I've been writing a lot about my own girlfriends lately in connection with my new e-book You Gotta Have Girlfriends: A Post-fifty Posse is Good for Your Health, and each time I sit down to describe my "circle of trust" I wonder what to do with my lifelong...

I'm not crazy about the current Dove campaign in which a police artist draws a portrait of a forty-ish woman from her description (dour and harsh) and then draws another from the description by another woman who has spent a little time with her (warmer and more pleasant...

As any woman who has lost her mother does, I think of her especially on Mother's Day. In fact, I think I will always consider Mother's Day her day, not mine. And when I think of her life, I also remember the gift of her peaceful death.

The best thing a man can do for his health is to be married to a woman. One of the best things a woman can do for her health is to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends, especially as we get older. The longer we live,...

In her widely debated new book Lean In, Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg called it "the ultimate chicken and egg situation." She is talking about the endless back and forth about what is holding women back from Having It All, whether the system needs to change in order for women to...

Frequently after I have talked about the challenging changes and opportunities that are confronting women at a lecture, a man will come up to me and say, "Why don't you do your next book about men? We are going through a lot of the same transitions that women are." To...

I am making a new friend.... I think; you never know about such things until you are actually there, at intimacy. But this friendship is already taking a surprising turn.

I find myself going at it in a very different way from relationship-building in the past. I am still looking...

Like most women my age, as the years accumulate I get more and more selective about who I consider real friends, while at the same time, more and more committed to those who form my "circle of trust." The trouble is that paring down my inner circle can be hurtful,...

"You have just one more decision to make," the young hospice doctor was saying. He had already taken me through the requirements and responsibilities of the decision-maker in the program. My mother met the criteria for the patient: she didn't appear to have more than three months to live; and...

The fact that Meryl Streep's new movie "Hope Springs" opened and Helen Gurley Brown died in the same week seems to me a passing of a very important baton. The baton our Post50 generation needs to get us moving toward an honest and candid discussion about sex. Helen did it...

"Having it all" is probably the most misunderstood phrase since, as the late great Erma Bombeck once said about the ERA, "one size fits all." It has come up whenever there is a backlash -- and there have been many -- against the increasing empowerment of women. The implication that...

When my brother Charlie died of AIDS in February 1985, the epidemic had barely begun. The disease, first reported in 1981, had come out of nowhere, and no one had any idea what caused it or how to treat it. But there was plenty of uninformed panic and prejudice.

The surest route to decline as we age is isolation. Older people fade away psychologically, physically, and socially, if they don't have the emotional or intellectual stimulation we take for granted earlier in our lives. So the post 50 version of "an apple a day" is "nurture your...

Like many women in midlife, I find Mother's Day as much a reminder of a fraught relationship as a celebration of motherhood.

Even if we are not caring for our mothers, and even if we rarely spend time with them -- even, as in my case, they are no longer...

Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James is number one on the New York Times best-seller list -- an unusual slot for a pornographic novel. And it has gotten there by word of mouth. Have you heard about it? Have you read it? Are you thinking you might? In my...

A few weeks ago my 25-year-old daughter mentioned that the first of her friends was pregnant. "It's weird," she said. To which I replied, "I know. In my experience, having a friend get pregnant was much more disruptive to the friendship than having one get married."

I was reminded of...

Not long ago I wrote a blog called "Sex, Love, and Unicorns," describing the ambivalence I was encountering when I talked about sex among us older folk. Everyone seemed to be embarrassed by the topic. Those who were doing it were a little sheepish and didn't want to...

The actress Julianne Moore recently sounded off about celebrity magazines. "They encourage young women and some middle-aged women to be interested in somebody else's narrative rather than their own," she told Moremagazine. "I don't want my daughter or her friends to be interested in Jessica Simpson. I want them to...

Being in love knows no age limits, and our bodies can experience great sex throughout our lifetime. That is the message of my new book How We Love Now: Sex and the New Intimacy in Second Adulthood. But as I have been talking up that message, I have learned a...

When I went to work at Ms. in 1972, I wore a matching pink skirt and blouse -- and a girdle. I had just gotten married and was, therefore, not able to get a bank loan without my husband's approval. I had given up playing basketball (half-court for girls) in...