The Professor and Heather Anne
Although we don't have all the answers, we hope we can encourage and excite you.
We're here sharing our lives to inspire you to make the most of the second half of your life.
Join us each week, my friends, where you're sure to get a smile -- from lessons learned to mishaps, the adventures go on for miles...here on The Professor and Heather Anne.
The Professor and Heather Anne
From Trauma To Triumph: Midlife Love, Reinvention, And Hope
We share how a six-hour first date led to a late-in-life partnership rooted in honesty, faith, and humor. Along the way, we map career pivots, health upgrades, and the courage to talk about trauma, hormones, and hope.
• who we are and why we care about midlife reinvention
• Heather’s path from Beverly Hills to lending and speaking
• Joe’s exit from academia and move to Oklahoma
• meeting on JDate and the six-hour first date
• building trust after divorce and long gaps in dating
• right sizing home and life during relocation
• healthy aging with strength, yoga, and supplements
• naming trauma, ACEs and PACEs, and practical hope
• future guests on hope, finances, and wellness
• navigating tech and social media as a couple
• preview of next episode on sharing hard stories
Join us here each week, my friend, where you're sure to get a smile.
But you message me that you're going to be late because you had business questions to have to have to consult with a client.
Heather Anne:No, it was a lie. I eventually told you.
unknown:Your next favorite podcast pick starts now. Here's the Professor and Heather Anne.
Heather Anne:Welcome to the Professor and Heather Anne. I'm Heather Anne.
The Professor:And I'm the Professor.
Heather Anne:Although we don't have all the answers, we hope we can encourage and excite you. We're here sharing our lives to inspire you to make the most of the second half of your life. So I guess we're just going to dive right in.
The Professor:Dive right in.
Heather Anne:It's our first episode.
The Professor:That's very exciting. We're going to start by introducing ourselves.
Heather Anne:I'm Heather Simon, and a little bit about myself is I grew up in Bakersfield, California, graduated from high school. When I graduated from high school, I moved to Los Angeles to go to school and work. I wound up getting a job in Beverly, my first adult job in Beverly Hills and working for a famous actor's brother, which was a lot of fun. Being 19 years old and living that Hollywood Beverly Hills lifestyle was very nice, not going to lie about that. Then moved back to Bakersfield, met my husband, and we moved here to Oklahoma where he is originally from. It was a big culture shock for me. But by this time I had landed in the mortgage business and became a mortgage lender. I've been a mortgage lender for just about 30 years. Being able to help people make their dreams come true through homeownership is something I've really enjoyed through my career. Besides being a mortgage lender, I am a national speaker. I became a national speaker a few years ago. I speak at women's conferences. I speak at universities. I speak at nonprofit conferences. At the university, I speak at conferences for nursing students, medical students, psychology students. I am also the mother of two grown boys. I'm very proud. Sometimes even when I talk about them, I get a little tears that come to my eyes. I grew up in trauma. I had a very uh I had a childhood full of trauma. There was abuse. My senior year of high school, um, we became front page news, and it was not for anything good. So when I look at my boys now, I am just amazed on how well they turned out. Um growing up, they did learn about my trauma. It's not something I kept from them. I was very open and honest with them about it, mainly because I wanted them to understand me a little bit and um to understand where they came from, to make sure that we changed our families' story. And uh they are outliving their lives, doing a great job. My youngest one, my oldest one joined the army right out of high school, and he became um his job in the army was EOD, which is handling explosives, so he became a bomb specialist. And uh a lot, there's a little story behind that. When he was about uh four and five, he became obsessed with the show MacGyver from the 80s. And he would always pick up things and put things in his pockets, and when I'd ask him what why do you have these things? and he'd be like, Because I in case I need to build something to escape or build a bomb. And here he grew up to be my real life uh MacGyver. My youngest son is um he's living in Denver right now, living his best life, trying lots of different things, um, travels a lot. Um he is very proud of him. There is not anything that he cannot do. He would come to me when he was younger and say, I'm gonna do this, and he would do it, and that's what he's doing now. One of the things that him and I do is um uh baseball. So our goal is to go to all of the baseball stadiums in the country. We have been to about 13 now. One of our greatest ball games was last year. Um we were able to go and see our favorite team, the Yankees, at Yankee Stadium at the World Series. And uh so we're always constantly trying to figure out where we can see the Yankees, what ball ballpark we can go to next. But uh one of the things I did pass down to my boys is the love of the Yankees, even though I grew up in California. I um was a huge Yankee fan since I was five years old, and my boys are huge Yankee fans as well. And uh the reason why the World Series when we got there, I literally did start crying. One of the things was um I was at the Dodgers Yankees World Series in Dodgers Stadium in the late 70s, and then to be there to experience the Dodgers and Yankees in the World Series in Yankees Stadium with my younger son was just a dream come true. And um, but that's a little bit about me. Let's hear about the professor.
