A Healthy Long Marriage After 50 Part 2 - Episode 342

Why Relationships Shape Longevity Sandy Kruse 0:02 Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy Kruse. Welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. For many years now, I've been a trusted voice for people in midlife and beyond who want a deeper, more honest conversation about wellness. One that includes the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the esoteric.

Most episodes are solo now because I want to bring you thoughtful research, lived experience, and grounded insight without noise or bias. And when I do bring on a guest, it's because their work genuinely adds something meaningful to the conversation. Here we explore the full spectrum of what it means to be well, how the body functions, how the mind heals, how the spirit expands, and how all of these layers shape life lived with clarity and joy. Thanks for being here.

And if this show resonates with you, please follow, rate, review, and share it. It truly helps the message reach more people. Part Two And The Iron Gate Sandy Kruse 1:31 Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. This is essentially like a part two.

I did record a podcast about protecting a long marriage over 50. The reason I wanted to do a part two is because that one was super, super interesting. So go back to that. And the other reason is because relationships are one of the strongest predictors of how long and how well you live.

It's actually on par with all of these massive lifestyle factors that everybody obsesses over. And after midlife, their effects actually get stronger, not weaker. So a lot of my topics this year have focused on this for that very reason because I feel it's so important as we age to have relationships that actually enrich our lives. I'm going to get into all of it today.

Go back and listen to the other podcast because I think you're going to like it. If I remember, I will link it in the show notes. I'm going to ask you to hit follow wherever you are listening to this podcast, because every week, for over six and a half years now, I come and I provide unbiased. So, well, I say unbiased, but really it's my opinion, my research.

I am a registered holistic nutritionist. I'm also a certified metabolic balance coach. And I'm when I say whole, I look at our wellness as a whole. It's not just about biohacking your way to 120.

That's silly in my mind. And I've earned the right to say that because I used to actually label myself as a biohacker. And I feel like I've really evolved in my role here. So I used to really work with women, you know, at midlife who had a lot of health health challenges.

And while I don't really work with women anymore, I have decided to really, really focus on my passion over profit and unbiased information and research because I want the world to be a better place. And focusing on red light therapy, that ain't gonna do it, my friends. That's not gonna help us age well. I mean, it can contribute, but this is why I look at the whole body.

Okay. So you hit subscribe and also share this podcast with one person. Maybe share it on social media. Tag me at Sandy Knutrition is everywhere.

I am everywhere. And that actually just helps my independent podcast to stay alive, my friends. Stay alive. Isn't that what we're all trying to do?

So When The Group Snubs You Sandy Kruse 4:42 I want you to picture this. You're walking arm in arm with your husband. Most of the people who listen to my podcast are women, some men, and that's okay. Your spouse.

Someone that you've known for 25 years is walking near. They were in your kitchen at one time. They are friends with your kids on social media. They say hello to your spouse and your spouse only by name, as though you're not even walking beside him.

And you don't wonder why for one second. You know exactly why. You protected your marriage, you closed the gate, and some people have never forgiven you for it. So I talk about the Iron Gate in my other podcast.

And go back and listen to that one. I think you're gonna love it. So if this is you, this episode is for you. Okay, maybe not that exact scenario.

Um, and if that's not you yet, but you can feel your friend group tugging somehow, some way on your marriage, this episode is exactly for you. Because today I'm talking about how to know if your friend group might be toxic to you, to your marriage, and to your life, and what it actually looks like when you choose your marriage over the group. So a few months ago, I created and recorded that episode, Protecting a Long Marriage After 50. A lot of you connected with this Iron Gate symbolism, the idea that your marriage is a sanctum and people earn access through behavior, not history.

I don't care if you've known them since you were five. And what I didn't get into that episode is what happens after you close that iron gate. Because there is a price to pay, and I want you to know what it is going in so it never throws you. So let's get into it.

