Latest / Libido Lounge / Hot Love at 50! With Erin Keating

Transcript

Hot Love at 50! With Erin Keating · Libido Lounge

0:00
I wanted to tell the truth Mhmm.
0:03
About what my life felt like.
0:05
Couple months before my fiftieth birthday and it was the second wave of Omicron, but I still
0:10
came down with COVID.
0:12
And I got it really hard.
0:14
It got really quiet there for a couple of days.
0:17
I had this feeling of, like, how did I get here?
0:21
How did this how is this my life?
0:24
I'm Erin Keating, and I am the founder of Hatter Than Ever.
0:29
We are a company that makes hot stuff for women 40.
0:33
There is no map for us as women in our forties, fifties, and sixties.
0:39
There has never been a generation of women as successful as we are.
0:44
But no one was talking about pleasure.
0:48
No one was talking about laughter.
0:51
No one was talking about joy.
0:54
No one was talking about self expression, saying the truth.
0:59
All of that became possible because I had this open space in my life to reinvent.
1:07
And pleasure isn't just sex.
1:09
Yeah.
1:09
No.
1:10
Pleasure is about letting yourself experience the world through your senses.
1:15
The first thing I always encourage people to do is
1:20
Hey, everybody.
1:21
Quick break at our episode to talk to you about our sponsor, My Libido Doc.
1:26
One of the things that we truly believe is that great sex is available to everyone, but we just
1:33
have to learn how.
1:35
So head over to our site to get your free copy of our ebook, Five Steps to Mind Blowing
1:43
Orgasms and Romance.
1:45
Get the quick and easy tips to turn your sex life around, rev up your engines, and fall in
1:52
deeper love and passion with yourself and your partner.
1:56
So if you just go to mysexdoc.com, you will find that ebook there for download.
2:03
Now back to our show.
2:05
Hi, lovers.
2:06
Hi, lovebirds.
2:07
Welcome back to another episode on the lounge.
2:10
I'm your host, doctor Diane.
2:12
And as you just heard, I have an amazing guest, a new friend of mine, Aaron Keating, and we are
2:18
talking about what happens at midlife.
2:21
Like, what happens where so many people so many people talk about midlife crises, right, but it
2:27
doesn't have to be a crisis.
2:28
I think midlife is a point in time where people start asking questions and, you know, kind of
2:34
go into the unknown around what is this part of our life supposed to look look like?
2:38
What is our purpose?
2:39
What is even supposed to feel like?
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Right?
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Our needs, our wants, our preferences, our desires, so many things change at this point.
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So I have an expert for you guys today to chat about that, and we're gonna start by welcoming
2:52
her and hearing.
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She's a really, really beautiful and also intense story of how she got into her work.
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So welcome, Erin.
3:01
Thank you so much for being here, and let's start by just telling us a little bit about the
3:07
process that you went through with getting sick, with everything, you know, you've told me
3:11
offline where you really decided to, you know, reinvent yourself and say, what does this next
3:17
part of your life, you know, look like?
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Will you tell us about that?
3:20
Absolutely.
3:20
Well, thank you, doctor Diane.
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I'm so happy to be here, and anything with the word libido in the title is for me.
3:27
You know?
3:28
That's part of my midlife reawakening.
3:30
You know, I, I was a bit of a, like, prep school rebel in my twenties.
3:38
You know, I had I had sort of been a good girl and done all the things right that you're
3:45
supposed to do.
3:45
I got good grades.
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I went to the right college.
3:49
I, I launched a career in my twenties, but I was also sort of artistic and creative.
3:59
And, I was so excited to be an adult.
4:02
Right?
4:03
I was so excited in my twenties to be an adult, and I really gave myself time to sort of
4:08
explore what what excited me and what moved me.
4:12
And I was a writer performer.
4:13
I thought I was gonna be on Saturday Night Live.
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Like, that was my big dream.
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And, you know, as my twenties went by, I found that it was challenging to reconcile my
4:27
artistic and kind of countercultural aspirations with, the idea of being a grown up.
4:35
And like a lot of people, and especially women, I started to make decisions that would lead me
4:44
toward a capital a adult life.
4:47
Yeah.
