Season 3, Episode 79: Love After 50: Navigating Divorce, Widowhood and Stepchildren

In this episode we talk to Francine Russo, Francine Russo, a renowned journalist and author of "Love After 50: How to Find It, Enjoy It, and Keep It." 

Francine shares her personal journey through widowhood and divorce, and the unique advantages of finding love later in life. She says new love in later years is the best love. Listen and find out why.

Merging families in adulthood, also known as adult stepfamilies or later lifestyle families, can be challenging.  Some say it can take up to five years to create harmony, and that the divorce rate is higher for people who marry a second time. 

Then there are the issues of pre-nuptials, estate planning and making sure your children are not left of the mix. This tends to be even more challenging with a second marriage, especially if you both have children from previous marriages or relationships. 

We talk bout the legalities to consider prior to plunging into a second marriage. A significant difference in age and financial resources can also cause difficulties and potential delays. However, the consequences of avoiding this conversation are even more dire in a blended family because laws affecting estate distribution have been written to better fit the needs of a traditional first marriage.

We also talk about how to approach the sensitive topics of dating and divorce with your adult children and practical tips on when to introduce your new partner.

A big thank you to Connie Gorant Fisher, our audio engineer. Share your thoughts with us at biteyourtongue@gmail.com and follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

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Chapters

• 0:04 Blending Families After 50
• 15:49 Navigating Relationships After 50
• 18:00 [Ad] Modem Futura
• 18:45 (Cont.) Navigating Relationships After 50
• 32:51 Navigating Relationships With Grandchildren
• 35:58 Finding Love After Loss and Confidence

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

You need to say to your son or your daughter I am feeling lonely, I really miss having a companion and I would like to start dating. If the child says oh no, mom, what you say is I understand your feelings. This may be difficult for you. You're having your life, You're in college, You're at a job. You're having your life, you're in college, you're at a job. You're not living here anymore. I need this for me and I need you to try to accept it.

Speaker 2: 0:34

Hello everyone. Welcome to Bite your Tongue, the podcast.

Speaker 3: 0:37

I'm Denise and I'm Kirsten, and we hope you will join us as we explore the ins and outs of building healthy relationships with our adult children. Together.

Speaker 2: 0:47

We'll speak with experts share heartfelt stories and get timely advice addressing topics that matter most to you.

Speaker 3: 0:54

Get ready to dive deep and learn, to build and nurture deep connections with our adult children and, of course, when, to bite our tongues. So let's get started.

Speaker 4: 1:05

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Bite your Tongue the podcast. First of all, I just want to thank everybody for listening to all of our episodes. It means the world to us and we want to thank our listeners who have signed up to become sustaining members through our Buy Me a Coffee program. That also means a lot to us and for those of you who have not signed up, it is so easy Just go to our website at biteyourtonguepodcastcom and look for the support tab.

Speaker 2: 1:30

It is easy, and thanks for mentioning that, kirsten. I also just want listeners to know we're not making money. All this does is help us pay our expenses. And speaking of expenses, I wanted everyone to know that I'm not using our fancy microphone today because I'm traveling and so I'm using my little headphones to my Mac. I beg forgiveness in advance if it doesn't sound great and round of applause if it does. So we'll learn something today. But anyway, I'm very excited about today's topic. We're talking to a woman who's had a great deal of experience in merging families through divorce, through widowhood. She's a fabulous writer, and Kirsten will tell you more about this. But what I'm excited about, for some reason in the last few weeks we've gotten several questions about how to tell your adult children when you're getting a divorce. Another one asked about their stepchildren don't get along, what do you do? Or their stepchildren don't get along with their stepfather. So we're going to be talking a lot about that with this wonderful guest who Kirsten is going to introduce right now.

