Taking an Older Lover
Field Notes from the Trenches
I was meant to be going on a first date which had already been rescheduled once. This detail feels very important to me.
When the 25-year-old Hinge match I’d been texting for a month cancelled on me again for his very important work in IB, I wasn’t really disappointed, just felt like the whole thing was a waste of a hair wash. I replied:
Ah no worries, my friends are going out for St. Patty’s so it all works out. Lmk if and when you want to raincheck!Which, looking back, was perhaps too nice. But it was true: I was grateful to have other plans, and I wasn’t surprised. He’d done this once before.
So I pivoted; I got ready for a night with the girls. And as I pulled a “Kiss Me” trucker hat down over my freshly blow dried part, applied tubing mascara to my eyelashes, and stepped out onto the sidewalk, I felt that almost imperceptible charge in the air —when the gust from a closed door opens an unexpected window. Possibility.
I saw him before he saw me. From across the room of our second bar, seated in a small circle booth which I was guarding religiously despite its not being coveted by any competitors in particular.
Still, I was dutifully holding down the fort while the rest of my friends played pool. At some point, he had joined them.
“Who is that?” I asked Nat, who was keeping me company. Her eyes tracked my gaze. She didn’t know, but he was cute, we agreed.
“We’re having a lot of fun over there,” Sarah came to tell us, pool cue in one hand, sweating Downeast cider can in the other. “You guys should come over.”
We reluctantly agreed. I’m not all that good at pool, and also, need I reiterate the false importance of guarding the circle booth?
I resumed my spectatorship from a nearby barstool, and not very subtly, I suppose, because at some point the mystery man and I locked eyes over the fuzzy pool table green. He silently waved. I smiled, caught. My hand mirrored his.
He was called Tim: the same as my two least favorite of my Mom’s exes. -2
He was Canadian. +1
He was also visiting NYC from Austin. -5
See, it’s just that as a rule, I don’t really do that any more —go for people who aren’t available. Who aren’t real, viable options. I’ve been there, done that… more than I care to admit.
My favorite genre of romantic prospect, historically, has been someone who is: Perfect, but.
But, they just got out of a serious relationship. But they’re leaving for the summer. But they’re not completely over their ex. And, most recently, an impressive all three!!!
In the end, despite the fact that the onus should fall on the person who didn’t know what they wanted —the one who wasn’t ready but tried anyway— the only blame I can really make stick is to myself. The signs were there all along, and I ignored them in favor of hope. It doesn’t make me at fault, necessarily, but it does make me a willing accomplice. And a foolish one, at that.
So it’s with all this available information, and my prior experience, that I filed Tim —the Canadian visiting from Austin— into the mental category of Not a Possibility.
But of course, reader, that’s not where he stayed.
What can I say? Chance was in the air. Everyone gets to be good at pool once.
We ended that first night at Joe’s Pizza, a whopping 10 blocks down and two avenues over from where we started at a random bar called, not unironically, “The One Trick Pony.” We bought $40 worth of pepperoni “dollar slice” pizza for four of us, paid in hastily withdrawn ATM cash.
Tim had to pee, and I told him to go in an alley but not to get a ticket.
When he came back, I very smartly asked if he had washed his hands. He laughed, bought three waters, and handed one to a homeless man outside, along with a slice.
I don’t know how we all got separated, but somehow he and I ended up sitting on two stools near a wall ledge —feet propped on the bars of each other’s seats, sandwiching our knees— while our friends engaged in deep, drunken conversation in the center of the room. It was here that I finally thought to ask him how old he was.
“Guess,” he said through a mouthful of greasy cheese.
“Hmmm… 28?”
He shook his head with a small smile, like he was keeping a secret.
“What?! Older??”
“Yep.”
“Thirty,” I said in disbelief.
“Older.”
“32…”
He pointed up with his thumb.
“What! 33?” I gasped.
We continued on like this: me counting up by intervals of one, in complete disbelief, until we arrived at 37.
“Thirty-seven,” I repeated in shock, tried to let it sink in.
“Thirty-seven,” he owned it.
I spent every night with him for the rest of that week.
It was a whirlwind of a week. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you there was also a hell of a comedown.
