I Am Confused.

Do me a favor. Read the following scenario, and note your reaction, if any.

Woman, in a dull marriage, eats a glorious meal prepared by her son’s best friend. Her sensuous self re-awakens, and she tracks down the young man, and begins a secret love affair.

Now, consider the same scenario, but change the sex of the characters. Make it a husband fooling around with his daughter’s best friend.

Are your reactions to each different? Mine are. And I’m still trying to understand why.

The first scenario comes from the 2009 Italian film I Am Love. It’s a visually beautiful and arresting movie, an over-the-top melodrama lovingly filmed.

Emma (played by Tilda Swinton, herself at one time reportedly involved with a man 18 years younger if the Daily Mail is to be believed) is the film’s primary point-of-view character. Usually, we as audiences are conditioned to cheer for the POV character, even when that person makes decisions we wouldn’t agree with. In this case, as Emma began her adulterous affair with a younger man (her son’s best friend), I never questioned the rightness of her actions. I felt happy for her as she rediscovered joy. Apparently, her point-of-view had become mine, because she didn’t question the rightness of her actions, either. In fact, the affair seemed right.

But as the movie reached its climax, a moment came when her husband, still ignorant of her betrayal, treated her with as kind, generous, and loving a manner as any in the film. This startled me. Quickly retracing their marriage through the film, I realized that both of them lived within a constructed life that forced them into stultifying roles. She had been left her home and changed her name as part of the marriage contract; he had to submit to his father’s will and share the company they’d founded with his son. Each gave part of her or himself and in turn enjoyed great wealth and comfort. Terrible roles, terrible prices to pay. But within those roles, the movie portrayed hm as kind to her, sometimes even tender. I wondered what then had made me accept her affair with a younger man? After all, it was a cruelty to her husband who loved her and to her son. Perhaps it was that she was rebelling not against her husband, but against a whole way of living.

But flipping the coin, I wondered would it have been as easy for me to accept a movie depiction of an affair in which the circumstances were much the same but the point-of-view character was the husband with a younger woman?

Sheri and I talked about this. The husband had the money and the power, she said. If he had an affair, he’d still have the power. That’s one reason we cheer on Emma.

That makes sense, but it doesn’t completely satisfy me. This is more complicated, I think, than rooting for the underdog. This isn’t an unjustly convicted prisoner and his cruel jailer. To its credit, the film muddies the problem. Emma is a heroine as she celebrates life with her younger lover, but by the end you will know that she has betrayed and hurt people who love her.

Thinking about all this makes me wonder about the ways I’ve learned to form opinions about people in particular roles and in particular narratives. An older woman rediscovering herself through a younger man is a heroine; an older man rediscovering himself through a younger woman is silly.

Of course, as with all generalizations, that’s also too simple. Perhaps that’s the point.

Out with the Old

Hef with the runaway bride

Sometimes these age-gap relationships can get a little funky. Consider, for instance, the 60-year age difference between Hugh Hefner and Crystal Harris, who were scheduled to wed on June 18. If you think people whisper behind their hands about other age-gap couples – sex? parents’ reactions? common interests? just a fling? – you can imagine what might be the buzz about this kind of age chasm.

Then, four days before the wedding (at the Playboy Mansion!) Crystal called it off. Even a 6-carat diamond couldn’t persuade Playboy’s December 2009 Playmate of the Month to marry the 85-year-old Hef.

My favorite part of the New York Daily News story announcing the split:

The May-December couple had been dating for more than a year, overlapping with Hefner's relationship with the Shannon twins.

The twice-married Hefner proposed Christmas Eve, putting the 6-carat engagement ring in a Disney-themed box that played music from Harris' favorite movie, "The Little Mermaid."

 

The Shannon twins? The Little Mermaid? Was this a marriage made in heaven, or what? Word is that Crystal ran from the altar in favor of a younger man, and that Hef has already named his new girlfriend. She’s all of 27.

My Juan Williams moment

(…albeit, not likely to get me fired from writing for this blog.)

You remember Juan. Longtime NPR contributor and liberal foil for Fox News? Last October, he mentioned on The O’Reilly Factor that he gets nervous on airplanes when he sees other passengers dressed in garb that, as he later wrote, “identifies them first and foremost as Muslims.” Given the situation -- a shouting match with O'Reilly and a conservative writer – what Williams had to say sounded awful. Later, he seemed to want to clarify that the airplane unease he described was unreasonable and rash and no useful tool for making decisions about policy or people. If I understand him – and maybe I'm being too generous – he was describing a human phenomenon: that we all sometimes have rash impulses about people we could describe as “other” – not us, not of our tribe, not belonging to what we know as the dominant culture or following the mainstream models of behavior. We mustn’t, however, act on these impulses. We mustn't stereotype people based on what we've seen -- real or imagined -- of others like them. We must take a deep breath and think.

But you know the rest of the story. NPR fired Williams.

Now, here I am, a guy writing a blog about his longtime love affair with his 17-years-older wife. And I get an e-mail from a 27-year-old woman saying how much she loves the blog and of course, why not, because she lives with her boyfriend who is 19 years older, which makes him, coincidentally, my age.

My rash-Juan-Williams impulse?

Yup. All the wrong stereotypes.