The Fun Girl Tax And Alcohol Glue Sandy Kruse 7:02 Let's start with the fun girl tax. Okay. I want to start with us, women, assuming that you're a woman listening to this, women in midlife, because I don't think we talk about enough how friend groups work at this age. The kids are older or gone.

The soccer fields and the school events that held a lot of these friendships together are over. So, what fills the space? For a lot of groups, it's alcohol, long weekends, cottage trips, patio season that runs from May to October. Wine o'clock becomes a personality.

And inside those groups, there's a role for women. I call it the fun girl. She's easygoing, she doesn't make it weird, she laughs at the jokes about her own husband, she stays till the end. She never says to her spouse, honey, it's time to go.

She never says that's not funny to the group. And every woman in that group knows, even if nobody says it, the fun girl gets invited. The one with the boundaries does not. And that, my friends, is what I call the fun girl tax.

You pay it in drinks that maybe you didn't want, jokes you didn't find funny, conversations about other people's marriages, bedrooms, and maybe even really personal stuff that really doesn't belong in that group. There's research out there of the Framington Heart study showing that drinking spreads through social networks. If the people around you drink more, you drink more. This isn't willpower, it's the water that you're actually swimming in.

And our own Canadian guidance on alcohol now says that two drinks or less is considered low risk. Two, in a lot of these groups, two drinks is the minimum warm-up before dinner even begins. So, and this isn't to shame people who drink. I am not, you know, uh what they call like sober living.

I do drink now and again. But I want you to ask yourself this if you stop drinking tomorrow, would you still be invited? Would these friendships still hold? If the answer is no, the alcohol is the glue.

I want you to think about that. So The Boys’ Club Pulls Him Back Sandy Kruse 9:52 let's talk about the boys' club. I have talked about it before because I think this is a really important topic that's not talked about enough. So we're gonna go into the husband side because um I want to go deeper on this.

Some of our husbands have friends that they've known since grade school, the guys they played hockey with, got drunk with at age 15, covered for each other with their parents. There's real history there. But I'm gonna give you the hmm. Those friends don't just know your husband, they know who he was at 15.

A lot of them need him to stay that guy, the guy before he was married. Sociologist Michael Kimmel, who spent years studying men, and he found that men largely perform their manhood for the other men, not for the women. The audience that matters is the guys. So when a man grows up, gets married, starts putting his wife first, goes home when she says she's really tired, the guys feel it as a loss.

He's whipped. Oh, go ask the boss. That's not teasing, my friends. That's the group trying to pull him back to who he was before.

Marriage asks a man to become someone new, to grow the fuck up. The old crowd wants him to this to be staying the same, and the loyalty that they built at 15, they expect that to outrank the vows that he made as a grown man. Do you see how silly it is? It doesn't.

The loyalty belongs to the wife with the marriage, not the boys' club. And the same thing happens with women, a little bit differently. The girlfriend who liked you better when you were miserable in your marriage, the one who gets quiet when your marriage is good and suddenly very attentive when it is not. Pay attention to who shows up for the cracks.

When Friends In Your Livelihood Sandy Kruse 12:32 your friends are in your livelihood is another thing I want to talk about. Because this is really important. You know how you always hear don't mix friends with business. So let's say your friend becomes your client or your business partner or employee, or you start referring work back and forth.

Researchers actually have a name for it. It's called a multiplex relationship. One relationship that carries two roles at once or more: friends and business in this case. And here's what nobody tells you about it.

Psychologist Margaret Clark and Judson Mills did some famous research on the two kinds of relationships we have: communal relationships, like family and really close friends, where you don't really keep score. You give because you care, because you love. You don't track who paid for dinner last and exchange relationships like business, where everybody keeps score. Business, you keep score, right?

That's the whole point. You give, you get. Now, here's something I want you to think about. The danger isn't mixing friendship and business.

The danger is when one is running on friendship rules and the other is running on business rules. And one is keeping score while the other isn't. Okay, one gives the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes it's over and over and over.