The Professor:I'm Joe Manson. I was born in 1960, grew up in San Diego. I went to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate, grew my hair long, went to a lot of Grateful Dead concerts, I went to grad school at the University of Michigan, earned it a PhD, returned to Southern California, and from 1994 to 2022 I was a professor of biological anthropology at UCLA. I did research on primate behavior with my first wife. So I've spent it totals up to about six years in Costa Rica in tropical forest, following monkeys around, recording everything that they did. Around 2007, I switched to studying human behavior, basically psychological research, even though I was still uh in an anthropology department. I've studied personality differences, mostly with survey questionnaires, but also some research that used various methods that uh observe people's naturally occurring behavior. And I still do this research. So that's the work part of my life. My major hobby is music. I play recorder, something I just took up in my mid-50s. Uh, and so, of course, taking up an instrument as an adult, you never you never get to be as good as if you take it up as a child, but I've I've become able to enjoy it anyway, and that that's the important thing. So as a professor, I gradually became disenchanted with academia, both its prevailing philosophies, worldviews, and the way its institutions work or fail to work or work in perverse ways. I also gradually rediscovered faith and the importance of ancient heritage, both of which I had abandoned as a teenager. Uh I got divorced in 2021, so one of the many divorces prompted by the stresses of the pandemic, although my wife and I had been drifting apart for a long time before then. We have one uh adult daughter. In the summer of 2022, so I was only 62 years old, I retired, wrote a blog post about why I was leaving a tenured faculty position, so all of my complaints about academia. I left Los Angeles. I'd become just as disenchanted with LA as I had with academia, piled my belongings into my Honda, and set off for Oklahoma, a place that I'd never been before except a drive-thru, and where I knew exactly three people, two professors and one grad student at Oklahoma State. So it was kind of a reverse grapes of wrath journey. It was a major culture shock. So things like seeing a sign at the door of a coffee shop that says, please, no open carry. Uh in California, no one has a gun. So even to myself, and certainly to almost everyone who knew me at the time, this seemed like a very odd thing to do, to move from LA to Oklahoma. But it was the right thing to do because within a month of arriving, I met Heather, and eight months later, we were engaged to be married.
Heather Anne:So the main question we get a lot is how did we meet? And we met on a dating app called uh J Date. It's a Jewish dating app. Um it was my first time. I had been um separated, um broken up, separated from my ex for two years. And this was my first dive into um the dating world. I I actually didn't want to necessarily do it. I had a friend that was kind of pushing me to it, just saying, just go ahead and do it, go ahead and do it.
The Professor:And uh yeah, it was I I had uh so I had been enrolled in this app uh in Los Angeles, and then when I moved to Oklahoma and changed on the uh on the app changed my address, uh I saw that the number of women within, I think it was 50 miles, uh that was the setting I used. Within 50 miles of me, the number of women who met my criteria was less than 10. There just aren't very many Jews in Oklahoma. And um most of those, uh, there was something about their criteria that I didn't meet. So I was about to unsubscribe. This this J date seemed like a complete waste of time and money. And it was just at that time uh that Heather joined and I saw her profile.
Heather Anne:And my profile was um because I still wasn't sure I wanted to do this. I just grabbed whatever files I had uh pictures I had on my phone.
The Professor:So in none of her pictures was she smiling.
Heather Anne:Which I smile a lot more now. I do smile in my pictures now, so that says something. Um but I also it was just a short little blurb about myself, and I don't even quite remember exactly what it was.
The Professor:You had a very smart ass lie.
Heather Anne:Which was what my point was. It's like, you know, I just kind of had the attitude, reach out, don't reach out, I don't really care. So but you did reach out.
The Professor:I I thought this this is a very interesting moment. I I can tell.
Heather Anne:So then you did reach out. And we we exchanged messages for it was only about a week, and uh uh and then had our first date, which was uh afternoon coffee, but then it turned into dinner, and then somehow we wound up shopping at Trader Joe's.
The Professor:At Trader Joe's. Uh I was living in in Stillwater, Oklahoma, uh, and uh uh the the the nearest Trader Joe's is in is in Tulsa uh where where where Heather lived, and we had the date, and so I said, well, I I'm as long as I'm here in town, I I I need to pick up some things so I can't get in Stillwater.
Heather Anne:So our first date actually wound up being like six hours.
