No Ring, No Apology

Divorce, loss, or just a decision made on our own terms — staying single at this age isn't a phase waiting to end. In this episode, we dig into the real data behind the rise in staying single after 50, unpack why other people get so uncomfortable when we're genuinely happy on our own, and spend real time on the relationship that doesn't get enough credit: our girlfriends. If you've ever felt like you owed someone an explanation for being single, this one's for you.

Thank you for listening to this episode of My Sexy Menopause Body! If today’s conversation inspired you, resonated with you, or made you think, I’d love to hear from you. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed what you heard, leave a review—it helps others find this community.

You can also find more resources, wellness tips, and tools to support you on your journey at KimNick.com. And hey, don’t forget to share this episode with a friend who needs to hear this—it’s how we grow this movement together.

Until next time, take care of yourself, honor your journey, and remember: you define how you age.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to my sexy menopause body, not just a podcast, but a movement. Menopause isn't something to dread. It's something to own with strength, confidence, and yes, sexiness. Because menopause doesn't mean fading into the background. It means stepping fully into who we are. And now here's your host, Kim Nicholson. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

I need you to sit with something for just a second. Somewhere today, a woman is going to tell someone else she's happy being single. And then she's going to watch their face do this little thing. I know you know what I'm talking about. It's like a flinch or a pause. Like she just said something suspicious or something. But that reaction isn't actually about her happiness, it's about what her happiness does to everyone else's story. And today, that's what we are calling out. Hey, it's Kim Nicholson, and welcome back to my sexy menopause body. And today I want to talk about something that nobody wants to say out loud in our dating over 50 series. But here it is. Guess what? Not every woman wants to get married again. Not after a divorce, not after losing a husband, not even if she never got married in the first place. Some women, believe it or not, get to this stage in life and they look at that question, do you want to find someone? And guess what? Their honest answer is no. Or maybe it's not right now. Or maybe it's never again. And I need you to hear me say this clearly that this is completely a legitimate answer. Full stop. Yep. And once we get through why that's true, I want to spend some real time on something that doesn't nearly get enough air time. And that's our girlfriends. Because if marriage isn't the thing filling your cup right now, I promise you, something is. And for most of it, most of us, I should say, is it's the woman standing right next to us. So here, let's talk about the honest moment. I want to start with a story I hear over and over again because I have several friends who um are in their 60s and 70s, and they are not married. So I want to tell you about a specific friend of mine. Um I'm gonna call her Denise. Let's say Denise got divorced at, I think she got divorced around 54, and she's now 64. So for 10 years, she's been single. And for the first year, everyone in her life always asked her the same question, and they would ask it on repeat. So are you dating? Are you on any of the dating apps? Don't worry, honey, you'll find someone. She said it felt like she had been handed a problem she was supposed to be solving. Like being single was, you know, a broken down old car in the driveway that needed fixing before anyone would stop asking her. Well, guess what? Three years later, four years, ten years later, Denise, my friend, is still single. And she is not waiting for anything. She travels with her sister and other girlfriends. She has a standing Tuesday night dinner with uh at least two of her girlfriends that I know of, and she says that, you know, she'd protect harder than than she ever has a protecting date night with her friends. I mean, she holds that, you know, as so important. Nothing will get in her way with her Tuesday night girlfriends. And she told me, you know what? I didn't come out of my marriage lonely and looking for the next one. I came out of it whole. And I like who I get to be now on my old terms. And that's really, to me, was such a profound statement. You know, she's not broken, she's not, doesn't need to be fixed. She came out on the better side. So that's my friend, Denise, is not a woman who gave up. That's a woman who chose something. And guess what? Society still doesn't have a great category for that, especially when you're over 50. So it does, it's it's it's an unusual spot to be in for her. So here's where I want to get real with you, because I don't say things on the show without research behind it. So let's talk about gray divorce. Gray divorce, if you've never heard about it, that's divorce after 50. It has roughly tripled since the 1990s. It now makes up over a third of all divorces in this country. And that's not a fluke. That's a whole generation of women rewriting the rules. And here's the part that surprises people most. Researchers followed women for 10 years after a gray divorce, and about three out, three or four, three out of every four of them never remarried and never moved in with someone new. So let's compare that to men in the same boat. About six out of ten stayed single within this time period. So women are simply less likely to go looking for round two. You know, I if you ask women directly, and you get an even more telling number, more than half of the divorced or widowed women say that they're just not interested in a new partner. For men in the same situation, it flips. Most of them are still open to it. What does that say about our sexes? This isn't a tiny group of outliers either. This is documented, a growing pattern among women, exactly like you and me. So let's get back to that original question. Why does this situation make people so uncomfortable? So, why does saying I'm happy single make someone so twitchy? There's actually, believe it or not, a name for this. A hold on, let me make my notes here. A social psychologist named Bella DePaulo spent her career studying what she calls singles, the stereotyping of single people, as somehow as being immature, lonely, or incomplete. And here's the line from her research that actually stopped me in my tracks. She found out that when a single person simply says the word, I am happy, believe it or not, it can trigger hostility or disbelief in the people around them. I found that absolutely shocking. But yet, during the times that I was single, I found the exact same look on other people. Think about that. So not anger at something you did, but anger at your contentment. That's just so bizarre to me. Why? You know why? Because our culture has spent decades telling us one story about what a good life looks like. And it has a wedding in it. So when you're happy without that piece, it doesn't describe your life. It quietly questions a story other people have built or built theirs around. And that makes people uncomfortable in ways that have nothing to do with you. Even the science on this is more honest than the headlines. Long-term studies have shown that follow that follow the same people for years found something humbling. People get