Advice from the Times of India

“Would it be right,” asks the Times of India in a recent article, “to say that despite growing in numbers, the older-woman-younger-man-relationship always comes with a very short shelf life?”

My goodness. One hopes not.

Saif and Amitra

Well, the Times offers me as proof, there is the breakup of Madonna and Guy Ritchie. And Courtney Cox’s split from David Arquette. And of course the divorce of that young pup Saif Ali Khan from his 12-years-older wife, Amitra Singh, after a 13-year Bollywood marriage. Even that most famed of Cougar unions, DemiAshton, reports the Times, is in danger of disunion.

 Oh, yes. The famous couples.

Putting aside the fallacy that the lives of the rich and famous are evidence of anything except the lives of the rich and famous, I’m going to give writer Haimanti Mukherjee credit for interviewing a relationship counselor for advice that could keep a HimPlus love affair going. That advice­–mostly directed toward women–seems fairly solid. In summary, this is what the Times suggests:

1. Women needn’t act their man’s age. They need to act their own. He didn’t fall in love with a woman his age; he fell in love with you.

2. Just because the woman acts her own age doesn’t mean she gets to mother her man.

3. No couple does everything together, and that’s also true for older women and younger men. So what if she wants to watch “The Breakfast Club” one more time, and he wants to run up the side of a mountain? It’s okay to let your partner enjoy his age sometimes without you; and you can enjoy yours without him.

4. Refrain from asking over and over, “Why did you fall for an older woman?” If you keep asking, he might eventually wonder, too.

All good points, to which I might add only this:

Don’t fall for a movie star.

Older woman thinks about it all

I said to Michael today when he reminded me it’s my turn to put up a post that all of this blogging has made me think a lot more about our age gap than I used to.

Is that a good thing?

Writing this blog has given me cause to watch some really bad television (see entries on “The Cougar,” “Cougartown”), get suckered into figuring out my “Real Age,” follow the love lives of Katie Couric and Susan Sarandon, track the Twitter postings of Ashton Kutcher and ‘fess up to what I wrote in my journal almost 20 years ago.

But it’s also broadened my knowledge of the world, given me an opening for an honest chat with my mother-in-law, helped me think about his & her career issues, and given me a reason to watch a Kate Winslet movie.

We now find ourselves considering our age difference more than we used to, and confronting some issues — retirement, money, location — that we might have avoided.

The biggest advantage to thinking about our age difference so much is that I don’t hide from it anymore. Now I take it out and examine it a lot more than I might have, which makes it familiar — like wrapping up in a favorite sweater.

The bummer is that no matter how you slice it, I’m still the older one.

In Praise of Older Women

The recent gaga about older women-younger man relationships is much focused on the sex lives of celebrities (42-year-old Sam Taylor-Wood having baby with 19-year-old! Demi and Ashton still married! Madonna still with younger man!).

But most of us Himplus couples don’t attend star-studded parties or walk red carpets. We teach. We commute. We walk our dogs. We plant a peach tree in the spring. We wrestle with taxes, insurance, monthly bills.

I was reminded of the divide between my life and those celebrity Himplus couples when I read recently that Stephen Vizinczey’s “In Praise of Older Women,’’ initially published in 1965, is being re-released as a Penguin Classic.

Set against the backdrop of war, the semi-autobiographical book details the sexual education of the narrator through a series of relationships with older women, starting when he was 12. While the narrator discovers erotic pleasure, he also learns about life.

“Vizinczey is more interested in the metaphysics of sex than the mechanics; it is, for him, a means to forge a deep connection with another person, a way to liberate the soul,” writes William Skidelsky in The Observer.

In another recent interview in the Telegraph, Hungarian-born writer Vizinczey, now 76, says his fascination with older women was as much about the brain as the body.

“The most attractive thing about a woman is her intelligence. The older women in the book were intelligent enough to learn from experience. An older woman who is an idiot is clearly inferior to an intelligent 20-year-old but the intelligent 20-year-old will be even more interesting and exciting when she's 40 or 60."

He talks, too, more about relationships than about coupling. "Most relationships don't last,” he told the interviewer. “Enduring relationships depend not only on the ages of the couples but whether they are on the same wavelength.”

Still, there’s this too: "To be a young man and have a grown woman as your partner is not just attractive, it is paradise.”

Cherchez le jeune homme

Here comes yet another OWYM film – Chéri is set to hit U.S. theaters at the end of June.

Set in turn-of-the century France, the film follows the affair of retired courtesan Lea (Michelle Pfeiffer), and her 19-year-old lover (Rupert Friend). Adding to the drama: The young man, the Chéri of the film’s title, is the son of a fellow courtesan.

The affair lasts six years. Complications arise when the young man’s mother arranges a marriage for him with a woman closer to his own age. I don’t know how the movie ends (although I can guess), so I can’t be a spoiler.

 But I can reveal the true story on which the movie is loosely based.

The movie is based on the 1920 book “Chéri” by the French writer Colette, whose life seems far more interesting than that of her fictional heroine. (For more on Colette, see this New York Times review of a 1999 biography).

At age 46, Colette began an affair with her 16-year-old stepson.

Uncommon love was a common theme in Colette’s work and life. She had already had affairs with women, bared her breasts in Paris music halls and divorced her first husband. The stepson affair would last five years and end her second marriage, to her lover’s father. Her third husband was 16 years younger than she.

All of which is to say that the recent excitement over younger men with older women is nothing new. It’s been frothed up by all things Demi and Ashton and by TV shows like The Cougar. But it predates all of that. It predates Colette, too.

 Still, there’s something about older women and younger men at the current intersection of media and culture that gets people excited. The recent movies and TV shows (The Reader, Cheri, Desperate Housewives, The Cougar),  the popularity of Demi and Ashton as supermarket tabloid fodder, and the revelation by AARP that three out of 10 single women between 40 and 69 are dating younger men — all of that bespeaks a fascination with this kind of uncommon love. And it says, too, that it’s not so uncommon after all.