Speaker 4: 2:31

That's great. Thank you so much, denise. Today we are happy to welcome Francine Russo. Francine is a widely recognized journalist. She covered the boomer beat for Time Magazine for over a decade. She has also written for the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic and other major publications. She wrote an article recently in the Wall Street Journal called how to Maximize Joy with your Grandchildren and Minimize Conflict with your Kids. Your child isn't parenting the way you would, so what do you do? I will put a link to it in our episode notes and maybe she will agree to come back and talk to us about that someday. Today we are talking about her book Love After 50. The book not only tells her love story after 50, but highlights the difficulties of melding the family and give some advice to parents who divorce and have adult children. Welcome, francine. Is there anything we missed in the intro that you would like to share before we get started?

Speaker 1: 3:20

Nothing you missed, but I would like to add that Love After 50 has a subtitle. How to Find it, enjoy it and Keep it? Because, believe it or not, love After 50 is so popular. There are other books with almost the same title oh my gosh.

Speaker 2: 3:37

Okay, Well, we were going to mention that because on your website, the second line under the title, a comprehensive and intimate guide to finding, keeping and enjoying love after 50, you say it's the best kind of love there is. Why do you think that's so and why is that so important to know?

Speaker 1: 3:55

I think that when we're young, we marry for many reasons. We marry to find someone to be a parent to our children, to make our fortune with, to have a certain kind of life with. We marry people usually that might be appropriate for our parents or for our social group, and all of these things come into play when we marry, which most people still do. But when you're over 50 and your children are grown up or mostly grown up, and you're looking for a partner, you don't have to think about any of those things. You don't have to think about whether your parents will like them. They may not be around anymore. You can consider whether your children like them and we will talk about that, but you don't have to give them a veto power.

Speaker 1: 4:55

You already have whatever financial resources you have. You don't need somebody to make your fortune with. In fact, you probably, if you have resources, may want to protect them and, in fact, not look to somebody else to blend your resources with. What you want is a partner, somebody who loves you, who gets you, who makes you laugh, who's just there to be with you and enjoy life with you. If they don't have the right degree or they're not the right religion, according to whoever your parents or your younger self, it doesn't matter. That so brings you opportunities to meet people you would never have considered before, but who may be exactly what you want for this time of life.

Speaker 2: 5:51

That's really interesting. I never really thought of it that way. Maybe we all should be getting divorced and finding that person that just appreciates us for us and doesn't know all our baggage. Why don't you tell us I hope I'm not prying, but you outline it all in the book, your journey. I'd love to know some of the mistakes you found. I think you lost one husband very young. Then you lost another husband. So tell us this journey, the mistakes you made, what you learned and what others might learn from. You might learn from you, I will.

Speaker 1: 6:23

However, I want to say that my story, while it frames the book, is one of about 50 stories of couples I interviewed who were in second or third relationships, who were in late life relationships, and told their stories of the mistakes they made and the journeys they went on in order to find a wonderful late life relationship. So my story is just one of many, and I also interviewed many therapists and experts in relationships in order to give advice on how to find somebody, how to have a relationship when you're older, etc. As for my own story, it is true that I picked, for all the reasons one picks a first husband for and I don't regret that. I'm not saying I loved my first husband. We were married for 22 years. He was a high-earning attorney. We had two wonderful daughters who were still children when he died unexpectedly of a heart attack when he was 49 and I was 46. This was pretty devastating and I was very immature for 46 and needy and terrified to be on my own. I started looking for a relationship way too soon and all the looking for love in all the wrong places, as the song goes, for 10 years until I married my second husband. I dated, I had relationships. I made many mistakes, my relationships. I had eventually got better and better as I matured, learned what I needed, learned, in fact, how to find the right person, usually for me online.

Speaker 1: 8:16

And when I married my second husband, who was also a widower, who was also a widower, we combined our families in a way that it's very hard to do when you're older. They were young adults. The youngest was 14 when we met. My youngest was just about to head off to college. When we got married, I became their stepmother and, because there were no other parents in the picture, we all lived together.

