Four Ways LBBs are Different From Young Marrieds. Truly.

I have recently encountered a spate of people who have been arguing with me. But, only about one topic. They don’t believe getting married for the first time over age 40 is any different than getting married young. So, I must defend the LBB territory.

Ways in which LBBs are different from Younger Married Women (YMW):

1. To have (our own) children or not to have (our own) children. Unless we are able to pull off a medical miracle, this one has pretty much been decided for us. I know someone will comment that they were over 40 and gave birth to a beautiful baby, effortlessly. But, my lovely, you are the extreme exception. Ask any medical professional and they will tell you the same thing. If you are over 40, you’re done. So, we either already have them or aren’t going to have them (or will adopt). You youngins’, for the most part, still have options before you (and internal debating to do).
2. The merging of stuff. I don’t care if you were born rich and have an entirely furnished apartment by the time you are 23. You still will never have as much stuff as we do. We have simply been on the planet longer. This means we have more personal momentos, more experiences, more people, and just plain more things than anyone under 30. And, merging all this with another is why HGTV has entire shows dedicated to cleaning out the clutter, merging spaces, and his and her design interventions. Someone’s got to keep that channel in business.
3. Sense of Self. Everyone continues to evolve as they grow older, But, well, some things have been established by the time you are 40. We know who we are. And, quite frankly, if we change it’s because we want to. When you are 28, you are going to change even when you don’t want to. You have experiences ahead of you that you won’t quite know what to do with. They will impact you in a way that would not impact someone who has lived for two decades as an adult. We LBBs think we know ourselves to the level that we don’t believe we’ll change much. (Note to me: You’ve still got some evolving to do, so don’t get too comfy. You just don’t realize it.) This difference lies in our opinions about ourselves. 
4. Our sense of compromise may be skewed. We can’t tell (well) when compromising is, well, compromising over betraying ourselves. LBBs have been so used to doing it our way for so long, that when asked to do something differently, well, sometimes we don’t know what to do with it. Younger people seem to be more malleable. They appear more amenable to compromise. Or, in other words, they don’t feel betrayed when asked to give up their Saturdays for soccer games over shopping just because their guy just wants them there. Sitting on the couch. Doing nothing. With them cheering on Germany over Argentina. LBBs? Well, let’s just say we can’t quite figure out why it is such a big deal for us to go shopping over viewing Husband yelling at the referee for the “incredibly bad call.”

There’s more. But, that should stop the debate over whether there differences at all. There are.