And then one is taking advantage or changing the rules or blending them between friends and business. This happens with friendships too, right? It's also happening in friendships where you're always the one who's the giver, and somebody's always the one who's the taker. Except this could cost you a lot more with business.

The sociologist Mark Grano Vetter wrote about this in one of the most cited papers in the field. He said, the trust we build through personal relationships creates the opportunity for someone to take advantage of that. Think about that. The closer the relationship, the easier it is to actually get burned because you stop checking.

You you'd ask a friend, sorry, you'd ask a stranger for a contract, right? You'd ask a stranger to explain. You'd never let a stranger do half of what you'd let a friend do. And here's where it really gets you in the end.

When something goes wrong, you can't really hold them accountable without somehow blowing up the friendship. And often they kind of know that, whether it's subconscious or not. Some might even count on that. Researchers at Wharton, Julia Pelimer, and Nancy Rothbard found that friendship makes people hesitant to question, confront, or push back on each other when it relates to business.

Nobody wants to be the one who made it awkward. So you swallow it, you let it go, you let it go again. You maybe do some favors, you do things under the table. They do things under the table until one day you look up and you might be the one who's been giving and they've been taking for years.

Research on betrayal and business relationships shows that it hits hardest when it comes from someone that you trust personally because you didn't just lose a deal. You often end up losing the person, the history, and your faith in your own judgment all at once. Because you knew them in one way, and then you brought them into the business world and you see an entirely different person, right? Now bring all this back to your marriage.

When one person in your friend group has a hand in your livelihood, they have a responsibility to both of you, not just the spouse. And sometimes one spouse feels more loyal to that friend than the other does. And now that business has driven a wedge right into the middle of your marriage. Something to deeply consider before you mix friendships with business, because it can in fact affect your marriage.

So in the last episode, I gave you the friend test. When you're in trouble and you ask for help, do they help or do they enjoy the chaos? Voting Request Then Back To Boundaries Sandy Kruse 17:54 Before I take this a little bit further, I just want to tell you about a contest that I'm actually entering, and I am so excited. It is for America's top host contest with Ryan Seacrest.

I have entered this. The winner gets to have six guest spots with Ryan Seacrest's morning show, as well as $25,000. Most of you know I do this passion over profit and have been coming here each and every week for over six and a half years. I would greatly appreciate your vote.

I'm going to have the link in the description. Now let's get back to the rest of this podcast. I want to take that one step further because this might be one of the most important things in this whole episode. Okay.

The Moment Friends Choose Sides Sandy Kruse 18:49 Picture this. You're out with another couple. Your husband has had more than enough to drink. You've got a flight to catch.

You quietly turn to this couple and say, Oof, can you help me get out of here? They laugh in your face. Then one of them waves the server over and loudly orders another round of drinks. This, my friends, is a direct choice.

They chose a side in real time, and it wasn't yours, and it wasn't even your husband's, and it certainly wasn't in support of your marriage. So Counter Moves After You Change Sandy Kruse 19:33 let's talk about what happens when you close the gate. So let's say you've done it, you left the chat group, you stopped laughing at the jokes, you kept your business and friendships separate. You went home with your husband when it was time to go home.

Here's what's coming. The group pushes back. More often than not, they're going to continue to test the waters. There's a psychologist named Harriet Lerner who wrote a book called The Dance of Anger.

And she has a name for this. It's called Counter Moves. When one person in a system changes, the system responds with one message. Change back.

The snubs get louder and more obvious. And when you still continue to hold your ground, they try to take away your belonging all together, and you become invisible, non-existent. Then just one day, someone you've known, maybe intimately, for over two decades, will hug your husband and look right through you as though you're not even there. That snub isn't necessarily about you, although it might be.

But it can also be resentment that you've put up that iron gate and kept it permanently shut. It can be for him your spouse. It's a question are you still one of us? It's the group trying to pull him back outside that gate, right there on that sidewalk, in about five seconds.

They're trying to recruit him back. And the only thing that matters in that moment is what he does. Does he stop to chat while you stand there invisible? Or does he keep walking and proceed with just a polite nod?