4:47
Right?
4:48
So, I sort of pivoted from being a writer performer and, producing shows in Downtown New
4:55
York.
4:56
I'd like to say I spent fifteen years in a basement theater.
5:00
You know, I really earned my chops that would lend themselves to a career in television, and
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that is what I ended up doing as I sort of headed into looking for a career with a capital
5:12
c.
5:14
And so in my late twenties, early thirties, I started my career.
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And then in my mid thirties, I started looking for a spouse because I knew I wanted to have
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kids.
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So then I had the career, and I had the husband, and then I did fertility treatments,
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and then I got a pair of twins, fourteen years ago.
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And, I started to build this life that looked like the kind of life that I was raised to
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want.
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Was it the life that I really truly wanted?
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No.
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I wanted a more bohemian existence.
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I wanted, not to actually ever have to get married, but to love someone so much that we
5:55
were just renewing our commitment to each other every day in in deed and in action.
6:02
But I married someone who wanted to get married.
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So I was like, okay.
6:06
And I, instead of sticking down the artist path, became a producer and an executive
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because I wanted to make a living.
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And sort of by a thousand cuts, I think a lot of us sort of go from our youthful ideals, our
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our, artistic inclinations, our more freewheeling, expressive selves, because we're
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trying to figure out how to get all the things that, you know, our mothers promised us that we
6:37
could have everything, that we could have it all.
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And so I started to build that life.
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And then in my forties, I was like, wow.
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I've been striving for so long.
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Now I actually started to have the career, and I had the kids, and I wanted to live into the
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promise of my own success.
6:59
But as time went on, I realized that the marriage that I was in was not the marriage I
7:04
wanted to be in, and that the career had a very, very high cost.
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But I had bought a house, and, you know, I had, I had a nanny to pay, and I had a title to
7:18
fulfill, and I had a role to play in my in my domestic life.
7:23
And I was really, like I I picture it as, like, just you know, it's like a plate of pancakes
7:29
just, like, stacking up, stack up.
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And then I'm the waitress who's, like, walking around going, I hope this doesn't all fall
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over.
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You know?
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And I say waitress because I'm in service of everyone else.
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Right?
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And those pancakes are not really for me.
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They're for the people in my life or for the structures that I'm serving.
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And about, six months before, maybe a couple months before my fiftieth birthday, I was
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working from home.
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We were, just getting through COVID, through the pandemic, and it was the second wave of
8:07
Omicron.
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I was vaccinated, and, but I still came down with COVID.
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And I got it really hard.
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And I thought, well, this is just like a bad flu.
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I'm just gonna work through it.
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So I was still on conference calls, and I was still on Zooms, and I was still doing all the
8:24
things that I was supposed to do, hacking up a lung, going on mute.
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And eventually, it got so bad that I, needed to check myself into the hospital.
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And I got to the hospital, and they were like, right this way.
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We don't understand why you have this so bad, but, you need to come here, and you need to
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stay here.
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And so I spent a long weekend at UCLA Hospital.
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And, you know, they they they wheeled me in a wheelchair down to the end of a long haul into
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a private room.
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And I thought to myself, oh my god.
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This is like a hotel.
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Like, here I am.
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It's quiet.
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I had an excuse finally not to be responsive to work.
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No one could ask me for anything.
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All the demands that had been pushing me to work while I was sick, to run my household
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while I was sick, to you know, you have little kids, like, they're the demands are intense,
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You know?
9:30
And it got really quiet there for a couple of days.
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And my room started to fill up with flowers and and well wishes from people, and the biggest
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bouquet was for my work.
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And that is a metaphor that will stick with me for the rest of my life.
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Like, those were the people who cared the most about whether or not I got well.
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And, they hooked me up to all the IVs.
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They gave me all the drugs.
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I started to get better.
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I started to just think my own thoughts in the quiet of that room.
10:09
And when I came time to leave the hospital, my now ex husband, he had had a really hard time
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managing the kids for two or three days without me.
10:22
Yeah.
10:22
And I think he had gone into a bit of a spin, thinking about what his life would be like if I
10:28
was no longer there, and he was pissed.
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He was pissed.