The Professor:Yes. And uh I felt like I could tell Heather things about myself that I hadn't told anyone. That that this was someone who who understood me and that uh I I could I could disclose uh I could open myself in a way that I I I hadn't. Um and so so this was one of the cues. This was this is someone I was fascinated with.
Heather Anne:I was um nervous and intrigued. Neither one of us had gone on a date for 30 plus years, so that uh was nerve-wracking in itself, but within a half hour I felt very comfortable with him, and we were just there was no breaks in our conversation. It just really flowed, and we went from one topic to another topic, and and it wasn't just sharing about what we're doing now, it was really we had already known we had the connection of both being born and raised in California, so we were able to talk about California and the beaches and all of that. Um, but it I I feel like it really just obviously it flowed together that we it lasted for six hours.
The Professor:One of my impressions is that this is a very strong person, someone who's faced a lot of challenges, in fact, is battered, battered but not broken. And this was one of the most impressive things to me. We'll talk about this more.
Heather Anne:Um I was very impressed that you were, I'm gonna say it, Mr. Smarty Pants. I loved our conversations and just your knowledge, and we had things in common, the music and things that we read, and so that was um very appealing to me as well.
The Professor:I was I was nervous before the date, having not been on a date in 30 years, and and there were things I worried about that I uh would without meaning to launch into lectures to sort of an occupational hazard being a professor. Lots of lots of lectures like on the tips of our tongue. Uh, and so uh I I was monitoring myself to make sure I was I was doing a lot of asking questions, listening, not just talking.
Heather Anne:And you did very well. You asked a lot of questions, and I really appreciated that. And the same thing, I hadn't been on a date in 30 years, so you know, it's all the typical girl stuff. Am I wearing the right outfit? Um, truth be told, I probably changed my outfit like eight out eight times before I was at the door.
The Professor:So but she messaged me that she was going to be late because she had business. And this was not true.
Heather Anne:No, no, it was a lie. I eventually told you the truth. It was a lie. I um couldn't decide what I wanted to wear, and I probably did my hair two or three times, and I had short hair at the time, so that says a lot. I was very nervous calling my girlfriends. What am I doing? What in the world? Um, but we'll get more into that as the episodes um, as we get into more episodes. One of the reasons we decided to do this podcast is after doing some research and stuff, we found that there's not a lot of podcasts necessarily geared towards uh midlife, people that are in their uh older generations, the Gen Xers and the baby boomers. But truly what kicked everything off was um I had signed us up to be in a contest, uh contest, um, America's uh favorite couple. Um I did this without telling him first. As soon as we got the notification that we had been accepted into the contest, I um then had to confess and let him know that we were doing this. And one of the things you had to do was pick like a name for your guy for yourselves. And you have always been known to my family and friends, even on social media, as the professor. And um so when I was younger and dating, um, I dated a lot and it just became a thing for me. I never really, the guys that I dated, I never really addressed them by their names when I talked to my friends. It was always like occupation or something, you know, the pilot, the heart surgeon, the farmer, because I did date a far a farmer when I was younger. Um, just things like that. And it just, I never knew how long I would be dating them, but it you always want to talk to your girlfriends about the guys you're going out with. So when we started, um, I just kind of fell back when we started dating. I kind of fell back into that. And I didn't know, you know, was this going to be a long-term thing? Or your title was very easy because you are the professor. So um, so I knew I wanted that to be part of our name for the contest. So, but it just wound up being the professor and Heather. I couldn't change it because then I wanted to change it to obviously the Professor and Heather, and because people our age are going to understand the reference to that.
The Professor:Understand the cultural reference, yes.
Heather Anne:And uh so um, but one of the things that happened, we uh were in the top five. We moved up pretty quickly, we had a lot of family and friends voting for us. But one of the things on social media that I had was I had a lot of women my age, um, women that have recently just been divorced or widowed, who maybe have been divorced for years but just had never wanted to get into the dating scene, asked us, uh sent private messages to me asking what it's like being married for a second time, how we met, um how did I know you I wanted to get married again. And so um, and it just kind of started and perpetuated from that of people asking us questions and different things. And then, you know.
The Professor:So so this is one of the one of the kinds of topics we'll be addressing in the podcast is this, is um forming new relationships, dating, forming new relationships in middle age. But also more broadly, uh remaking one's life uh in in middle age or older. So um changing careers, changing the location where you live. And of course, as we get older, we get more set in our ways, and it becomes more and more of a of a psychological uh and some often practical challenge of how you how you do this, how you you make these big changes. And so um, so some of our topics will be about things like um like uh relocating.
