By Maria Padhila
“Oh, be quiet! This isn’t about you!” My girlfriend was laughing as she said it, but she had a point, all right.
Chris has been seeing someone, and the word “love” has apparently been spoken. I think it’s too soon, I’m worried he’s going to hurt her feelings, I don’t really know her very well, I know she knows all about me, I know he’s told her he’s not a one-woman person, but I don’t really know if she’s truly down with all this, I know she’s straight, I know she’s not interested in knowing me much better, and I’m not really sure she’s not actually totally monogamous and secretly hoping he’ll change his ways, and this was not the scenario I’d envisioned.
I’ve already called him a son of a bitch, at high noon on the street in Capitol Hill, and that was before I was halfway into the prosecco and grapefruit juice. And I can’t stop laughing — mostly at myself.
Other than that, it’s a perfect day — almost spring, sunny, and we’re lined up at the bar, me, Chris, my girlfriend, her boyfriend, and we’re about to watch the bartender set fire to some Greek cheese. What could be finer?
We all want to hear about Chris’ romance, so I try to stop talking for a minute, even though it’s what I do best, snarky fast-talking. I am a very clever Gemini/Libra, debating myself for hours, aren’t I? Aren’t I the smartest one in the love room? Everything I do and say is colored by my competitiveness on the field of love, the flaw in myself I have to face down in this, and I’m very amused at myself, and grateful that my friends can be at least a little amused as well.
“Saying ‘love’ is just being open to a possibility,” my girlfriend says. “It’s just opening a door.”
This is someone who sings along with Arthur Lee: “I could be in love with almost everyone…” and means it. She, like me, is old enough to enjoy whatever comes our way in that field of love, and smart enough to take it in the moment and not take it too seriously. But a young woman like that, oh dear. I don’t want him to hurt her feelings. I’ve been that age, and as vulnerable as I imagine she is. Am I that vulnerable now? I press at it as I would a sore muscle. Does it hurt? Does it worry me? Am I bothered that Chris can apparently do this so easily?
“She’s younger!” I tell my girlfriend, and we both laugh again. It’s a little sweet, this wishing I were younger, more beautiful. That’s why we laugh, and it’s what our lovers don’t understand when they reassure us that oh, you’re wonderful, I like older women, I love who you are, you’re hotter than most women half your age, etc. Of course it’s great to hear — I have an ego, for god’s sake. But I also have a grasp of reality. A good part of my pleasure these days comes from knowing much of this isn’t going to last. Being resigned to the fade. It can make every moment crisp as autumn. It brings its own kind of vulnerability and fragility. It’s part of the reason my girlfriend and her slightly younger boyfriend had spent the earlier part of the day on the flying trapeze. You have to jump; you have to try. It’s a good place to be. We’re fortunate, and aware enough to know it.
What I have learned to do is to re-frame the picture, to will a sort of magic and shift my perspective, and everything is suddenly exactly the way that pleases me. My greatest frustrations and disappointments stem from the areas that appear — remember, that’s appear, only — intractable. Finances, politics, chronic health conditions, working for the Man — these things don’t want to budge, but perhaps I’ll develop the alchemical skills to transform even these. The older I get the more I see that I have really very little to lose, and my pride is the smallest thing of all. Every expectation, every ‘should’ I can drop, makes me lighter. Perhaps I started all this to hasten this process of letting go.
If I can let go of my loves, what most people hold most tightly to, do I win the polyamory Olympics? There’s competitiveness again. I’ll never let go of my capacity to laugh at myself. Take everything, but you’ll have to pry my cold, dead fingers off that one. I look at my hand on the stem of the cold wineglass. Not cold or dead, but undeniably old.
I don’t know if Chris realizes how I like to think of his hands on someone more youthful. I don’t hear it spoken of too much in polyamory circles, this kind of pang, this brush of heartbreak and how oddly good it feels. People will talk about their favorite whip or their violet wand, but give me the slash to the heart to get my endorphin rush, I suppose.
The first day I met Chris, he told me — among many things — that he used to be a player. Now, sober for many years and in a very different place in life, he says he doesn’t need that, but the spark is still there. I hope and believe that he’s an honest player, because I know he’s still got that about him. When he said it that day, the words were barely out of his mouth when I burst out: “I wish I were a player! I always wanted to be a Lothario! If I had been a handsome man, I would have — cut a swath!”
