In Praise of Older Men

I was fighting off the flu, but I’d wrapped myself in a dress, cinched the waist tight, and now sat, flushed and underfed, sipping down a hot toddy (my cold medicine) in a hotel bar. At 34, I’d agreed to meet for drinks with a man 24 years my senior. A painter, he was dressed as he’d been when we met—at a literary party in TriBeCa, to which he was accompanied by one of his nude models—in a fleckless Savile Row suit. He wore it effortlessly, in the way only men over 50 can. He had the solemn good looks of a Roman senator and brushed his dark hair, thick as a horse’s mane, straight back from his temples. Realizing where we’d sat, he laughed: Leering down at us from the wall was an early work of his, something from the ’80s. “They actually hung that up in here?” He then presented me with two gifts: a book about his “old friends on the New York scene back in the day” and a small wooden frog on a stick, a Japanese toy. The first established the access he offered; the second seemed to comment on my place in our burgeoning relationship. The tone had been set, and I was prepared to play my part.

Every time we write about our romances, we’re recounting the private coming-together of two individuals, drawing on conversations no neutral party was present to overhear. In other words, there’s a limit to the perspective a person can have about herself—but there are patterns. My own began to emerge at the age of eight, with a glimpse at the VHS cover of Last Tango in Paris. There he was, a thoroughly weathered, silver-haired Marlon Brando, awash in that oversaturated amber light so redolent of the ’70s. Sitting on the floor with a much younger woman—both hunch shouldered and naked as apes, their legs intertwined, her arms tugging at his neck—he kept his head back, chin tilted up at a slightly aloof angle. His domineering posture, and that amber glow, spelled out something complex and unmistakably adult. (...)

Part of what lends the older man his appeal is how he appears to have arrived from a distant and still exotic land, the kingdom of Adulthood. He’s a prince in that realm, and he has all his shit together—unlike most of the talented men my own age. After all, what does Maria Schneider see in Brando in Last Tango? She has her fiancé, but he’s too wrapped up in the beginnings of his career to pick up on the sexual boredom she practically exudes from her glowing pores. By contrast, the older man in the empty apartment, however damaged he may be, gives off the deep, low frequency of hard-earned experience. And since we live at a time when the physical differences between 30 and 50-year-olds can be negligible, this added dimension is often an advantage. I think of the writer and how I liked to lay my hand on his head; mostly bald, he had a finely shaped, elegant skull. His nose had a pronounced arc that to me looked patrician and out of step with the times, the combined effect being that of a patinated profile on a coin. I imagined I could feel the hard-bitten years of striving under my fingertips, and now here he was, safely on the other side.

But a man’s choice to date much younger may also reveal a self-conscious impulse to remain relevant, to beat out the younger competitors waiting in line. While it’s surely possible for one’s true partner to be a cool decade or two her senior, you may discover you’re merely the latest installment in a decades-long series, never seen wholly for who you are but rather as a representative of a type. You risk becoming, essentially, the romantic interest in a Philip Roth novel.

by Alex Mar, Elle |  Read more:

Image: Hector Perez/The Licensing Project