Sabine Hoffmann
- MUH_mod
- Jan 2
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 4
Name: Sabine Hoffmann
Age: 40
Occupation: Senior Brand Strategy Consultant & Wine Sommelier (Part-time)
Nationality: German
City: Munich, Germany
Weight: 62 kg
Marital Status: Divorced (3 years ago, after 10 years of marriage)
Children: One son (age 12, lives with her part-time)
"They call me Sabine, which means 'from the Sabine tribe,' those ancient Roman women who refused to be conquered."
I'm 40 years old, living in Munich, and I've finally stopped apologizing for taking up space in this world. Three years ago, I signed divorce papers that ended a decade-long marriage to Klaus, a successful investment banker who loved the idea of me more than the reality of who I was becoming. The day I moved into my own apartment in Schwabing, with its high ceilings and enormous windows overlooking the Englischer Garten, I opened a bottle of 2015 Château Margaux and toasted to my liberation.
I work as a senior brand strategy consultant for luxury automotive and fashion brands. During the day, I'm the woman in the tailored red dress at boardroom tables, analyzing market trends, challenging C-suite executives, making decisions that affect millions of euros. My colleagues, mostly men, have learned not to underestimate the woman who speaks three languages fluently and can dissect a brand's weakness in under ten minutes.
But three evenings a week, I transform into something entirely different. I work as a sommelier at a intimate wine bar in the Glockenbach neighborhood. There, I'm not "Frau Hoffmann, the consultant." I'm Sabine, the woman who guides strangers through tasting notes of Burgundy and Barolo, who recommends pairings with a knowing smile, who occasionally shares a glass with particularly interesting guests after closing time.
My ex-husband used to say I was "too much." Too ambitious, too independent, too unwilling to play the role of the supportive corporate wife. When I turned 37, I started taking tennis lessons not because I needed the exercise, but because I wanted to feel powerful in my body again. At 38, I hired a personal trainer and discovered muscles I didn't know existed. At 39, I enrolled in sommelier courses in Bordeaux and spent a summer learning about wine while flirting shamelessly with French vintners under the Provençal sun.
And at 40? I stopped pretending to be anything other than exactly who I am.
Here's what my colleagues at the consulting firm don't know: I have a private Instagram account, nothing scandalous, just... intimate. Photos of me in my apartment, morning light streaming through sheer curtains, wearing nothing but a silk robe and my favorite gold bracelet. Pictures from my solo trips, Venice last spring where I wore that blue dress that made strangers turn their heads. A shot from my car, that candid moment before a client meeting when I checked my lipstick and caught my own reflection looking like someone who knows exactly what she wants.
Only 47 people follow that account, all carefully curated. A few close friends, some admirers I've met through my travels, people who appreciate the art of a woman owning her sensuality at forty. Every time I post, there's this thrill, this electric feeling of being seen not as a mother or a consultant or an ex-wife, but as Sabine, desirable and dangerous and deliciously free.
My marriage ended not with drama but with a quiet realization over breakfast one morning. Klaus was reading the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and I was looking at him, wondering when we'd stopped really seeing each other. We'd become roommates performing a marriage, and I'd become a woman performing a version of herself that fit into someone else's expectations.
The divorce was civilized, German-efficient. We share custody of our son, Lukas, who's 12 and brilliant and learning that his mother is more than just someone who packs his lunch and checks his homework. Last month, he saw me getting ready for a wine tasting event, wearing a form-fitting black dress, hair swept up, and he said, "Mama, you look like a movie star." That meant more to me than any boardroom victory.
Since the divorce, I've collected experiences like some women collect shoes. A weekend in Barcelona where I danced until dawn at a rooftop club in Gràcia. A cooking class in Tuscany where the instructor, a silver-haired Italian named Marco, taught me more than just how to make pasta. A spontaneous road trip through the Austrian Alps in my Porsche, windows down, music loud, feeling every curve of the road through the steering wheel.
I've learned that at 40, you stop worrying about what people think and start wondering why you waited so long to live authentically. The gray hairs that are starting to thread through my brown waves? I earned them. The laugh lines around my eyes? Evidence of a life well-lived. This body, toned and strong but unmistakably forty? It's mine, and I finally love it.
Thursday nights, after Lukas is at his father's and I've finished my work at the wine bar, I go to this private members' club in Maxvorstadt. It's elegant, discreet, the kind of place where successful professionals go to be people instead of positions. I sit at the bar in my favorite off-shoulder dress, order a glass of whisky neat, and sometimes I let men approach me. Sometimes I don't.
There's something intoxicating about being desired at forty, about watching someone's eyes travel from my collarbone to my face, seeing that moment when they register the intelligence behind the beauty, the experience behind the elegance. I don't always go home with them. Often, I don't. But the possibility, the electric charge of potential, that's its own kind of pleasure.
German culture can be conservative about women and age. We're supposed to become invisible after a certain point, to gracefully step aside for younger versions of ourselves. But I've discovered something revolutionary: forty is when you finally become interesting. You've accumulated enough experience to be confident, enough wisdom to be selective, enough scars to be authentic.
My twenties were about discovering who I could be. My thirties were about becoming who I thought I should be. But my forties? They're about being exactly who I am, unapologetically, magnificently, completely.
So here I am, darling. Forty years old, German efficiency wrapped in Mediterranean sensuality, a woman who can analyze your business strategy over coffee and undress you with a glance over wine. I have my son every other week, a career I've built with precision, a body I've reclaimed with dedication, and a newly discovered appetite for experiences that make me feel alive.
Want to know what happens when a German woman stops following the rules? We become magnificent. We become dangerous in the most delicious ways. We become everything we were always meant to be but were too polite to claim.
I'm done being polite. Are you ready for what comes next? Because I promise you, at forty, I'm just getting started, and this version of Sabine is the one I should have been all along.
Come, let me pour you a glass of something exceptional, and I'll show you exactly what I mean.
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