every day and at least in my memory got them breakfast every morning.” The former note is sort of true, the latter is a complete fantasy. PS: He also suggested the Richard Gere comparison above.)

By the late 1990s, my husband made a very (he inserted that word) good living, but we were a family of four in New York City, so we needed both incomes. There were years when I taught 11 classes and wrote books and screenplays, book reviews, the occasional essay, all while running our household and intermittently hospitalising my parents. I also didn’t have a classic office job like Bruce’s, which meant my days had flexibility. I could do laundry at 2 in the morning while grading papers – the trifecta being simultaneously food shopping on Fresh Direct.