Author, Lisa Guest

Lisa is a reluctant writer from Long Beach, California, and a dear friend from back in our D.C. Days.  Her book, COURTING ME(N) is in its final stages of being edited and about to be sent to one agent, praying transition will be just as easy as when she only applied to UC Berkeley and got accepted there.  This is a labor of love after living a life of devotion, not religious but in alignment with regaining women’s mastery over themselves and their bodies.  Her writing can be found at Huffington Post, Caring Bridge, Authentic Antenna and her own website.

Here’s a little something from the end of her new book.  It’s a little longer than most of our posts, but well worth the read, especially if you’ve ever thought  about settling.

Courting Me(n)

The Case for Not Settling

Last year a BFF (mother of three, PhD in Psychology) loaned me her cherished copy of Lori Gottlieb’s book, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. This dear friend desperately wants to be married again. I took the book and resolved to read it, which was a complete struggle. Many times I wanted to throw it across the room.

Ms. Gottlieb said that a woman’s value goes down annually once she hits the age of thirty-five. Ms. Gottlieb, who wrote the book when she was forty-one, said dating life at forty-one is a horrendous, unfair, uphill battle and a woman should lower her standards and desires in order to marry because ten years later at fifty-one, her options would be even more minuscule. Marriage has never been my goal in this life so I don’t know why I let this author get under my skin. I was fifty-one when I read it.

The day I finally finished the last chapter and could close this book forever, five separate men were rotating around me, all wanting to meet me. Maybe none of these guys wanted to marry me, but that’s not the point and I didn’t care. Since I was in my teens, I’ve been of the belief that women as they age are ostracized and ignored, while in fact, they have wisdom and humor in spades that younger women do not have. I wrote a poem about my eighty-plus-year-old great grandmother when I was seventeen. I saw clearly how wise she was and how most everyone ignored her after she’d devoted decades of her life raising the next generations.

I am an old woman.

I have years that have

accumulated and made

me what I am today.

I am lonely.

I have a family deeply involved

in living their lives,

accumulating their years.

Where is the answer?

What I have

they are looking for.

And what I need,

they are throwing away

While searching for what I could

already tell them.

If only they gave me the chance

7/2/77

I know parts of me are drooping and sagging. Occasionally, wrinkles, lumps, and spots discourage me but usually my mind and heart are so deeply engaged in my life, that the physical is a side slice of comic relief.  Yeah, this is what aging is, this is what worry does. Such is nature. At a certain time the flower begins to wilt, the paint begins to chip, and the food begins to decay. Certainly there are life-enhancing potential practices to at least look immortal, if one wishes. It is a human right to spend one’s time trying to stop or slow down the aging process. Individuals decide for themselves what their priorities are on the subject.

For this woman to write a book and tell all women that they will all experience this lack as they age is criminal in my mind. And yet, so many supported her book, saying that young women must be accurately warned. Not until recently were women accurately warned about the difficulties of giving birth and raising children! I agree honesty is important and I’m glad the truth about sex and reproduction is more available for the youth so they can make wise decisions that will affect the rest of their lives. If she can broadcast her personal discovery about aging and get a movie deal portraying this ancient point of view about the institution of marriage, I stand up and say, relish the wisdom of experience over spending one’s time criticizing the nature of the beast. (more…)