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You know, sometimes men have, like, two gears, angry and horny.
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Not a lie.
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We had gotten to the place where we had one gear, and that was not horny.
10:44
Yeah.
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And so I left the hospital to so much anger from my ex about me suddenly being unavailable
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for the tasks that I had signed on onto, you know, the the the plate of pancakes that he
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expected to be served in his life.
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And I had this feeling of, like, how did I get here?
11:15
Yeah.
11:16
How did this how is this my life?
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I had never had a brush with mortality.
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I had never been sick.
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I am not a morbid person.
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I don't think about death.
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I don't think about illness.
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I think about, like, what can I get done, and how can I accomplish my goals, and how can I
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make sure that people in my life are taken care of, and that everybody likes me?
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Like, you know, those were the things that were my concerns.
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And I started to really feel the feelings that I had been pushing down.
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And I started to acknowledge some truths that I had not been willing to acknowledge.
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The first being the marriage was no longer working, and that we had taken vows that he had
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wanted us to take, that in sickness and in health, and this was the in sickness part, and
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he wasn't able to show up for me in the way that I needed to be shown up for.
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I needed to be cared for
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Yeah.
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Instead of being the one doing all the caring.
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And when those tables were turned and things were inverted, it didn't work.
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And so we decided to go to couples therapy.
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I turned 50 within that period.
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Yeah.
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And six months later, he moved out.
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And six months after that, I got laid off for my big fancy corporate job.
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Wow.
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A lot of messages coming in so many ways.
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Everything happened in sequence so fast.
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Yeah.
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And I was left with a blank slate for my life.
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And I had a little bit of money in the bank, and I thought to myself, what do I wanna do?
13:15
Who do I wanna be?
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And the first thing that occurred for me is that I was obsessed with podcasts, and I wanted
13:23
to reclaim my own voice.
13:25
And I had been licensing my voices to corporations for twenty years.
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I had been making them tons of money.
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I had been really been evangelizing in service of these corporate missions that I believed in,
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that I was on board with, that I was being paid for.
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But given my own choice, I wanted to tell the truth Mhmm.
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About what my life felt like.
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Because I suspected that I was not alone in this generation of women who did everything
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right, who climbed the escalator.
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And then I got to the top of the escalator, and I looked around, and there was nothing.
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There is no map for us as women in our forties, fifties, and sixties.
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There has never been a generation of women as successful as we are.
14:20
There literally in the history of planet Earth, there has not been a more capable, educated,
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professionally accomplished, doing the work on ourselves, evolving, you know, generation of
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women.
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And I was, like, looking around and seeing lots of stuff about menopause, lots of stuff about
14:41
elder care, lots of stuff about how you can fix your body and fix this and fix that, but no one
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was talking about pleasure.
14:50
No one was talking about laughter.
14:53
No one was talking about joy.
14:56
No one was talking about self expression, saying the truth.
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Like, we've been shouldering these burdens for so long.
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We have been carrying our companies, our families, our marriages.
15:12
And I think a lot of us are in a similar boat as I am, which is as the estrogen started to
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drop, which happens to all of us in our forties, and my kids stopped needing me every
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second of every day.
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Now they're 14.
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You know?
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They're not they don't have the needs they had.
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Yeah.
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When I first started thinking, could probably get out of this marriage.
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That would probably be good for me.
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When they were five, that was when I started having those thoughts.
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But there was no way.
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They were too little, and I didn't wanna be a single mom.
15:48
And then suddenly, like, all of that became possible because I had this open space in my
15:55
life to reinvent.
15:58
And I am in it.
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I am not on the other side of reinvention.
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And I'm not sure I ever will be, and I'm not sure any of us ever will be.
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But, you know, one of the first things I wanted to do was reclaim my voice, so I started
16:13
interviewing incredible women who had experienced similar pivots in their lives or
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who had expertise about things that I was curious about.
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I started, talking about relationships and love and dating and sex, and I started talking about
16:31
career reinvention and, identity and how from, you know, overloving and overextending yourself
16:41
and how to create boundaries and all the things that I need, those were the conversations I
16:46
wanted to have.
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And women started to respond and say thank you for being honest, for being straightforward,
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for being vulnerable.