This is pure truth. To be able to seduce, awaken, please and leave — with peace and nothing but regret that the way it was will never be possible again — that’s my ideal, I believe. Of course I want to hold Chris forever, in some sense, just as I hope to grow old with Isaac. But knowing that everything changes is its own kind of pleasure.
There have been a very few people I’ve been close to whom I’ve realized I didn’t much like. There have been a few I didn’t love — and they were people who loved me. I never said I loved them, because I would have taken that seriously back then. I should have dropped them, said goodbye, I suppose. I don’t get the feeling they’ve held it against me. They might have re-written the scenes to suit them — I was a clinger and they wanted to be free; or they had only thought they loved me until X came along and they realized what real love is. All these stories, this architecture we construct of love. It gives us places to shelter, to hide, to pleasure in, but will any of it survive us?
Oh we are all so entrancing, aren’t we?! 🙂 Carrie, I too have so much experience – how could I wish to trade it? I am growing my grandfather’s eyebrows – think bushy – and am at “that age” where I find myself wondering if I want to (continue to) pluck away that “wisdom”?
Thank you Maria, I vote with Len on this one, (and eloquently he has put it). You write/speak your truth so beautifully. I am privileged to read you.
xo
you all are so interesting! Or fascinating, as Carrie says…here’s something funny: we were on our way to see a Restoration play, written by a woman, Susanna Centlivre, that was all about gambling at cards among aristocrats and all the other kinds of games they were playing. Kind of Dangerous Liaisons but lighter and funnier. (Tho if you read the book you get a feel for why the Marquise was such a monster. Anyway.)
I find younger women and their struggles very beautiful in many ways, and don’t mean to be condescending or envious…but there is a difference, and I like to be aware of these differences and what they mean.
I appreciate older men now more than I did when I was younger! Basically i love anyone who stays in there trying and fighting. people who have the ability to tap into that phoenix magic that lets them jump in over and over, even when we know what we know. i really love the sense that i can help be an agent of that re-awakening. that’s very exciting but not as available as i get older. but you never know, do you?
Len forgive me but nothing to lose.
Hmmm. Nothing to lose…
(younger women adore older men – the experience the words the know how, craft, honesty. And an astrologer?! And older women appreciate the same things. Don’t they? Probly the same for young men and older men?).
This makes me think of growing up and my Dad playing scrabble. My Mum was always the smart clued up one, with the clever scores and stuff. Words fascinated her.
And my Dad would play his game benignly and bring out these simple words and almost always once or even twice in the game he would smile as tho he found it surprising too, and put all seven letters down. He often won and my Mum used to go wild. (I think it goes with always finding a parking space).
Recently he started playing whist with some formidable players. he hasn’t played for decades. Learned on the farm with the canadian soldiers. I went with him the first couple of times and saw him up to his old tricks again, the simplicity, the understated casts, the brilliant ‘error’ from time to time. He laughed the other day and said he was beginning to remember the game and one of the women had given him a hard stare and said ‘You’ve played before!’ so I guess he’s been rumbled.
phhh! nothing to lose…
(because there is a queue?)
i am a lover of love, which may be why i attract players so easily. i was really working out the last 7 years past this last week and realized that i must be a really fine instrument to have been played so well. hate the game, not the player eh?
This is such a beautifully written article, Maria — at times bitingly funny, at others soulfully elegiac. Thank you.
Writing from the perspective of being 40, I have no desire to go back to where I was at, say, 19 (apart from perhaps to bring some of my 40-year-old self into my 19-year-old experience of the world – but then that would negate the journey I’ve made so far). I also feel my mortality far more than I did, and there is a mourning for where I can see my body heading, even if I probably look better than I did in my early 30s.
But it took some damn hard inner work, and some fucking painful lessons, to get where I am – and I know the work isn’t done, and that it keeps on going until my heart stops beating, and perhaps beyond that. Yet there is an acceptance and a growing sense of love of myself and others that I wouldn’t trade for anything. And in that way, life is good!
I’ve really enjoyed reading the comments here – thank you everyone!
Good point, dear Carrie. You can have youth and a lovely skin, but i would never want to exchange the ‘beauty’ I have acquired over the years with a lovely young skin and all the fears and insecurity that come with youth. Every age has its intrinsic beauty. But I also think it’s ok to feel melancholy as well as joyful about becoming more ‘mature’. And I’m glad you enjoy your daughters’ loveliness.
“but just look at Gianna’s skin, we’ll never have that again”. And we all turned and looked wistfully at the young girls’ silky white skin. But there was a kind of loveliness in acknowledging it openly, and in silence – altogether, a kind of shared melancholy about ageing. And that’s ok.”
