Getting Married At 40 Was An Identity Shift Nobody Warned Me About

Before I met my husband, the longest relationship I’d ever had was with a house.

This post is about the identity shift that comes from being good at a version of your life, and then having it change anyway. I’ll share my own story of going from very happily single to becoming a wife at 40, why the shift is hardest when you loved who you were, and how to carry the old you forward instead of leaving her behind. I’ll also tell you why my podcast is getting a new name.

Prefer to listen? Here’s the full episode.

I was really good at being single

That house was pure me. It had my colors, my furniture, soft everything, and natural light pouring in through the windows. My clinic was in the walkout basement, so I’d finish a session, walk upstairs, and be home, with nobody needing anything from me. I sat on my deck for hours. I went paddleboarding on a whim. I ate dinner whenever I felt like it, read on the couch until two in the morning, and when I was messy, nobody cared, because it was just me.

I liked her. I really liked that version of me. And I think that’s a big part of what attracted my husband in the first place: I liked myself, and you could feel it.

But I was also 35, standing in that beautiful kitchen wondering where the hell he was. I’d never been in a relationship longer than six months. It wasn’t that I didn’t want commitment. I was ready, and I just kept getting dumped along the way. I’d been on around a thousand first dates, and as an intuitive, I usually knew within ninety seconds. My shortest date lasted five and a half minutes. I moved cities about every four years, through Toronto, Waterloo, Sudbury and London, not because I didn’t want roots, but because I didn’t know yet where to put them.

Then everything changed at once

I met my husband one week after he’d moved into his new house. A year and a half later, I moved in, bringing my furniture into a house that was otherwise his. Then I had a baby, and a month later, the pandemic hit. I went from my soft, sunlit, unsupervised life to being a brand-new mom in lockdown, in a house that still mostly felt like someone else’s. And at 40, with a two-year-old at the wedding, I became a wife.

I did it all backwards, and it’s holding beautifully. But getting married later in life meant that after three decades of answering only to myself, there was suddenly someone who noticed. Nobody was policing me, but if I was up reading at 2 a.m., there was a witness.

The better you were at it, the harder the shift

Here’s what I want you to take from my story. The better you were at the old identity, the harder the identity shift.

Maybe for you it’s not marriage. Maybe you were the dedicated career woman who built a whole self around a title. Maybe you held the family together, or held it together in a marriage that’s ending now. Maybe you were an incredible mom of little kids, and now they barely need you to find their shoes. When that changes, it’s not just your circumstances that shift. It’s the question underneath: if I’m not her anymore, who am I?

That question is the heart of a midlife identity crisis. And being good at something isn’t a reason to stay in it.

You don’t have to evict the old you

This is where so many women get stuck. They think the shift means rejecting who they were, as if she was a mistake. She wasn’t. She’s the one who got you here.

I didn’t lose single me. She taught me I need softness, natural light and water nearby. She taught me I’m allowed to want time that belongs only to me, and that wanting it doesn’t make me a bad wife or a bad mom. She taught me to know in ninety seconds what’s right for me, a skill I use every day in my work. So I thanked her, took what she taught me, and brought her with me. She just doesn’t get the car keys anymore.

Why this podcast is getting a new name

My podcast is going through its own identity shift. It started as The Intuitive Drop, named after my Instagram broadcast channel, but I kept talking about emotions and my own stories more than intuition. So it became The Emotional Truth, and that felt right, because I wanted the deepest integrity and the deepest emotions.

Then I realized what I’d already been doing all along. Every episode, whether it’s the eldest daughter, the good girl, burnout, people-pleasing or divorce, is about the moment a woman looks at the life she built and asks, is that actually me?

So the show is becoming Her Identity Shift. It’s the front door to something bigger I’m building: a network of vetted women professionals who support women through life’s biggest pivots. They handle the logistics, and I handle what’s happening in your body, your emotions and your patterns.

The first series is on divorce, and the new trailer arrives November 2nd.

Subscribe to the podcast:

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/730IxK6Le9bwgAwKQBbrfM?si=a649923b6d4f4a4b 

Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-emotional-truth-nervous-system-regulation-somatic/id1896858957

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