A new year has never felt so welcomed! Below are a couple of things that caught my eye last month.
Dear Therapist: I was the Other Woman. Oh my goodness, Lori Gottlieb’s response to the “other woman” was so good. Her reflection on affairs and divorce sums up the complicated nature of marriage in general. Anyone who has been married for some time should read it. I bet you’ll find some of your own feelings in her descriptions (even if you’ve never dealt with an affair). I’m typically not one for excerpts, but so many of her statements were home runs.
“After all, he had you for sex and connection, and his wife for stability, security, the comfort of a shared history, and a mutual commitment to their children. When the affair came to light and he could no longer have both, what he faced wasn’t a choice between two people, but between two lives.”
“To put it plainly, he would be giving up his entire life as he knows it, all for a younger, single woman he’s known only in the context of an exciting affair, one in which he had no real commitment or responsibility.”
“I mention that nature of affairs because, having been married, he’s likely considered that if you two married, you’d become less shiny versions of yourselves. ….Nor could he really know unless the two of you get deep in the trenches of children and bad moods and health issues and dirty dishes and shared money and annoying habits and existential loneliness and fear of aging and utter exhaustion and years of the same fundamental disagreements and recycled jokes—all of which are revealed only in the experience of a long-term relationship.”
The Atlantic : https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/12/dear-therapist-i-had-affair-married-man/617361/
Saving at Work for Retirement: A Perk Coming To More States in 2021. I have mixed feelings about this. This program can make saving for retirement a little easier (and in my opinion only by a very small fraction). Anyone can set up and establish an IRA account (and set up the automatic deposits) right now. This, in my opinion, is not an employer-retirement benefit. The employer contributes nothing. In addition there are very different limits on how much you can contribute to an IRA versus a 401K per year (the IRA is capped at $6K but the 401K is $19.5K). I could see the appeal for part time employees or employees of small businesses, but I worry that companies that can afford to contribute to a 401K will opt for this free “alternative” instead. Ultimately, this will hurt the workers and benefit the companies.
Bridgerton. I was completely sucked into this new Netflix series. I binged watched the season over two days. Juicy and sexy. It’s like Gossip Girl meets Downton Abbey.
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