I’m embarrassed to admit this. Shouldn’t I (of all people!) recognize the myriad and miraculous ways love unfolds? Absolutely. But I veered right into making made-for-TV-movie stereotypes out of living, breathing, loving, complicated people. What makes my reaction more troubling is that I know this woman – I worked with her a few years ago. She’s smart and savvy. Nevertheless, for a nano-second, I had a gut reaction, for which I now apologize to Smart-and-Savvy and her older beau. My rational better angel wishes you happiness and all the strange beauty that comes with love.

So, there we go. Please don’t fire me. Instead, climb inside my head and wonder along with me: How many other people have impulsive thoughts and reactions when they meet Smart-and-Savvy and her partner? How do these people react? And what do such reactions mean for this couple as they make their way through a world where it is already much too difficult for couples to find and keep love?

What impulses have people had about Sheri and me?

Thanks, all of you, for not acting on them.

Some like 'em REALLY young

Doonesbury strip takes note of Madonna's preference for younger men.

Going fast

My mother, who would turn 100 years old this week were she still alive, was not quick to bless my relationship with Michael when it started more than 18 years ago. That’s not a surprise: Michael was younger than some of her grandsons.

“Take it easy,” she told me three months after Michael and I had moved past the friends stage. “Don’t go too fast; I don’t want you to get hurt.”  I was the youngest of her five children. I was also the first to be divorced (eventually three of us would be), and she had been protective of me ever since.

What my 81-year-old widowed mother didn’t tell me at the time was that she was also falling in love again. He was an older man she had known since high school.

 And when another three months had gone by and the relationships were moving forward, we made a pact to meet in northern Michigan. “I’ll bring my boyfriend if you’ll bring yours,” I told her.  In no time,  Michael had won his way into my mother’s heart.

Mom and Claus married soon after, and Michael and I followed the next year.

It still thrills me that my mother loved and married again at 82. I thought she was so brave, traveling that road again with a man who was, by that time, 86. But I think now it was not bravery so much as just flat-out plain-and-simple true love.

Like mother, like daughter. When love visits you — the kind of love that makes you know you are blessed every day — it doesn’t matter what age you are. 

Lessons from a Younger Woman

On a sailboat, the captain plots a course. Steers. The first mate supports, assists, advises.

Sharon V. is fourteen years younger than her husband, who is sixty-nine. These days, with her agreement, he’s captain, setting the course. The time has come for him to retire and pursue his boyhood dream of circumnavigating the globe in a sailboat. When you’re sixty-nine, the final horizon looks closer, so you do these things. There’s no way to disguise that reality.

But when you’re Sharon, when you’re fifty-five, a clinical psychologist with a desire to keep working at the practice you’ve built through years of passionate dedication, agreeing to be first mate is a younger woman’s act of love.

“We’re out of sync,” she says, “and we’ve talked about it a lot. We talk about everything, we talk it to death.”

Sharon and I talked about it last weekend at a family wedding on the Jersey Shore. Lots of fun. Cupcakes, “Love Shack,” mornings with sea foam around the ankles, recollections of other weddings the family has gathered to celebrate. Sharon is married to my brother-in-law, Joe. She and I sat down and for the first time since we met some fifteen years ago we chatted about what it means to be the much-younger spouse. I learned that our mother-in-law told Sharon flat out that she was too young for her son, and I felt grateful for her pathbreaking; I’d never even noticed a disapproving glance. I learned – with no surprise – that her husband never suffered anxiety at the idea of coupling with a younger spouse as my wife did. We talked about people mistaking us for the children of our spouses (in each case, it’s happened only once), about class reunions, about the cultural generation gaps that come in such marriages. Funny that Sharon and I had never talked about all this before.

She and Joe celebrated their 25^th anniversary this year. When she let him slip the ring on her finger that silver age ago, she smiled into the face of a man who was – like her –smart, widely read, and fit. An established psychologist, he first appealed to her because he could teach her things about her profession, but also about theology, and about sails and telltales, luffs and clews. She admits to having had a weakness for professor types. She was twenty-nine, he was forty-three; love and joy suggested they could be twenty-nine and forty-three forever.

“I didn’t know the age difference would become more apparent as we aged,” she says. “Physical health, stamina, cognitive speed, just small things. But they make a big difference.”

Cognitive speed. Remember, she’s a psychologist. She understands how aging changes our capabilities, how we need more time to make decisions or how we change our mind more often. As a psychologist, she can also look at the span of life and recognize how perceptions of age are sometimes a shorthand that describes what we can and can’t do. A high school freshman dates a high school junior and the years are a thrilling chasm because the older of them has a driver’s license and a job. But soon that separation collapses, and three years is no difference at all. Ten isn’t even so bad when you can both make children and the money to feed and shelter them. And while fourteen might be worth a second thought, it’s not so important when you’re both working and healthy and dancing late into the night. And if you are young and ignorant with love, one thing you can’t do is chart the decades to come. You know only that the person beside you is the one you’d choose to be at your side when you face Atlantic gales or Pacific sun. If you’re lucky, that’s the constant.

Because Sharon loves Joe she’ll give up a practice she’s built for a quarter century and say goodbye to patients she still wants to help. Joe and Sharon will sell the house they’ve shared. She’ll fret a bit about what might happen to them as they sail, whether they’re still capable of such an adventure at their ages. And she’ll take her time to think about how she might reinvent herself upon her return when Joe will be in his mid-70s and she’ll be on the verge of Social Security. For now, maybe, they can live as if they’ll always be fifty-five and sixty-nine.