Speaker 1: 8:46

To the extent, college-age children are living at home, and that became a great blessing. Because he died horribly five years later of late-stage lung cancer before we realized, before we realized, and I was the person who was there for his children and have been there for them ever since. And that's when we became a true blended family, because I was the only living parent to both my children and his children. We now have a wonderful blended family. We have Thanksgiving together my three stepchildren, my two daughters. Every year we have Thanksgiving at my stepdaughter's house outside of Chicago because she is the biggest house. People have different relationships within the family, but at that point, if there were conflicts or feelings mixed feelings about being in a blended family or having a new parent, those disappeared with the death of my husband. So then we all had an interest in helping each other through.

Speaker 2: 9:57

And remind me how old his children were when he died.

Speaker 1: 10:01

They were all in their early 20s. They went from 20 to 24, 25. And so they were too young. To you know, only one was fully launched, and they were just too young to have no parent.

Speaker 2: 10:15

When you got married, and were only married for five years, did you merge your assets? Or, when he died, did his assets go to the children or was his will set up that they went to you and then the children? That seems like a very complicated thing these days, with adult kids and remarriages.

Speaker 1: 10:32

Yes, and in fact I was very aware of that. In fact, I told you I was married to a successful attorney. I in fact had more money than my husband, chris, did, my second husband Okay, yes, okay, okay. And so I wanted to think about all the possibilities so that I wanted to protect the assets I had. He sold his house and he invested some of it in my apartment.

Speaker 1: 11:00

We renovated the apartment to make room for all of our children. His daughter was in the dining room as a bedroom when she came home. We all ate Thanksgiving dinner in the foyer. Luckily, it was a giant apartment. But before we agreed to get married and I really researched this first, I said look, we need long-term care insurance because if you get sick and need care, my assets will be decimated. So we in fact bought long-term care insurance, we got attorneys and we created a nuptial agreement I don't know if it's pre or post or whatever it was that indicated, since he was putting a certain amount of money into the apartment and leaving me certain insurance if he died first, how much money his kids would get. So that was all written out.

Speaker 2: 11:54

And you would advise that to anyone, right? And if the person they're looking at, or possibly marrying, won't agree to that, move on, yeah, or don't marry them.

Speaker 1: 12:05

Don't marry them. Don't live together, because living together also can create legal problems. For example, if I had died first, would he still have the right to live in my apartment We'd have to have a document for that or would he have to move on? All of these things. You need to consider all the eventualities that can happen, because you each have a life. When you're older, you come with children, with money, with houses, with responsibilities, and so you need to consider what will happen if I die first, what will happen if he dies first? What will happen if one of us gets sick and needs long-term care?

Speaker 1: 12:48

There was one other thing that I was very aware of. His youngest child was in college or entering college when we were married. We researched whether our being married would affect the amount of financial aid he was getting, and the answer was yes, and we decided, we thought about, we talked about it and we decided that I would make certain financial accommodations to make up for the fact that he was going to have to pay more for college. I didn't have to decide that, but that was a choice I decided to make because I did want us to be married. But I have to think about everything If you have children that age, stepmothers, stepfathers are responsible for financial aid just as if they were parents when you apply. So there's so many contingencies you have to look at and prepare for physical shape that you can.

Speaker 4: 13:54

As I'm listening to you, you sound like you really had a lot of this together. How much of this did you learn through this experience and how much of it was just sort of intuitive to you, because I'm hearing a lot of a lot of intuitiveness?

Speaker 1: 14:04

Well, I have to say I'm a great believer in therapy and I did have therapy after my husband died. That helped me a great deal as I went from relationship to relationship. Like I, my marriage was very wonderful, but I wanted it was very loving. But I wanted passion and romance. And I did find that with the very first guy early on. He was such a no good Nick and I ended up feeling such pain.