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I am not an expert.
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I am on the journey.
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I'm just more deeply invested in these conversations and bringing them to other people
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as they're happening.
17:06
And I'm sharing honest too.
17:08
And and being honest.
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And being honest, which I think is really hard.
17:14
Yeah.
17:15
Well, even I mean, it's such a great story.
17:18
Right?
17:18
I feel like it's so relatable for so many women.
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And, you know, when we're talking about this this thing around, like, okay, being really
17:26
honest, like, that point when you're in the hospital and you're actually saying, like, what
17:30
do I wanna do?
17:32
Like, how have you found in conversations with other people?
17:36
Like, have you found any ways that or any, like, similar patterns of helping women
17:42
actually get really honest with themselves with that question?
17:46
Because I I feel like we're not oftentimes led or even told it's okay as women to really get
17:53
honest with ourselves around what do we want, and everything has this attachment around,
17:59
like, but I should be this, and I should be this, and and it's the list of shoulds.
18:02
Right?
18:03
Yep.
18:03
So do you have anything that you've seen come up with, you know, people you've interviewed
18:08
with your own experience to, like, help women actually start with that place of getting
18:13
deeply honest with themselves of what do I actually want my life to look like?
18:20
I think, you know, there's a 12 step saying, we grow at the speed of pain.
18:26
And I really believe that it's hard to make massive personal change if you are not
18:34
suffering enough.
18:35
But
18:36
how much is enough?
18:38
Right?
18:39
So
18:41
Hey, everybody.
18:42
Quick break out our episode to talk to you about our sponsor, My Libido Doc.
18:47
One of the things that we truly believe is that great sex is available to everyone, but we just
18:54
have to learn how.
18:55
So head over to our site to get your free copy of our ebook, Five Steps to Mind Blowing
19:04
Orgasms and Romance.
19:06
Get the quick and easy tips to turn your sex life around, rev up your engines, and fall in
19:13
deeper love and passion with yourself and your partner.
19:16
So if you just go to mysexdoc.com, you will find that ebook there for download.
19:23
Now back to our show.
19:25
The first thing I always encourage people to do is write.
19:30
You know, just get a pen and a piece of paper and check-in with yourself and write, if I'm
19:40
being honest, and then take it from there.
19:45
Yeah.
19:45
We all have things that we feel like if we admit them to ourselves, we either have to live
19:54
with that truth and not change, or we have to change.
19:59
Yeah.
19:59
Change is uncomfortable, And we are taught not to be uncomfortable, to to avoid uncomfortable
20:10
feelings, to avoid awkward conversations.
20:14
We are also taught to throw ourselves under the bus and sacrifice ourselves for the status quo
20:21
and for, you know, keeping the plates spinning.
20:26
And if you are suffering enough in one area of your life or another, like, for me, the
20:35
starting place was sex.
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I had not had sex for ten years, and I was headed into menopause.
20:42
I was getting, night sweats.
20:45
I would wake up with, like, wet thighs.
20:48
How disgusting.
20:49
I mean, really?
20:50
It has to be wet thighs?
20:51
Thanks.
20:52
Why?
20:54
Well, why there?
20:55
Yeah.
20:55
I was not able to even bring myself to an orgasm, like and I had been very orgasmic and
21:00
very sexual when I entered my marriage, you know, but through attrition and through, things
21:08
that eroded the trust in the relationship and through oversensitivity, and and everybody
21:14
being so touchy about everything, me included, you know, this the intimacy part of our lives,
21:21
like the physical intimacy part dwindled to nothing.
21:25
And for me, that had been such an incredibly important way of being in my body and being
21:33
connected to myself, that that was the first thing I wanted to get back.
21:38
And so really, like, getting honest with, like, actually, this is super important to me, was
21:45
the first step on my journey of, you know, reinventing for right now how I do
21:51
relationships, how I do sex, how I how I engage with my body, how I live in my own skin.
22:00
And I, I have a friend I made through the podcast named doctor Juliana Hauser, who said
22:07
to me in one of my interviews, if you can find your agency in the bedroom, you can find your
22:14
agency in the rest of your life.
