Prime Time (29 page)

With Bob Shaye on the set of
Monster-in-Law,
which his company, New Line Cinema, produced.

With music pals Dallas Austin and Big Boi.

CHAPTER 12

Love in the Third Act

The one thing that can’t be taken from us, even by death, is the love we give away before we go.

—REVEREND FORREST CHURCH,
Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow

F
ROM EVERYTHING I’VE READ AND WHAT I’VE HEARD FROM most of the gerontology experts I’ve talked to, it seems clear that Third Acts have the potential to be a prime time for deepening already existing love relationships or forging new and amazingly rich ones—if one has a desire for such a relationship, and if there is a partner! Our joints may ache and our eyesight dim, but our hearts and minds may be primed for deeper intimacy and mutuality than we’ve ever experienced before.

Intimacy: Suzanna’s Story

One woman whose experience exemplifies the later-life discovery of intimacy is seventy-year-old Suzanna Graves. A lovely, slender woman who adorns herself with teasingly sheer, lush, textured fabrics that gleam and shimmer when she moves, she was an actor and is now a therapist. We met in her small, perfume-scented New York apartment for hours, drank tea, and talked about age and art and love. I asked how she felt about being older.

“Right now I am in a state of shock,” she blurted out. “Every year in my sixties was better than the year before. I mean, it has been the best decade of my life. I just can’t tell you.”

“Why, do you suppose?” I asked

“Well, we know what Freud said: love and work. I have come to the therapy work that I adore, and I have love. It started when I was finally able to get free of my obsession with romantic love—the thinking that the answer to my life was going to be Mr. Right. I was married for seven years and have two daughters and I’ve been single for forty years. I had many lovers … handsome men, famous even. But I finally had enough of all that charisma, with me a mouse in the corner. It always felt so unequal. Then too, I was frigid until well into my thirties. I was pretty. I got it. I knew what I was supposed to do: please men. But I was frigid. I went through it all because I wanted to please men, but my sexuality? What was that? Then, with a lot of therapy, I came out the other side and stopped looking for a man to save me.”

Suzanna also attended workshops run by the famous sex therapist Betty Dodson, who taught women to not be afraid of pleasuring themselves—with their hands, with vibrators. Dodson made sexual pleasure understandable and okay for thousands of lucky women, and Suzanna was one of them.

“Five or so years ago,” Suzanna continued, “I ran into an actor friend whom I hadn’t seen in many years. We’d been in a co-counseling group together. We knew each other’s stuff. It was great to see him—chat, chat, and that was that. And the next thing that happened was that my daughter was about to get married and she asked me why I hadn’t been in a long-term relationship and I told her, ‘It’s a lot of trouble and I have no libido.’ So guess what she did? She turned me on to a gynecologist who prescribed testosterone pills. This doctor told me there’s no reason women in their sixties shouldn’t have the sexual responses of women in their thirties. Within a month or so I began to notice that men were looking at me differently. I went to Zabar’s deli—remember Zabar’s?—and I was standing looking at the food display and the woman said, ‘Okay, honey. What will it be?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I am looking for inspiration.’ And this cool actor guy—you know what I mean: little stubble, good-looking, buff—came up to me and said, ‘Aren’t we all?’ And I said, ‘Well, yes.’ But there was a palpable difference. I was putting out something. And I thought, ‘Hmmm, I’d like a boyfriend.’ ”

“How old were you then?”

“Sixty-five, I think. I knew I didn’t want any of the old stuff. Now I want somebody I can feel safe with. I want somebody I can talk with. So I called up my actor friend and I said, ‘Would you care to move to the flirting stage?’ and he—bless his soul—I mean, not a beat, he said, ‘I’ve only been waiting since 1982.’ Oh! So I thought that was pretty good. He is ten years younger than I am.”

I asked if this age difference made her self-conscious, but she waved off that suggestion, adding, “None of it is what I imagined at this age. Anyway, one weekend my actor friend and I both had to go out of town to meet with people we had worked with in the past and to see a play. He carried my suitcase to our hotel and one thing led to another, but since we did have to go to a meeting and then the theater that night, I had the foresight to set the alarm clock.” Suzanna paused, and a lovely sensuality softened her face. “This man was the most divine kisser in the world. He had the most perfect touch. He was—I was beside myself. I had the most ecstatic experience. And I don’t know how to say this, but he had the most wonderful, big, dry, warm hands. I have cold, clammy hands. I have little Waspy hands. There was something so utterly perfect. Anyway, at one point the alarm clock went off. He reached across me, turned the alarm around, and said, ‘No, Suzanna. Wouldn’t you like to come again? There is always time for that other.’ And he said it in a tone of voice that was just—it was just somehow—gruff—the voice came from such a deep place and, well, there are lovely things in life and, you know, there
is
always time for that other. And, I don’t know how to say it—there was something about it that was just …”

“Irresistible?”