Speaker 1: 14:35

When that broke up I thought, okay, I know, for me romance and passion is partly about somebody being unavailable in a deep, meaningful way, and so I became attuned to. Was somebody really emotionally available? And I'm not going to tell you, my choices improved. But sometimes the first choices were people who were, in fact, emotionally unavailable in a way that wasn't so easy to see. And then, after getting my heart broken once, that time I realized that this is something I had to look out for and I really needed to find somebody who was really all there and could handle intimacy, because I wanted intimacy. And bit by bit, as I got older, as I had therapy, as I tested out different relationships, I was ready. When I met Chris, we both wanted the same things. We had very similar experiences of having been widowed and raised children on our own, and we understood each other's experience and we were really ready to partner and to marry.

Speaker 2: 15:49

Let's now jump into the book and not just your personal experience, because some of these things you have not dealt with, but you've interviewed a lot of people. How do you prepare your adult children, whether you're widowed or divorced? First, how do you prepare your adult children for divorce, because we had a listener question just recently. I'm getting divorced. What do I say to my adult children? Number two how do you prepare them for your dating? Some say you're not respecting dad or you're not respecting mom. You know blah, blah, blah. What's your steps for that?

Speaker 1: 16:19

Right. Well, I can't really advise on preparing your children for divorce, because I was totally unprepared when my husband's died, so that's something you need to talk to a therapist or a divorce Divorce lawyers are very wise about this, some of them.

Speaker 2: 16:34

I just thought. Possibly one of the people you interviewed who had been divorced talked about how they prepared their children, or anything.

Speaker 1: 16:40

I think not so much. Most of the people I interviewed had grown children. I'm going to back up a minute. The reason so many people are finding love after 50 is that the baby boomer generation had incredibly high divorce rates, and that continues. And the reason that we did is that we suddenly realized that we probably when we were in our 50s there was a very good chance. We had another 30 years of healthy life ahead of us, and people who are in an unsatisfying relationship and had already raised their children, or mostly raised their children, thought you know what? I don't have to be in this unrewarding relationship anymore.

Speaker 1: 17:28

There are plenty of people out there, or I can be alone, but I don't want toing relationship anymore. There are plenty of people out there, or I can be alone, but I don't want to do this anymore. I've raised my kids, we've made our fortune, we can. You know, whatever it is, people are breaking up in their fifties. This is continued. And so there's the.

Speaker 1: 17:45

They call it the silver tsunami, grey divorce or grey divorce, yeah, but it's huge. It's a huge number of people. Don't quote me on statistics, but I think it may be as many as a third of all marriages after 50. It's a lot. So there are a lot of people out there who's many of whom have learned from their marriages and their divorces, and some who have not learned yet but hopefully will. So there are many potential partners out there. I have heard many stories about children and, depending on the situation whether they're divorced, whether they're feeling like some on their mother's side, or maybe on both their parents' side they see their parents' loneliness. I have had children introducing their parents to new partners. I have heard of children writing profiles and teaching their parents how to date online as many of those you hear.

Speaker 2: 19:22

Francine though you also hear stories of my kid really doesn't want me to date. The whole idea of seeing my mom as a sexual being I just can't handle.

Speaker 1: 19:31

I understand and it is true, and it really depends on the relationship between parent and child, but really, are they real children at this point?

Speaker 2: 19:42

No right, Exactly.

Speaker 1: 19:44

I would say you need to say to your son or your daughter I am feeling lonely, I really miss having a companion and I would like to start dating. If the child says oh no, mom you, what you say is, I understand your feelings. This may be difficult for you. You're having your life, You're in college, You're at a job, You're not living here anymore. I need this for me and I need you to try to accept it. I would say don't bring people home until you're fairly certain you don't want to bring a cavalcade of assorted characters to meet your children.

Speaker 2: 20:28

So that's what I wanted to ask you. Did you bring the crazy guy at the beginning that gave you love and pet? No, okay, okay. So those were all yours behind the scenes.

Speaker 1: 20:36

That's right. The boyfriend who was emotionally available was only after we'd been together we'd been seeing each other for over a year that I introduced him to my three daughters.

