True Life Stories:
SOMEONE LIKE ME, BUT YOUNGER
by Joyce Maynard
Added on March 25, 2008
The man across the table from me was thirty years old, maybe, meaning
that I was already married, with my first child on the way, around the
time he got out of diapers. We had gotten together to discuss a project
of mine that interested him, but as the meal progressed, he was expressing
other interests.
I wasn’t going to get involved with someone the age of my daughter, but I was definitely flattered by his attention. I could feel myself shifting slightly from the motherly role I’d adopted, when we met, to something a little different, and as dinner moved towards dessert, I could feel him looking at me less in the way a boy looks to his mom, and more the way a man looks at a woman. "I wasn’t expecting you to be so hot," was how he put it. This was not a reference to menopause.
I confess, I enjoyed this. I had let my hair out of its clip. I fingered the pendant around my neck. I studied his unlined forehead and, reflecting on how long it had been since I’d faced a man across a table this way who still had all his original hair, a man for whom career disappointments and knee injuries and crummy divorces had not yet clouded the horizon. A man who never gave a thought to his prostate gland. A man still young, in other words.
"You’re really something," he said, when I came back from the ladies’ room, where -- it is true -- I had checked my lipstick as I wouldn’t have felt a need to do, if it had been one of my sons with whom I was dining, instead of someone who probably listened to the same music, and hung out at the same clubs. At hours when I am likely to be in bed. Alone.
"Thank you," I said, and I could look him in the eye here, where once I might have blushed or looked away. At the age of fifty three -- eighteen years since my divorce, with no shortage of relationships in my past, but having lived on my own now for longer than I lived with either parents or husband, I no longer assume as I once did that being unattached is a transitory condition for me. If there was a time when I viewed my single life as a period of waiting, for the real life that would begin when the right man came along, that day is long gone. And with it has come a certain regret, for sure, but also an undeniable sense of strength and assurance. I have done OK without a partner for a long time now. I will continue to do so. Not that I wouldn’t love to be in love, with someone who loves me back, and (because this next does not automatically follow the first set of conditions) able to put my life together with that of this other person. But I don’t feel the same hunger I once did, to partner up before the ark sets sail.
I have gotten past the uncertainties I used to feel, when someone gave a compliment. Time was, I stopped to consider what my strategy might be here. Now my rule is a simple one. Do what I want. Say what’s on my mind. If the other person doesn’t like that, it’s better to find that out sooner rather later.
"I mean it," he went on. "The girls I meet… the girls I go out with… they’re playing all these games. It’s so great to be around a woman who’s not putting on some kind of act. Someone that’s just totally real."
"It took a while," I said. "You have to do all that other stuff before you figure out that approach doesn’t work."
"I wish…" he began.
I looked at him. He reached his hand across the table for mine.
"I wish I could find someone just like you," he said. "Only younger."
Someone like me, but younger. You might as well say, someone who sings like Aretha Franklin, only white. George W. Bush, but smart.
"That person doesn’t exist," I told him. "Even when I was young myself, I wasn’t like me, now."
Which brings me to the gift older women possess, that nobody can take from us. The one thing age (brutal as it may be) cannot wither, nor custom stale, because in fact, only age produces it. It is the ablity to be ourselves, at last. After thirty, forty or fifty years of worrying what everybody else thinks about us, and trying to make people happy, an older woman knows at last that you can’t please all the people all the time, or even most of the people most of the time. All you can do maybe is please yourself.
I doubt this state of being would appear so noteworthy to me if it hadn’t been preceded by a a few decades of a very different kind of behavior. Speaking for myself first , but with the recognition that I am hardly alone in this, I will admit to having spent many long and frustrating years, trying to transform myself into the person I needed to be, for my relationships with men to work. Not that this resulted in wonderfully successful relationships, mind you. (One is all it takes, actually.) But when they didn’t work, it surely wasn’t for lack of effort expended. Maybe just the opposite. Too much.
Never mind how this happened, but the other night I tuned in to a reality show which happens to be a sick addiction of mine: "The Bachelor" -- a show in which a man the TV audience is meant to view as an undeniable catch, as a husband, is asked to select his future bride from a field of fifteen eager contestants. (We are further expected to take on faith the fundamental concept that a husband is what every reasonable young woman in America should want, and that any one of these fifteen would be happy to be chosen. The possibility that one of them might not want him is not a question anybody’s asking here.)