I broke my rule. I went for someone who is unavailable. Or, at least, I let them go for me. And it was so… great.
He was surprising and challenging and smart without condescension. And, all the rumors are true: he was also, really, so very nice.
I’ve always been suspicious of age gap relationships; wary of any dramatic imbalance in power. But I was surprised to find how easy it was to fall into step with him; how much he knew and how little it actually minimized my personal wisdom.
In fact, I found Tim on more equal footing than most men I’ve dated. I think it was something about his quality of being fully formed.
When meeting someone my age, there are so many variables between us; so much, independently and together, that is left to be settled. My instinct is to accommodate. I can easily —ardently and in good faith— be swayed to someone’s way of thinking: their preference for strawberry over grape jelly, their unwillingness to adopt a label.
At the time it always feels like an act of care. I do it easily; I’m happy to. It’s not a cost. In fact, it often feels very true to me, in line with my beliefs. I want to be easy, I want to be flexible; open. It’s only after things end, and the rose colored glasses are replaced with latent clarity, that I remember: I have always been someone who reaches for grape. My malleability was wasted on someone who didn’t care to order both.
The stuff I’m made of is solidifying, for sure, but there’s still molten matter at my core. It was really refreshing, for once, to crash against a solid surface.
He’s cultivated his personhood; it’s sure, steady. He doesn’t have much to prove, which begat an easy authenticity in me.
It could be measured in our double and triple texts followed by another one ten minutes later, because we’d had a new thought. It was me calling to ask the plan rather than sitting around waiting for a text, despite our not yet having spoken over the phone. I send as many emojis as I want, because he’s a millennial. I’m not so worried about being chill, whatever that has ever meant, and because it’s never given me a single thing in return. I feel rather freed of the shackles of a situationship because… has he ever even had one?
At some point during the week, in one of my truly manic voice memos to my best friend Sally —sent desperately from my open mouth, stuck in its shit eating grin in NYC, to her pinging inbox in LA— I put it this way:
“It’s like… I understand now why older women call it ‘taking a lover.’”
I laughed my way through the end of the sentence, but in another, I said:
“I feel like my judgement is getting much more grounded when it comes to romantic prospects; I’m not even all that into him yet, I’m very curious about him, and like, pleasantly surprised… and I think that’s kind of what I meant by ‘taking a lover,’ like, being a solitary, set human being, being concrete, being set in stone… and then allowing someone else to pass through, but you remain. Oh my god, I’m using Biblical terms.
Maybe it’s idealistic, but I think of older people, and older romance as being, like, ‘I don’t need to change you, and I don’t want to change you. You’re a fully formed person, and I am too, and I choose you, or, I delight in you and all your quirks, and you’re okay just the way you are.’ And that’s how I want to be received by someone else.”
So, there was an ease with which I matriculated these unexpected life lessons; the chaotic thrill of my week with an older man. I learned so much in such a short time, and I knew —even as it was happening— that no matter how it ended, the experience would be net positive.
My incessant need for control and assigning meaning or knowing the ending took a small break. I was allowed to just have it, I decided, this unlikely experience.
“It was like… someone was touching my body the way—and not in a sexual way—I mean, just like, giving me the passive physical touch that I have always wanted… and I was like, woah this is crazy!
He was just running his hand up and down the side of my entire body, like down to my ankle. And—sorry I’m being crazy right now—but, anyways, I just had to externally process that because it was crazy, and so fun and sweet.
Takeaways are… 37 was fun, that was really fun. I think I should do more of that.”
Considering my voice was getting shrill just recounting some of these details to my best friend over voice memo, I do acknowledge that this is typically the sort of thing I’d just write in a journal and never revisit.
But, it all felt very moving to me. Not just on the surface, either; I’m talking tectonic level shifts. I am learning so much.
And I’ve read so much vulnerable, sexy, uncomfortable, good stuff lately. It made me think: heck, why not.
I’m still talking to the Canadian.
And I’m still looking for the real thing.
I want such unfettered adoration poured over my head, tucked against my breastbone, wrapped around my ankle.
I’m not sure The One Trick Pony is where I find it, but, how would I know if I never tried?
This was a fantastic and beautifully written read 🩷
I need a novel of these endeavors - 🧎♀️➡️thank you for your vulnerability