I have three beautiful daughters; two are 19 and one is 17. When I look at their faces and their silky skin I marvel that they are my daughters; that they have so much more wisdom than I had at their age. I see their youth and I feel a happiness well up inside me because they have their whole lives ahead of them; they are at the threshold of those lives.
I remember being their age and being so much more insecure and so much less aware. I had intuition but I was messed up by dysfunction. Until I was 18, I had been the “ugly” fat duckling who lived in her shell, afraid to venture out. Then I changed. I have lived so much life that by the time I was 23 I was already a divorcee who had lived in three foreign countries, visited three other foreign countries, been immersed into a very foreign (Arabic) culture, had sex with over 20 men (most of whom were strangers) and had enjoyed that “slut” lifestyle to its fullest, and had stopped traffic on a major street in Phoenix because of my beauty. So I don’t have that melancholy but rather a sense of having been and done so much that now it is their turn to be and do.
Maybe it was because I didn’t think of myself in terms of what I looked like for so long; I was only thin and beautiful for three short years so I wasn’t used to relying on my body or looks for most of my life. When you are not used to being part of the “normal” or “popular” crowd, you don’t sudenly belong just because you finally look the part. Instead I felt beautiful but not part of the beautiful people because I had never belonged with them before. Losing the beauty because of age isn’t so hard on me then.
I don’t envy my daughters their youth or mourne the loss of mine because I had so many amazing experiences and I am still living a life that is wonderous every day. It helps that I still have tons of energy for my age and still think fast.
Yes, thank you for this stunning, inspiring piece, Maria – for your glorious honesty. and humour. Cos in the end, I think the bottom line is humour, vitality, compassion – those get stronger with age (well, maybe the vitality doesn’t!. I was reminded of last month at the hairdressers, in the hairwashing room, we were all lined up like hens in a hen house, heads craned back over wash basins – all women at varying degrees of middle age, apart from a young apprentice hairdresser of 19. And the head hairdresser, hands enmeshed in her clients soapy hair. said “There’s nothing doing – we older women can be fascinating, beautiful in our way – but just look at Gianna’s skin, we’ll never have that again”. And we all turned and looked wistfully at the young girls’ silky white skin. But there was a kind of loveliness in acknowledging it openly, and in silence – altogether, a kind of shared melancholy about ageing. And that’s ok.
Thanks, Len. And I would say the same about you as well. :::smiling:::
“Being resigned to the fade.”
::::pssst! Whispering for effect::::: You don’t really fade. You just mellow and get happier and more content with yourself. You no longer need that outside reassurance of your inner beauty; instead you glow with it and it is apparent to everyone. I haven’t seen you but I know it is there just by your writing.
It no longer becomes about being “hot’ but rather about being your damn self; vibrant, alive, smart, experienced, loved. That’s all that matters. The rest is irrelevant.
Carrie: Thank you, in turn for being such a compassionate teacher of compassion.
Maria: This is one jaw-dropping beautiful piece. This is the equal of classical literature, but more real for having been seen, felt, experienced and reflected on in our time. It is a validation of our time. You have just redeemed our time, for cryin’ out loud. Speaking as an older man whose only remaining strength is nothing to lose, please accept my heartfelt and sincere thanks for this achievement, this reverie, this triumph.
“To be able to seduce, awaken, please and leave — with peace and nothing but regret that the way it was will never be possible again — that’s my ideal, I believe.”
I did that for three years and loved every minute of it. I didn’t have the regret, though. It was all fun and good; no regrets. I would literally proposition the guys I wanted in an assertive way and then, once in the “bedroom” (couch, car, wherever we chose), I got feminine and submissive but active and very hands-on. I felt I was giving a part of myself every time and there was love flowing out of my hands; my body. Afterward we went our separate ways, never to see each other again. I was called “slut” and “whore” for giving myself for free to total strangers but I like to think I gave them love and pleasure even as I took pleasure in return.
Sometimes I miss those days but not much. What I have with David is so much deeper and the love flows both ways. I feel a sense of deep contentment and security; a knowledge that I am at peace in our passion. The feeling that this man loves me beyond all else even as I love him the same is amazing and humbling and exhilarating all at once.
I am liking this aging thing; I feel more at peace with my body than I ever have. I am not competitive so I cannot relate to that at all. Instead, I feel a wonderful sense of well-being in my self and in my love.
We are all different and that is what makes us fascinating.