a little happiness bump right around their wedding, and then they go right back to wherever their happiness level already was. If they divorce later, they don't even get that temporary bump. Marriage isn't a happiness upgrade. Sit on that for a while. It's just a different life with its own version of hard and its own version of good. Same as staying single. Alright, so now let's talk talk about something that actually does fill the space. Because staying single doesn't actually mean staying alone. It means your, you know, your love and support you that you get comes from more than just one address. There's a woman named Susan Braun Levine, and she spent decades writing about women's lives after 50. And she wrote an entire book about this called You Gotta Have Girlfriends, right? And her whole argument is that a circle of trusted women isn't a nice to have in this stage of life. It's an emotional and even physical infrastructure. It's not the consolation prize after love. For a lot of us, it is the love story. And it's not just the author saying this. You see it played around in real time. You know, I have a Peloton bike, and I know, you know, I follow this one specific instructor. And so her name is Jen Sherman. And she's been best friends with her friend friend, I think her name is Pam. Um, and she said she'd been they've been friends for about 40 years. They started posting together, just being themselves, talking about life, comparing notes, laughing at each other. And it resonated with so many women that they built an audience of well over a hundred thousand people practically overnight. I just think that's incredible. And nobody was watching them for tips. They were watching, you know why? Because it looked exactly what they wanted more of in their own life. And easy, decades deep, no performance necessary friendship. So here's a way to think about your own circle of friends. From a piece I read on friendship after 50. Picture this. Picture four rings, okay? One inside another. And the center ring is intimacy, okay? The handful of people you trust completely and can't imagine your life without. So who would that be for you? Then the next ring is friendship because you're close to and love spending time with them. Just maybe not at the deepest level. Okay, so that's your second ring of friendship. Then your third ring is participation. It's a participation ring, okay? So people you interact with regularly, but wouldn't necessarily call them close. And then, of course, you've got the outer ring exchange. You know, like your doctor, the cashier, people you deal with, but you don't really know. So I want you to actually picture your four rings right now. Who is in the center? I'll tell you about my center. It's very limited. Um, obviously, my husband's there. I even consider my kids' friends as well. But for my girlfriends, I'm very, I guess, private. I've got a handful of friends that I've had for 40 some plush years, and then some that I've met over the last 25 years. And it's a small circle, but they are the type of friends that even if I don't speak to them for, you know, three, four, five months, we pick up the phone and we jump right back in where we left off. That's that inner circle or that intimate circle that I have. So who is in your center? If that circle feels thin like mine, that's not personal failing. A lot of us let those friendships go quiet during a marriage or when we raise kids or if we, you know, just the busy busyness of life, you know. And the good news is that ring is rebuildable at any age. And this next stat is exactly why it's worth the effort to make sure you maintain that inner circle of friends. There is a science based upon your girlfriend because this isn't just warm and fuzzy stuff. There is hard data behind it. There is a major, let me wait, hold on, let me get this paper straight. So there's a major long-term study out there of the health and retirement study. Okay. So almost 13,000 adults over 50, and it found that the stronger friendships were linked to better physical health, more movement in your daily life, and a real drop in depression risk. So, I mean, there's three incredible reasons why it's important to keep that inner circle. It's not soft, it's not feel-good stuff, it's measurable health outcomes. The same category of research that tracks things like exercise and smoking, right? And then women particularly tend to build deeper and more intimate friendships as they age than men do. We place, uh I guess, more value on that closeness and we lean in on it harder for many, many, many reasons. So remember what I was telling you about my friend Denise, that standing Tuesday dinner that Denise has with her girlfriend, that's not a stand-in for relationship. Research says that kind of connection is doing real protective work for her, not only her, for her mind and her body, her health, right alongside anything a partner might have done. Okay, so here's what I want you to leave with today. If you have a loss, a divorce, or you just decided intentionally on your own terms that a partnership isn't just what this chapter in your life needs. You don't owe anyone an explanation. Not to your mother, not your coupled up friends, not the well-meaning coworker who keeps trying to set you up. You get to define what a full life looks like at this age. For some of you, that includes a partner, and I celebrate that because I'm deeply in love with my husband and I can't imagine my life without him. But for a lot of you, it doesn't. And that deserves just as much celebration, and not as a consolation prize. See, there is no stigma here, not in this show, not for me. So, Denise, guess what? She didn't need any fixing, and neither do you. So, what she needed was a lot of us need, and that's a circle of women who show up again and again and again without an agenda and without judgment, without opinions. So here's your challenge this week, and it's a two-part. Okay, so first, the next time someone asks you, so are you seeing anyone? Try answering without the apology in your voice. Just answer the truth. You can say, uh, nope, and I'm genuinely happy. Watch what that does to the conversation. And then also watch what it does for you. Okay, the second part of your call to action this week is to reach out to one of those women in your center ring today. Not a text that says we should, you know, you know, meet up sometime. I'm talking about an actual invitation. Let's meet for a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. How about a walk? How about dinner this week? Put a real date on the calendar. You know, that relationship deserves the same effort that we use to put into date night. And before I let you go, if any part of this episode gave you permission you didn't need to know that you were waiting for, guess what? Send it to a woman right now. So if you know somebody who is in this situation, tell her about this podcast. Not because I need the download number, of course that's nice, but because you know what's more important than that? She needs to hear it today, and she needs to hear it from you. So come back next week because we're going to be keep pulling ahead, keep pulling on the same thread what this next chapter looks like when nobody's writing the rules for us anymore. So thank you for listening to my sexy menopause body. There's always hope, and you are not done yet.

SPEAKER_00 17:04

This is your time to own your power. Rewrite the rules and show up unapologetically because sexy doesn't expire. You define it.