'My mid-life affair with another woman'
Why women of a certain age are falling in love- and lust, with other women.
This piece was written by
who writes the excellent Midlife Mess here on Substack. Annie was paid for this piece, made possible by the hundreds of you who are paid subscribers. If you want to write for Things Worth Knowing you can find information on how to do that here. Or if you want to help support the writing I do and the writing of others, please consider becoming a paid subscriber by hitting the button above. This also gives you access to hundreds of essays as well as my writing courses and monthly writing group. Thank you.
I didn’t mean to fall for a woman. And certainly not at the ‘Celebrating Female Sexual Empowerment’ workshop I’d booked shortly after my divorce. The idea had been to figure out who I was after being trapped in a complex marriage for just under a decade. The last thing I went looking for was more romantic complications.
The course was made up entirely of women- some single, some in relationships and some, like me, freshly divorced. As a way to help us ‘explore’ who were were, we were set a range of slightly mortifying exercises which sometimes required working with a partner.
I was chosen to go first in a ‘communicating your desires’ exercise, and an attractive woman called Christine offered to be my partner. We giggled as the others crowded round us.
I sat down on a plastic chair. “Kneel down” I said to her, my heart thumping with the boldness of my request.
Without breaking my gaze, she obediently knelt down in front of me, before shuffling forward compliantly between my knees. Before I knew it she’d begun to trace her fingertips slowly up my legs. I remember being caught off guard by how soft her skin felt as well as how her whole touch felt different from a man’s. There was a knowing; a warmth; a familiarity that came from instinctively understanding one another’s bodies.
“Holy shit” said Sam, a blonde lawyer and fellow attendee over lunch. “I really thought you guys were going to fuck!”. I’d actually thought the same and was surprised by how much it didn’t weird me out. In fact, how much I wished we had.