So, Why Women With Boundaries Get Iced Sandy Kruse 21:57 why are women with boundaries hated? I mean, we've all heard this. When a woman is younger somehow, you know, people might call her a bitch, but it's more acceptable if she's younger and beautiful. You guys have all heard this research.

As you get older, she's an old hag, she's, you know, a menopausal bitch. There's a lot of different terms out there. A prude. I could go on.

Now, why is it that people who've known you the longest can turn the coldest? Let's get into that. Because it also relates to this women with boundaries. There are two pieces of research that explain it perfectly.

The first is something that psychologists call the black sheep effect. Groups judge one of their own who breaks the rules more harshly than they would judge an outsider who did the exact same thing. A stranger with boundaries, that's fine. But one of theirs with boundaries, she's a traitor.

The second is from a researcher at Stanford, Benoit Monin. He studied what he calls do-gooder derogation. Derogation. Look it up.

People resent someone who makes a principled choice because the choice itself might feel like a judgment on them. So your boundary becomes a mirror. And it's a lot easier to hate the woman holding the mirror than to looking at yourself. So if you've been iced out because you stood strong in your marriage, in your boundaries, wear it.

You didn't lose them. You found out who and what they were loyal to. Silence During Hard Chapters Sandy Kruse 24:10 Now let's get into the silence. This is a big one, too.

Sometimes we might go through something really hard in life. And many of you talk to me about a bunch of stuff. Life, you know, I heard hear this quote all the time: life is hard. Life is filled with challenges.

That's the facts. And people around us might know that we might be going through something. They see it, they know what's going on, and yet they say nothing, they do nothing, they keep smiling across the room, like everything's normal. I will never forget when our daughter was diagnosed with cancer, she was five, I was 40, and then I was diagnosed with cancer exactly one year later at age 41.

I remember exactly who was there for our family. The ones who came, who saw me at the hospital, who brought a Barbie for my daughter, who came to visit and see how our family was. I remember who was there very clearly. And I also remember who pretended like nothing was happening.

So imagine this. Imagine if you're that friend cocooning to protect yourself because life was really not easy. And imagine if they keep inviting him, your spouse, not you, and pretend like it's nothing's happening. These are tough circumstances, my friends.

And if you open your eyes to it, I think it's a lot more common than disgust. So silence is not neutral. Silence is a vote, and when someone, you know, watches you go through it and they stay quiet, you know exactly how and where they stand. Your body knows who is safe, and your body knows safe spaces.

Friendships Change And Circles Shrink Sandy Kruse 26:38 Friendships have a shelf life. Your marriage doesn't have to. And here's something that might surprise you. We talk about our friend groups like they're forever, the crew, the girls, the guys he's known since grade school.

But there was a university that followed about a thousand adults for seven years. And by the end, roughly half of the people in their close circles had been replaced. Half. People move, drift, change, fall out.

That's how friendships work. Now think about what that means for your marriage. Most friend groups turn over every few years. Your marriage is the one relationship that is designed to go the distance, supposed to, right?

Kind of hope for that. So why would we ever let a relationship with a shelf life decide the fate of the one that's meant to last a lifetime? And there's more. Research from Oxford found that when we commit to a partner, we typically lose about two close friends because our time and energy naturally shift toward that relationship.

That's not a flaw. That's what building a life together looks like. The old crowd can sometimes feel that shift. Some of them never make peace with this.

And then as we get into midlife, something else happens. Laura Karstensen at Stanford found that as we age, we naturally start trimming the relationships that drain us and holding on to the ones that truly matter. And the people who do that tend to be happier and more emotionally steady. So if your circle is getting smaller at this stage in life, that's not a loss.

That's actually wisdom. And this is where it becomes a longevity question. An Australian study followed older adults for 10 years and found those with strong friendships were about 22% less likely to die during that time. Strong friendships.