Speaker 1: 20:46

Okay, okay, other for over a year that I introduced him to my three daughters. So I didn't put them through that unless I had some certitude not absolute certainty that this was a serious relationship. Eventually, when you decide that you do want to partner, either move in with somebody or decide that you do want to partner either move in with somebody or marry them, or whatever point it is. First of all, be sensitive to your children's feelings. Do not say, as some people I interviewed did look, you're 50, you're an adult, get over it, because no matter how old your children are, you are their parent forever and they are your child forever. The chances are that you're getting married to someone or having a partner who becomes primary in your life will change your relationship with them. Maybe that son or daughter was the main person in your life and now they will no longer be and that is a loss for them.

Speaker 1: 21:53

It is a change, and change is hard. I would say sit down with your kids, listen to their feelings and say I do understand that change is hard. In some ways, our relationship will change. I want to assure you that I will spend this is very important I will spend some alone time with you so that we can still have our intimacy, and not every dinner or every lunch or every anything will be a threesome or a foursome or whatever you are. I need this for me. I am happy and I need you to understand. You don't have to like my partner, but I do need you to accept him and I need you to be respectful.

Speaker 2: 22:39

That's the most important part. Even the title of your chapter, I think, is one of your biggest challenges or dealing with kids, or working around them. And then you say one of your biggest challenges as a couple is relating to your kids your own and each other's. So I think, what do you do when the two stepkids don't like each other, your child doesn't like them, or their child doesn't like you? You say be respectful, but that makes it really hard, doesn't it? When your kid just says he's no good mom, I don't know what you're thinking.

Speaker 1: 23:08

Well, you just say, look, I'm who I am, I'm an adult, this is my choice. You don't have to like him, but I do need you to accept him and be respectful and over time and you don't have to do everything together you can craft your together time in ways that work for your particular family. So you don't have to have giant family events where all the stepkids are together if they don't like each other. You know, very often they have their own families. At this point they have their own lives. You don't have. Often they have their own families. At this point they have their own lives. You don't have to blend. I would say, keep your expectations of blending your family to a minimum, because it rarely happens. As it did with my family, it took a death, a horrific death, to bring us together. I don't know what would have happened. I mean we were getting along okay, but there were, you know, there were maybe some rivalries or conflicts or ambivalence, which is natural I want to get.

Speaker 2: 24:10

We'll get to the relationship part. But I want to ask one more question, and maybe I'm just too money oriented in all this, because I worry about this a lot. You said your first husband. He was a corporate attorney. You had more going into the relationship than your husband, who died after five years. So even though this family is melded in inheritance, your kids are going to get a lot more.

Speaker 1: 24:31

They are, but I talked to them after Chris died and I was obligated by my prenup to leave them 20% of my estate.

Speaker 2: 24:43

Leave his children.

Speaker 1: 24:45

Yes, because he had put into the house. But I asked my two daughters. I said I really want to leave their three of them. I'd like to leave them each 10%, which would mean you would each get 35%. Are you okay with that? And they both said yes, it's not an equal amount of money, but I think in terms of the other things that we give, it's quite equal.

Speaker 2: 25:10

Yeah, and I think, speaking to everyone about it, seems like the most important thing that you're saying. You are so candid with your children and it sounds like your stepchildren, that everyone knows what's to come. So there's no like, oh my gosh. And then all this fighting when somebody dies, they get it, they've agreed to it, and you're moving on and enjoying your life. That's correct.

Speaker 4: 25:33

Now, with all these kids, has anybody married?

Speaker 1: 25:36

Oh yes, at this point I have eight grandchildren and one on the way. My stepdaughter and my two daughters have had children. My two step sons have not, although one of them is married, and my older daughter has two kids. My younger daughter has two and her third on the way, and my stepdaughter had two and her third child turned out to be twins.

Speaker 2: 26:00

Surprise and are you considered the grandmother, are you their mother in these situations? There are situations like that. I don't want you here. You're really not my mother.

