| Ours is a common enough story as the twentieth
century merges with the twenty-first. Two women, both mothers,
in our forties, suddenly single again after many years married
and, for the first time ever, entirely dependent on our own
abilities to support ourselves and make separate lives. Growing
up in the vanished age of formica and free school-milk, we came
to maturity at university wearing embroidered caftans and telling
the Americans to get out of Vietnam. Married early, we carved
out a fragmented career path that uneasily diverged from the
paths followed by our stay-at-home mothers.
When our marriages folded at a similar time, we talked about
our separations and divorces and the subsequent experiences
of rebuilding and making new intimate relationships. As we
talked, we realised that we were not alone, that for the first
time in Western history, thousands of middle-aged people like
us are leaving marriages or long-term relationships to be
confronted by a singles scene altered beyond recognition since
our youth. Often immensely hurt from the considerable emotional
damage of marriage failure, we face the many-tentacled hydra
of past loss while seeking new partnerships to provide security
and future happiness.
In the quite recent past, divorce or death of a spouse was
often followed by a humane type of suttee where society expected
the divorced or widowed (women particularly) to live out their
lives in lonely celibacy. All that has changed. We children
of Aquarius have no sympathy with such asceticism. Instead,
we are repartnering and remarrying with alacrity, but our
enthusiasm for coupledom offers no protection against the
difficulties of the search or the complexities of building
new mid-life relationships. The etiquette of first time-courtship
and marriage is well established, but when it comes to subsequent
pairings, the definition is far less clear. The situation
is like the world of a new subdivision where the roads have
been laid but there are no signposts. Recycled People offers
the stories of people who have been or are in that place.
By sharing their experiences, their successes and their failures
we hope to provide some of those signposts and to make this
new world more friendly and accessible.
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We, Coral and Paula, are not counsellors or psychologists,
and we do not see Recycled People as a definitive account
of what happens when people move away from a previous long-term
partnership into a new committed relationship in their middle
years. Rather, we have used the voices of ordinary men and
women, along with commentary from a range of professionals
in the field, including psychologist James Smithells, to track
and highlight the myriad difficulties, emotions and joys that
appear to be commonly associated with this experience. The
people we interviewed and their situations differ, of course,
but dominant themes and similarities of experience emerged
strongly as we compiled and wrote this book ... We use the
metaphor of recycling because it reflects the reality of using
the experiences and self-knowledge gained from the death of
former relationships to establish new, and often more rewarding,
ones ...
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