Remember, I said that. Strong, not big, not loud, not the biggest table at the cottage. The right people add years to your life. The wrong ones take them.

And the one relationship that has the most power to protect your health for the long haul is the one that's sitting right beside you. Researchers at Brigham Young University looked at blood pressure and friendship, specifically the friends people felt mixed about. The ones who are lovely one day and cutting the next. The frenemies.

People's blood pressure went up more around those friends than around people they flat out didn't like. Your body relaxes more around an enemy than a frenemy, because with an enemy, at least you know what you're getting. Your nervous system can clock that. Frenemies And The Health Toll Sandy Kruse 30:20 So there's also brain research from UCLA showing that being excluded from a friend group lights up the areas of the brain that you would experience as if you had physical pain.

This was strangers in a lab. So imagine when it's a whole group that you've known for decades. Your body registers it. For a woman in midlife, whose cortisol is already harder to regulate, whose sleep might already be fragile, whose hormones are already all over the place.

Spending years braced around the wrong people is real wear and tear. Thyroid, gut, sleep, joints, all of it counts. Here's a simple test that I know. Okay I'm gonna take a pause.

How do you feel the next morning after spending time with them? If you wake up with a hangover that has nothing to do with the wine, ladies, your body is giving you data. It's like I want you to listen to it. So here's where I want to land with this.

In the last episode, I said the marriage has two doors and each partner holds a key. This is true, but nobody closes a door that they're afraid to close. If a part of you still wants to be the fun girl, if part of you still needs the invite, needs the group's approval, needs to be liked at the barbecue, then the group will always have a little wedge, a little way back in. They will use your need to belong as a key to just kind of inch that door open.

The day you decide that your marriage matters more than their approval, that key stops working. The snubs, they stop being a weapon because there's nothing to take from you. It simply doesn't matter anymore. You're not trying to win anybody back.

You don't need to explain anything. You already know everything you need to know. You protected your marriage, and that iron gate stays shut to those who simply do not support it. You decide who's inside that gate, you decide what gets through that gate, and you let everyone else react however they need to react.

It's fine. So I'm gonna close this out on marriage, friendship rules. You Eleven Rules To Protect Marriage Sandy Kruse 33:12 can take what resonates, leave whatever doesn't. Number one, the marriage outranks the history.

Nobody gets seniority for knowing your partner first. Number two, we don't bring our marriage into the group. Not the fights, not the problems, not the money. Always turn inward first towards your partner.

Work together to decide if you need to bring other people in for help if you need to. Number three, we decide the night before the night. How much, how late, who's driving, what time we're leaving to go home together. Nobody at the table gets a vote.

Nobody at that gathering gets a vote. They have no say. Number four, if you continue to pour when asked to stop, that is important information right there for you. Number five, what's private about someone else doesn't get forwarded, saved, laughed at.

If a chat keeps going there, leave the chat. I've been in those scenarios where stuff that shouldn't be talked about is talked about. Number six, keep business and friendship separate wherever possible. And when you can't, keep it clean, keep it in writing, and keep it off the dinner table.

Number seven, we stand together in public as a couple. We argue, if we have to, at home. Number eight, don't return to the old ones who went quiet when things got hard because life gets hard, and they showed you exactly who they are. Number nine, don't explain your boundaries at all to anyone.

You owe no one an explanation for what is going on in your private marriage. Number 10, keep the circle small. A few people who make your nervous system feel safe are worth more than a table of 12. You have to brace for.

Number 11, be the friend that you want. When a friend's marriage is in a hard chapter, help to protect their marriage, not just your friend. True friends will always protect the marriage, not just their friend. So that's Share Rate Review And Closing Sandy Kruse 35:56 the episode.

If this one landed for you, please share it. And if you can, go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and rate and review with a few kind words. It really helps me to keep going. And remember, you can always email me if you want the research.

I have all the citations and the sources. I'm happy to share all of that with you. Email me sandy at sandyknutrition.ca and thank you so much for being here. And I look forward to coming back next week.

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