22:16
And if you can find your agency in the rest of your life, you can find your agency in the
22:20
bedroom.
22:21
That these things, this being able to ask for what you need to prioritize your own pleasure
22:26
and your own experience and your own skin and your own connectedness and how you wanna be
22:31
connected with somebody else in intimate moments.
22:34
Like, I was so hungry to get that back Yeah.
22:39
That that was where I started.
22:42
And, I it's been a wild it's been a wild adventure for the last three years, you know,
22:53
that has included lovers and boyfriends and online doms and all kinds of things that, that
23:02
have made me feel like I am back to being myself, and I'm connected to the vital, sexy
23:10
woman that I was when I got on that escalator, you know?
23:16
Yeah.
23:17
And and if I can do it, if I can reconnect with myself, and then use that juice to fuel the
23:25
rest of my life, other women can do it too.
23:28
I am not extraordinary in this way.
23:32
Well, I love your story, and I do think you are extraordinary from a standpoint of everything
23:37
you've, like, like, committed to.
23:39
Right?
23:40
Like Yeah.
23:40
A major commitment to say, hey.
23:43
I'm going to want my life to be different, and I'm actually going to show up.
23:48
And I think I think it's important to celebrate the, you know, extraordinary in all of us.
23:54
And I know there's I appreciate that.
23:56
I'm not saying
23:56
I'm not awesome.
23:57
I'm just saying, like, what I am doing is available
24:00
to Go to everybody.
24:01
Yeah.
24:01
Yeah.
24:02
Yeah.
24:02
It makes sense.
24:03
I I do know that, like, there are women listening to because I to this, and I hear this
24:08
in my own work that women get to a certain point and they're like, well, pleasure is not
24:14
that important to me anymore, I don't need to engage in sex, and I think this happens a lot
24:20
around, you know, the forties, the fifties, I think it happens due to a lot of different
24:25
reasons, some of it is menopause, some of it is, I think people just get to a point where
24:30
it's just like going through the motions and we're doing all the shoulds and
24:34
It's the sex they're having.
24:36
It's not sex in general.
24:37
Right.
24:38
And and that's why I think there's a level of that or the sex they're not having.
24:41
Right.
24:42
Right?
24:42
So I was so disassociated from myself.
24:45
I was ahead with no body.
24:47
I mean, I really was walking around like, the only valuable things in my life come from my
24:52
neck up.
24:53
Right?
24:54
Like, the important things I can handle with my brain.
24:57
So then what do you say then to, like, to because I think that's a very common thing.
25:01
Right?
25:02
We get so much in almost this, like, masculine version of the feminine, which Mhmm.
25:07
Is super linear.
25:09
It's solving problems.
25:10
It's not in our head and not in our bodies, and we just start to lose that connection in this
25:16
process to our femininity, to our pleasure, to our joy, our laughter, all these things you
25:21
named earlier.
25:22
Mhmm.
25:22
So what do you say then?
25:24
Like, if somebody like do you talk to women ever in, like, your work where it's like
25:28
somebody is I've just decided that that's no longer important to me.
25:33
Pleasure is no longer important to me or sex is no longer important to me.
25:36
Do you have any, like, messages for anybody that's kind of in that mindset of, hey, this is
25:42
just not for me anymore?
25:44
Sure.
25:45
I mean, I think the first question is, has it ever been good?
25:48
Yeah.
25:49
Right?
25:49
Because if
25:50
because if you've never felt if you've never had great orgasms, if you've never felt, like,
25:58
just that honey dripping through your veins feeling of, like, good, sexy vibes and good,
26:05
you know, oxytocin, like, then I don't understand what you would want to go back to if
26:13
there's nothing to go back to.
26:15
Right?
26:15
It is available to us, though, and the pleasure is so good for us.
26:22
I had, doctor Nan Wise on my podcast
26:25
I love her.
26:26
Who, you know, studied the relationship between the brain and sexuality.
26:31
And if you're a person who's made motivated by health, like, you light up those pleasure
26:37
centers in your brain, you are working on your longevity, you are working on your well-being,
26:43
you are working on your cognitive skills.
26:47
And, you know, if you if you're a person who's like, well, you know, that's the