Speaker 1: 26:10

You can be their aunt, my 10-year-old grandson did say so what are you in relation to me? And I just said I'm your grandma. He said, oh, okay, but he knows that his mom relation to me. And I just said I'm your grandma. He said, oh, okay, but he knows that his mom refers to me very affectionately as her stepmom, and I was there for the big moments of their life. I walked my stepdaughter down the aisle, I gave the big rehearsal dinner for my stepson. I fulfilled that role. I went to my younger stepson's graduation for the award ceremonies. Basically, I'm it, I'm the parent. You stepped to the plate, yes, but it wasn't hard. I was grieving and my heart so went out to them and they sustained me. I consider it a great consolation for Chris's death that these children became my children.

Speaker 2: 27:01

I just want you to know and I'm sure you know this through all of your interviewing it's not always the case. You're showing to me an example of what should be done. Many situations I hear it's not done. I think you really stepped to the plate and I think if any message comes through here is step to the plate. I guess it depends if there are other people in their lives, like another mother. You have to figure out what your plate is and what your role is after that person dies.

Speaker 1: 27:30

Actually, I don't think there should. I think everybody has to figure it out. I was in a very particular situation. I loved these kids before their father died and my heart so went out to them. You know, there just wasn't a choice for me. But if I were to have married somebody who had grown children and a living mother, or, you know, other step-parents, it might have been completely different and my choices might have been different. I don't legislate this. I think each person has to make a decision for themselves.

Speaker 1: 28:05

One of the great things about this period of life is that you have many, many options, both in terms of how you are with your kids, for sure. But one of the things that affects this is do you marry, do you live together, or do you each stay in your own homes and see each other five times a week and talk 20 times a day? That affects how the relationships with the kids are, because one of the reasons people don't live together is they want to keep their social lives separate, and that includes their children. So they see their children, they see their friends and then, separately, they see their partner. The choices are many. You can craft it any way you want.

Speaker 2: 28:51

How long after Chris died did you get the current partner you have now, and why have you decided not to marry?

Speaker 1: 28:59

I waited several years. I was working on my first book, which is about how adult siblings deal with their parents aging. That was called they're your Parents Too. I didn't throw myself into dating, as I had done when I was young. I gave it several years and when I felt I was ready I went online and I maybe had five to 10 dates. I sold you know one guy for five dates and then I met Michael.

Speaker 1: 29:29

I had made all my mistakes. I knew the kind of person I was looking for. I also had no interest in marrying. I had sold the big family apartment because it was hard to manage as one payer living in a smaller place that I felt I was going to live in until I died and I would never wake up and have to worry about whether I could afford or had to move again. I didn't want the complication, the financial complication, and my children also had my powers of attorney for health and all of that, and I wanted them to remain that way. So I didn't want a legal relationship with anybody else. I have a wonderful relationship but we're not domestic partners and we're not married and I don't have to worry about his long-term care. He's financially separate and that's the way I want it.

Speaker 4: 30:23

We're getting kind of close to time and I want to make sure that there isn't anything relationship you've ever had when you're older.

Speaker 1: 30:42

And that having choices about what kind of relationship you have whether you marry or live together or don't live together just makes it so wonderful to have what you want. That also affects how easy or not easy things are with your children and with your friends and you can craft the kind of life you want and still have a partner.

Speaker 2: 31:06

Okay, and one more thing I have to ask before we close is about feeling lovable, because that hit me a lot, because I think as you grow older in any relationship, your body changes, your mind changes, your libido changes, all of these different things. I love the part where you talked about your sexuality and feeling lovable. What advice do you have I guess this is particular well, men and women to be able to expose themselves again at this later part of life in a loving, passionate way.

Speaker 1: 31:38

One of the other wonderful things about loving somebody when you're older is that your bodies are not the same and you're not driven as much by your sexual urges. You want companionship, you want somebody who gets you, somebody who makes you laugh, somebody you can count on and, of course, you want to feel attraction. But it's not like when you were in 20s or your 30s, because you each have physical vulnerabilities, whether it's a man not being able to get erections or whether it's a woman whose vaginal dryness prevents her from enjoying intercourse. You have to tell each other early on I can do this, I can't do that. This feels good and, because you have to be vulnerable, you're intimate and you share and you can tell each other what you want, what you need, what feels good in ways that you probably never did before. Believe me, there's a lot of pleasure in that.