This season’s bachelor, Andy, like all the others who preceded him, was handsome in a toothpaste-commercial kind of way -- a military doctor and triathlete, with the abs to prove it, who expressed a desire to find (over the course of ten episodes) his soul mate, life partner, mother of his children, and all-around companion on the jogging trail of life. The women, ranging from cute to knockout, ages 23 to 28, had been selected to move into a mansion in Santa Monica, where they would submit to a rigorous selection process (starting with an athletic competition, followed by a group date on a yacht) in which a few of them would be eliminated every week, culminating in the great moment when The Bachelor would choose his lucky bride.
What struck me, watching this -- invariably stupefied, but unable to turn off the set -- was not only the unquestioned assumption that these young women would want to be picked in the first place, but just as much so, the way in which they assumed that the way to Andy’s heart lay in their success at putting on the best possible show for him -- of athletic prowess, a positive attitude, bubbly personality (god forbid, anyone on this show actually have a problem), commitment to home and family, and great cooking skills. The idea that any one of them might adopt the approach of "I’ll just be myself and let the chips fall where they may" was about as alien to these young women as it would have been if one of them had allowed herself to show up for breakfast, or her exercise workout, without makeup on.
Maybe a person has to live through a few failed relationships -- or a few dozen failed relationships -- to learn this: that sooner or later, the truth about who you really are is likely to slip out. If being yourself isn’t going to work with somebody, it’s probably best to determine that fact before you head off on the Hawaiian honeymoon so many of the young women on The Bachelor seemed fixated on. ("Describe your dream wedding," one of them asked The Bachelor the other night -- in a rare moment when the tables were turned, very slightly, towards checking out the man. But the question wasn’t "What kind of marriage would you like?" or "what kind of relationship?" It had more to do with locale, size of guest list, color scheme.)
So I’m back to this question of who a woman would be, if she were
like me, but younger, as my dinner companion envisioned her. The younger
part would involve a flatter stomach probably, fewer lines around my mouth
and eyes, a look around my knees I can achieve now, for a moment, if I
gather up the extra skin around that vicinity and pull it up a little
as a person would, who was smoothing a bedspread or putting on stockings.
(An activity that dates a person, as precisely the kind of person who
does need to pull up the extra skin around her knees, by the way. Because
someone the age of my daughter, say -- or the age of those young women
on The Bachelor -- has probably never pulled on a stocking of this sort
or fastened a garter in her life.)
But as for what the "like me" part of this hypothetical ideal woman looks like -- I think I know. It’s the part that doesn’t try to please anymore, or at least, not the way a younger woman would. Who I am now is a woman in possession of the belief that the only way anyone’s likely to be happy with me is if he knows who I am and decides, that’s fine by him. Sooner or later, I’ll end up being myself anyway. I might work really hard at being the woman a certain man might find irresistible, to the point where he did find me irresistible. Only where would that get me? I’d have to keep up the act forever. So, never mind.
When I was young, and I wanted a man to love me, I worked at it, and if things didn’t turn out the way I wanted, I believed I’d failed. Now I figure whatever happens is what was supposed to take place. There is no such thing as letting some terrible revelation about myself slip out, by accident, because whatever slips out is the truth of who I am, and if who I am doesn’t suit a person, I’d better not be with him.
"We could have such a good time if you could just be nice," a man told me, not so long ago. A man I loved, with whom I had been very much hoping I might have a future. "If you would only... behave," he said. "Things could be wonderful."
For him, perhaps. But the truth was, the times I wasn’t nice were also the times I was most myself. My moments of what he perceived as acting up were in fact, my moments of greatest authenticity. After years of hiding those parts of myself away, in the interest of keeping the peace, I had come to the recognition that this kind of peace, this kind of wonderful times, bore too high a price.
I love men, but I don’t need one any more, the way I did, when I was young. (And I wanted someone to be a father for my children. And then, I wanted someone to raise them with me.) The ability to take care of my own self wasn’t an aptitude I had sought out, but after many years of having to do that, I acquired it, and once acquired, it is not a skill that disappears. I couldn’t conceal it now, if I wanted to. This is both good news or bad, depending on the man. I’m not looking for him to be my world. I have one already. It is the biggest thing I acquired, over the course of all those years I was busy watching the grey hair move in, and the lines take up residence in my forehead. I became my truest self, and though The Bachelor wouldn’t hand me the coveted rose, signaling that I was in the running for the big prize, the good news is, I wouldn’t choose him either.
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