LOVE, LATE AFTERNOON
I know a man who by his late 80’s had lived out the May-December paradigm. He had four marriages, each time finding a woman at least 20 years (and more) younger than he. For him late love was a fiction. His loves were a denial, perhaps an attempt to erase, the age he was accumulating. He seemed to have sought rejuvenation with each new amour and resisted their aging by turning them in for a new, ever younger model.
But then there are those who never seemed to find love until it seemed too late, as if their love warranty had expired and they now faced a lonely, loveless end stage. But then fate or an accident provides a long, very long, last opportunity that rises up and erupts in their heart. Such individuals know they must be guarded against false, beguiling promises of love. Some cannot resist or they intentionally throw all caution to the wind, taking pleasure and joy knowing it’s all unfounded and impermanent.
And then there is the rare—perhaps not so rare—instance of falling in love, a very first love, late in life. Not at 40 or 50. Those are late because of delayed availability, a block imposed by a focus on career or the care of a parent or a disabled child, or a perfectionistic hold out for the perfect one. Then time suddenly seems to be running out and, warding off a looming endless loneliness, the search for love takes center stage. And a someone is chosen.
Truly late love, not necessarily the first or even the second, comes so late that it arises at an untimely moment, when new love is unexpected, even undesired, impracticable, embarrassing, unsightly in others’ eyes, wrong and unseemly for a senior. Absurd for an old person.
Psychologists recently have reported that personalities seem to change before age 30 and after age 60. And they track such changes by measuring the Big Five traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, openness to experience, and neuroticism. Of course measuring such traits, even using concordant observers, is ultimately subjective and, in my view, unreliable.
Nonetheless, I can endorse the concept of personality change late in life from my own observation and experience. Many such changes are reactions to life events: loss of a partner, loss of a cherished pet, retirement, children becoming more independent and involved in lives and immediate families of their own, illnesses, hearing loss, immobilities, mood disorders. The impact of such events cannot be underestimated. Yet aside from all these there come changes in perspective that cannot be explained by such proximal conditions.
This is when late love may arise. Like cupid’s arrow, love’s trajectory falls on one who is ready, open to that experience, agreeable to its possibility, conscientious about love’s probable impact, sufficiently extroverted to allow a new person into one’s orbit, and free enough of disabling neuroticism so that love can become manifest and real.
And love strikes at that advanced age with the same stunning, demobilizing, convulsing punch that it did at age 16 or 20 or even 40-50. Perhaps, as Freud would surely argue, late love like all love is fueled by libido, meaning sexual desire and naked lust. Sex is like a Fury, a demonic creature forcing its way both up the spinal cord from the hormone fomenters and down from the emotion wracked brain, perhaps stronger from below in the young and more potent from the brain in the elderly. The argument is mute. Love is blinded by its ebullience. It hits everyone, when the target is met, with much the same force and fortitude.
Who has not seen a grandma or grandpa suddenly caught in the throes of fresh, exuberant love? To an on-looker or a family member it may seem cute or disgusting, sweet or sour. That depends on the kind of relationship the observer has with the elder person. No matter how the love appears and how it evolves, it is its own reality.
After all, after the after, love is unbounded and also unbounding. Good news to those awaiting it, whatever age.
Isn’t it true: that love waits for no one and for everyone?
