“It’s considered an older man’s right to date younger women and also just an inevitable result of biology. But a woman who goes out with a man ten years younger would be described as having ‘scored’ or ‘gotten her hands on him’”
Photo: Francesca Dagrada/Getty Images/EyeEm One day in the winter of 2013, I was walking down the main street of the small town I live in when someone tapped me on the back. I was in a bad mood, days overdue on my health-insurance payment and months overdue on breaking up with someone. Reasons why my life was a mess kept coming at me, like the flying saucers in Asteroids, the only video game I’ve ever played. I was 43 and a half, and I was panicking about my life as if I were stoned. I wasn’t.
His name was Tor. I had met him briefly years before, and when I had recently been introduced to his cousin, I told her, “Oh, yeah, I know your cousin. He’s hot.” This had obviously made its way back to him, as I must have intended. We stood in the street and talked. Then we stood on the steps of the coffee place I was about to enter and talked, then we went inside and talked in the vestibule.
But also an actual young person. People say age is just a number, yet this truth glosses over the fact that number refers, rather crucially, to the number of years one has been alive.
Also, their assumptions were right. Right before I met Tor, my gynecologist was like, “Hey, it’s a good time in life to see where your hormones are at,” and he ran a test and then showed me a whole bunch of numbers. One of those numbers was really low. “What’s that?” I asked the doctor. “Oh, that basically shows how fertile you are,” he said breezily. My number was like one. “What’s normal?” I asked. Normal seemed to be somewhere around 40. I had never wanted children.
“You’re fucking 45,” my best friend said about all of this, blowing out smoke in annoyance. “If he doesn’t know you can’t get pregnant, well, he’s so stupid that if you ever break up because he suddenly wants a baby, you’ll be glad to get rid of him.” I laughed, but I knew I would never be glad to get rid of him.
For all the annoyance I felt at being called a “cradle robber,” my own views on the subject were as harsh and judgmental as anyone’s. I was a lifelong feminist who had always kept up with the reading, but it all seemed pretty useless to me in this situation. There were probably other representations of femininity around me at the time, but the only ones I ever saw were young moms, and I thought, I can’t be either of those things.
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