Women age faster than men

My dad told me.

He was preparing to break up with Mom then.

It was more than two decades ago, in the fall of 1998. I was eighteen. He was the age I am now, plus-minus — around forty.

At that point, my parents had been together for almost twenty years and I can’t complain about growing up in a broken family. Though they married very young — when they were just nineteen — it wasn’t “young” by Soviet measures. I know Mom was deeply in Love with Dad — she told me that — and, throughout the twenty years of their marriage, her love never waned. I’m less sure about my Dad’s feelings. Overall, though, for many years we were a stable family.

My dad came from a poor family, but made a stellar career in the Soviet economy, and was successful in the 1990s too, after venturing into entrepreneurship.

In my teen years I was well aware of the cracks in my parents’ marriage. My Mom deeply resented my Dad’s new circle of business associates, including his very own younger brother. She stayed humble, even as we became very rich — all against the backdrop of a highly turbulent Russian economy in its first post Soviet decade, when most of the population had stayed impoverished.

I’m not saying that she stayed humble while Dad grew all wild and sinful. Mom was very conservative by her nature. Dad — entrepreneurial not only in business, but more open-minded in general, willing to try new things, new places, new experiences.