We Integrate Our Strengths In Midlife

Males and females are very much alike for the first 10 years of life. We become radically differentiated at puberty and arrive at the farthest reaches of our oppositeness in our late 30s, the most distant poles of the Sexual Diamond.

But in our 50s, men and women begin moving closer together again, and by our 60s, each becomes something of what the other used to be. Rigid role divisions melt away. Women become more forward, managerial and political, and more interested in accomplishments than in nurturing others, while men age in the opposite direction, showing greater interest in nurturing and being nurtured, in expressing themselves artistically and appreciating their surroundings.

One very public couple that exhibits this switch in polarities in a middle-life marriage is the former treasurer of California and her husband. Kathleen Brown’s story traces the classical outlines of the Sexual Diamond.

Kathleen is the daughter of California’s first couple of politics, Bernice and former Gov. Edmund (“Pat”) Brown. She was a natural politician, charming and pragmatic, but her brother Jerry was the one charged with perpetuating a new California dynasty.

During her young adulthood, Kathleen Brown tried to fit the traditional female mold she had watched her mother carry off. She eloped at 20 and dropped out of Stanford University in 1966 to have her first child. Then, after 14 years of marriage and three children, her husband announced he was leaving her for another woman.

But Kathleen Brown was not on the remarriage market for long before Van Gordon Sauter, an older, bow-tied conservative who ran a local CBS-TV station, let it be known he’d like to meet her.

Sauter took her breath away by announcing on their first date, “Hey, I want to marry you.” She held him off, but not for long, and followed him to New York when he became president of CBS Sports.

Reaching the crossroads of her mid-30s, Kathleen hit upon the idea that she could become a late-blooming lawyer. By the age of 40, she managed to finish in the top 15 percent of her Fordham Law School class. Her decision to become a corporate bond lawyer was driven by the painful experiences of her young adulthood: She wasn’t taking any chances on drowning again in her dependency on a man. “I knew I had to have an oxygen tank to support me.”

An “oxygen tank” becomes vitally important to women as they begin traveling across the Sexual Diamond in their 40s toward greater autonomy. It became even more urgent in Brown’s case when her husband ran into a life accident. Sauter was suddenly and unceremoniously fired by CBS. The couple left New York to return home to Los Angeles. But not in defeat. Kathleen was exhilarated and ready. It was time for Gov. Brown’s daughter/Kathy Brown Rice/ Mrs. Van Gordon Sauter to reinvent herself.

When Kathleen decided to run for California state treasurer, she became, according to a family friend, “like a flower slowly opening. I watched her … get stronger, more confident, more her own person, more sure of her own ideas.”

What also emerged was the rippling Irish political charm of her father. Ethnic particularities aside, it is a classic switch in identifications as a woman begins moving in the opposite direction along the Sexual Diamond. Kathleen won the treasurer’s race handily.

Her second husband seems completely supportive of her political career. Once the fearsome president of CBS News, Sauter now works only three days a week. “I like the idea of being a semi-retired kept man,” he cracks.

This sort of integration and celebration of male-female strengths is probably not possible until we reach middle life. For couples who are conscious and confident enough to allow the Sexual Diamond to work for them, the reward is a richer, smarter, more attuned relationship in which each can come closer to being whole.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate