How To Create Your Second Life At Any Age

BarbaraSher.com

Sher Success Teams
KilimWomen

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This is the best single book of the many I have reviewed dealing with the issues that are commonly lumped together as the "midlife crisis." Barbara Sher sweeps away the received wisdom about women and aging with a no-nonsense broom. She proposes that our first life, until 40, is not really our own - we are at the mercy of our  biology and governed by our hormones. But in our second life, we finally have the freedom to make real choices based on what we've learned from our past experience.  The mistake most of us make is that we don't slip out of the chains of nature when we can -  we try to keep applying the rules we learned from our first life to our second life, rather than recognizing that this is a whole new game. 

About reaching the "invisible" stage:

"I hate this!"  said a 42-year-old friend. "I thought I hated man whistling and bothering me, but now they don't look at me at all!  I feel like I disappeared."

But being invisible puts a great power in your hands, the power to be yourself.  It's not that you can walk into jewelry stores and swipe a tiara, like an invisible person in the movie.  That's small potatoes.  Being invisible lets you swipe something a lot bigger, the freedom to do as you please.  Because when people stop seeing you, they lose control over you.  It's a little gift but extremely useful, because it gives you an early taste of freedom before you're quite ready to stop feeling defined by other people’s opinions of you.

Everlasting romantic love is part of the big lie of youth, and youth is the only place where this lie can live.  You are crossing into an era where you don't really like lies anymore, but you hate to admit the romantic love was nothing but hunger, hormones, and illusion.  However, if you don't admit it, you'll have to forget everything you've learned in the last 20 years.  Because the real problem with love at midlife isn't that you're too old to compete with a 22 year-old.

The real problem is that you know too much.  You're too sophisticated to fall for illusion, but you're not past wanting it all the same.  Right here in the middle of being a grown up, your heart has launched an all-out war with your brain.  You're watching both sides, trying to do the right thing, but you can't help wanting your heart to win.  You're hoping against hope that you'll be able to salvage some of the dream.  Because without that dream, the future looks so bleak.

 

What you can't see yet is that it's never too late to find authentic love.  But if you're still looking for the great romance, it was always too late.  When you don't understand this you're in trouble, because romantic love is a fake.  The feeling that goes with love songs is not merely elusive; you can search the rest of your life and never find it.  In fact, until you stop longing for it, you'll never get real love.

In fact, this is what UnconventionalWoman.com is all about - becoming the woman who lives in reality, not in dreams of past or future; and living as oneself - not as the person our family and friends expect us to be, or as a woman who is always seeking that potential mate who will solve our problems.

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