Speaker 2: 32:42

I bet that's really interesting. All right, I think we've gotten most of this from Francine and, as I mentioned earlier, she's written about grandkids and your children, and I wonder if we can leave with two tips on how to handle it. When your child, your stepchild, you, have questions about the way they're raising your grandchildren, do you bite your tongue entirely? What are a couple tips you could offer in closing?

Speaker 1: 33:08

Well, I wrote about this for the Wall Street Journal and I interviewed a lot of people about this. The most important thing that a lot of grandparents have trouble with is to be aware and to remind yourself that you are not in charge. Your children are now the parents. They get to decide. You may not agree with them, you may disapprove of many things, but you don't get to decide, and you will get along much better with them if you acknowledge you can say what your feelings are and saying I don't really think this is a good idea, and your kids will say, well, that's the way we, we do it. And then you shut up as hard as it is You're. You made mistakes when you were a parent, a young parent. They will make their own mistakes and you have to let them do that.

Speaker 1: 33:59

The other thing is to be really helpful, not taking, but giving to the extent you can. So ask them what do they need? Be aware they have incredibly busy lives. Their kids are incredibly scheduled and you need to fit in with their lives. So ask them in what ways can you be helpful and you need to fit in with their lives. So ask them in what ways can you be helpful. When is it good for you to visit? What holidays can you spend with them? What holidays do you have to take a back seat for? What kinds of rules do they have about whether the kids get gifts or sweets or stay up until a certain time? Follow their rules. Follow their rules.

Speaker 2: 34:43

That's a big one. Bite your tongue and follow their rules and I think it saves the relationship. If you want to ruin the relationship, do everything oppositely.

Speaker 1: 34:55

Right.

Speaker 2: 34:56

Okay, francine, thank you so much for joining us. Good luck with your new grandbaby. Do you know whether it's a girl or a boy? They want to be surprised. They want to be surprised. Well, I might have to ask you to let us know when the time comes. So, thank you so much. I hope it's a healthy, fast, productive birth. How about that? Okay, thanks so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, thank you. So that's a wrap. I really enjoyed her. What a smart cookie, and I just want everyone to know although we talked to her about this finding love after 50, if you Google her, francine Russo and we'll put a link in our episode notes she's written about everything from taking care of your aging parents, how to deal with your grandchildren so many things in this genre. I hope that everyone will take some time to look her up. I appreciated her openness and her vulnerability, and so much that she had to say was so real.

Speaker 4: 35:50

I completely agree. Without that excessive emotion she was really able to get to the nuts and bolts of her experience, which is she lost two people. It wasn't necessarily.

Speaker 2: 36:01

Two people.

Speaker 4: 36:02

Yeah, it wasn't that she chose those things, that's just how her journey has played out. Obviously, she had all the skill sets to be able to navigate that very difficult situation.

Speaker 2: 36:13

But and the confidence and we didn't talk a lot about parts of the book that some people that are in a situation where they're looking for love would like. She really talks about how to find that love ability and how to have the confidence in yourself again to go out there and put yourself out there. So there's something real about that. There's a few friends I'm going to really make sure listen to this episode Even friends that don't have adult children that are looking for love in this part of their life.

Speaker 4: 36:38

Thank you today for listening and also thank you to Connie Gordon-Fisher, our audio engineer. I want to remind everybody once again to support our work by going to our website at BiteYourTonguePodcastcom and hit support us For as little as $5, you can help keep us going.

Speaker 2: 36:56

And also I want to tell you, remember on our website there's that little microphone Send us messages anytime you want. Send us messages, but remember sometimes you might have to bite your tongue.