Heather Anne:We're we are in the process of relocating uh at this time, uh things like um how uh uh blending families, um uh retirement, finances, um building your dream home, right sizing your life and your home, um healthy aging. Healthy aging, um, what it's like to um the professor really wasn't into working out. He he walked a lot, he very he's very healthy, but um since we've been together, he now lifts weights and does yoga. Um we I even have him doing some sound baths. I have him on all kinds of vitamins.
The Professor:Vitamins, supplements.
Heather Anne:About be so it's about being healthy. Um we're very fortunate that neither one of us are on any medication, so we'll be talking about even that. Um we also have um one of the things we'll be talking about is childhood traumas. So you grew up in a fairly traditional home.
The Professor:Traditional meaning there wasn't much trauma.
Heather Anne:There wasn't much trauma. I grew up in a home full of all kinds of trauma, and we'll be talking about that and even how navigating that and bringing that into a new relationship. But we're really here also to talk about things that we just don't talk about. Um, our generation was you don't talk about a lot of stuff. If you have problems, you don't talk about it, you don't tell your friends and family. Um case in point, women and hormones and menopause. That has been a taboo subject for many years. We'll actually be talking about that, not just women's hormones, but men's hormones. So just everything that just kind of affects our lives as we're aging and we hit that 40 plus mark.
The Professor:And so, do you want to tell them about the uh some of the guests or the kinds of people we would we're going to have as guests?
Heather Anne:So um we're going to have uh experts in all the different fields that we're talking about. So we'll have um people that'll come on and talk about right sizing. We'll have um another professor will be coming on and talking about hope. And um anybody that's gone through trauma knows about ACEs and paces, and again we'll get into more of that. But aces is the adverse things that happen in your life. You know, like this questionnaire of one to ten. Um mine is a ten, by the way. And then uh paces is the positive things that happen in your life, and they've done extensive research on the paces, and uh she will be a special guest of ours and probably be on a couple of times just to be able to go into those segments of uh childhood trauma and hope and the positive things that you can do in your life, even as an adult, to change um your outcome on life, I guess.
The Professor:And there'll be um people who can talk uh about the um uh supplements and uh health-enhancing things we've done, uh people who uh who are in in the business of of selling and distributing these things.
Heather Anne:Yes like that. And talk and even talk more about our health and how we've gotten our numbers down and your numbers that older men have to worry about. Um we'll be talking more about that as well. So we have a lot uh that we really want to share with you. We really did some research and have just found more people of our generation are coming out and talking about more of the things that we're dealing with in older life. Um, but there really isn't like a couple that's coming out and just sharing our lives and all the crazy things that we've gone through just since we've been together for three years and now we've been married for gosh a little over a year now.
The Professor:Yes.
Heather Anne:Almost a year and a half.
The Professor:Almost a year and a half. We'll talk about uh social media and technology uh for the for the middle-aged and older.
Heather Anne:I'm on social media, he does not like it that much.
The Professor:Yes, uh I would I would delete my Facebook account if it weren't for that uh Heather uses it a lot and some sends me videos on it and so forth.
Heather Anne:That's my community, that's my love language. I sent you all these videos. I think that's it for our first Well that's it.
The Professor:That's we're coming to the end of our first episode, but we want to say a little something about what our second episode.
Heather Anne:Oh, yes, our second episode. We'll be diving more into how first dating. Um feelings and things that went along with that. Also, how you processed on our first date, I kind of threw a little like, oh, by the way.
The Professor:She said, right before the start of my senior year of high school, my family became front page news. And not for anything good. And that was it. That was it.
Heather Anne:We didn't talk about it that night, just threw a little nugget out there.
The Professor:But uh starting on the second date, uh uh she told me uh more about about this uh this this sort of you might say that's like the climax of a traumatic uh upbringing. And so what we're gonna talk about in our second episode, in part, is digesting these kinds of experiences and then and then processing them, hearing about them in another person, um, and so so how this the effects of this on like on life today uh for for the both of us.
Heather Anne:Yes.
The Professor:Okay.
Heather Anne:So we hope you enjoyed our first episode in which we've talked about who we are as a couple, um, how we met, our relationship. We talked about why we started this podcast, the meaning behind our podcast name, future topics, guests we'd like to have, and our motivation for each episode. We have so many exciting discussions coming up. We can't wait to have you along for our new episodes. So join us here each week, my friend, where you're sure to get a smile. From lessons learned to mishaps, the adventures go on for miles. Here on The Professor and Heather Anne.
unknown:Thank you for listening to The Professor and Heather Anne.
