It will help you understand the problem if I first explain that my husband and I are very lucky -- he’s CEO of a small company serving the health care sector, and in these days of COVID-19 that place is booming, and I’m in a pretty secure position in academia.  “So why”,  you might ask, “Is that a problem?” My husband’s (hereafter AJ) 60th birthday was coming up. What do you give a man who has everything he wants? The sho...

A most dangerous game: Frank It’s a poor excuse, but I was ‘On the rebound’. Well, maybe not. Rebounding suggests bouncing back --   after my divorce it wasn’t a bounce, it was more like a splat.  Three years earlier I abandoned my own grad studies to work so we’d have a reasonable standard of living while my new husband finished at Harvard Law. He graduated, passed the bar exam and started a career. Our marriage began fa...

I don't know how often it happens with other couples, but fantasizing about wife sharing had become part of our pillow talk. Maybe it was because I answered my husband's questions about long-ago boyfriends and long-ago sex. There was nothing wrong with, or boring, about our life -- not the sex part, not the loving part, and not the day to day living part, but my reward for telling stories, maybe from time to time a little...

  I didn't mention it earlier: Carl practiced law mostly in Charleston SC, one of the more romantic cities in the South, and it's also home to MUSC -- the Medical University of South Carolina. One of my research grants includes a provision requiring me to offer seminars and training sessions at other universities. About two months after the ‘Show and Tell” I just told you about in part 1, I was scheduled to spend several...

Women my age will understand: menopause and its flood of hormones can really mess up a woman's view of herself and her world. Mine made me feel older, unattractive, and okay, ugly.  My husband worked at changing my opinion. "You're more beautiful now than when I married you," he said and he persuaded me to pose nude for him one Saturday morning because "You may become more beautiful but you will never be younger."  The ca...

The internet and Google makes it easier for there to be ‘unexpected connections’. “Hey T,” the email read, “Are you going to the APA convention in Denver?  Love to see you there.” The American Psychological Association annual meeting was held there in 2016, the time frame of this story. The email  was signed ‘Russ’, and my Russ memories came flooding back. Russ was an associate professor when I was in grad school. We had...

Like many of yours, my job involves travel, and most guys and women I know complain about the same thing -- we have high-energy days but at 5:00 PM, unless we have arranged a business dinner, we retreat to our hotel rooms, alone. Guys have an advantage, they can go to the hotel lounge and have a drink. A woman alone in a hotel lounge is often taken for, well, you know. I attend PittCon, an annual technical conference and...