“Irresistible, yes. And that he has this attitude about sex that is, to me, the most straightforward, the most—‘healthy’ sounds revolting, but—healthy, rational, kind, generous, good, whatever, that I have come across in any man. So, to me, there is this just amazing thing. And he does it often. There was a time when I had an urgent problem with my eye. I was scared. It was Sunday, but I called my doctor and made an appointment for the next morning at eight
A.M.
My lover walked out into the sunshine with me that Sunday afternoon and turned to me and said, ‘Well, that’s good. We have a plan. We’ll go home. I will run you a bath. You’ll feel better. I can lick you. You will be calm. No exertion on your part. You will sleep well. Then we will go to the doctor early in the morning.’ There is something about his attitude toward sex, to me, that is just amazing. That said, do we have problems? Big problems. We do. So that is the story behind how I am the poster child for testosterone, because I still have a libido at this point. Now, I don’t know if I will have it if I stop taking the pills, but at this point the habit is so ingrained that when I see my lover I know that should I wish it, good times will ensue. I don’t know whether it’s become a habit, Pavlov’s dog, or whether it is the testosterone that is keeping me libidinous. But who cares?”

I asked if they lived apart, and she was adamant on that point.

“I’m with clients all day in my practice on a very intense level, and apart from that I’m used to solitude. My default position is ‘How can I help? How can I be a good girl?’ You called it the ‘disease to please’ in your memoirs. So now, I need time to reintegrate, to come back into my skin so I won’t fall into those old patterns.” We gave each other a high five on that one.

“Meanwhile,” I said, “ you are in a satisfying, loving relationship, having good sex, and you are strong enough now to know what you want and need and what you don’t care for. And, through therapy and your daughter’s nudging and the hormonal tinkering, you went and got yourself ready for some loving. Staying ready for it but not incomplete if it doesn’t come—that’s the challenge now, right? That’s the road I’ve been on myself for some years. And it came for me, too. In my seventies!” Another high five.

Individuation and Androgenization

Suzanna and I are examples of women who, later in life, have come to embody two things that allowed us to open to the potential for love and sensuality, elements that tend to be more evident in older women of our generation: individuation and androgenization, which I will explain in a second, but I know, I know! They don’t sound very romantic! Nevertheless, possessing them makes romance deeper than ever. For some, this comes naturally … and earlier. For us, as for many others, it took work and desire and time. Let me explain.

The psychologist Carl Jung used the term “individuation,” which is very different from individualism in that it allows one to maintain healthy boundaries—to not lose oneself—while being in an emotionally and physically intimate relationship. Suzanna’s healthy boundaries have allowed her to know that she needs to live alone, have time to herself, and avoid getting caught up in her partner’s “stuff.” Like Suzanna, I found standing on my own two feet more than iffy in my earlier years, when I lacked confidence and an independent identity. I could become what a man wanted me to be, what I thought was required so as to be lovable. I’m probably the only person in the world who thought Woody Allen’s movie
Zelig
must have been based on a true story. The title character, who literally becomes whomever he is talking to, seemed perfectly plausible to old “I’ll be whatever you want me to be” me. Talk about poor boundaries! But real intimacy, however, requires self-revelation, and that’s problematic if you’re not sure what the “self” is or are scared that your revealed self will be discovered as a fraud and rejected. We speak of falling in love. Maybe that was the problem. Suzanna and I fell because we weren’t standing on our own two feet. Individuation, on the other hand, means you “own” yourself, you are a free-standing, self-validated adult, as opposed to entwined and needy, and this tends to happen to women in their fifties and beyond, enabling them, in their intimate relationships, to “stay in connection without being consumed by the other person,” as Dr. David Schnarch puts it.
¹
The psychologist Terrence Real says, “There is no aphrodisiac stronger than authentic connection.”
²

Carl Jung also believed that with individuation, people’s maleness and femaleness come into balance. Dr. Jane Loevinger and many other psychologists today agree that the potential to let go of rigid sex roles for both men and women in the last third of life represents the peak of maturity and points the way to achieving individuation, autonomy and “communion.”
³
Betty Friedan’s research on aging showed her that “couples facing age with lowest morale and least sense of intimacy are those where the husband
still defines himself as family chief and provider,
and where the woman
still sees her identity only as a housewife/mother.
”
⁴

The social gerontologist and anthropologist David Gutmann has written, “Whereas adult males start from a grounding in Active Mastery and move toward Passive Mastery, women are first grounded in Passive Mastery, characterized by dependence on and even deference to the husband, but surge in later life toward Active Mastery.… Across cultures, and with age, they seem to become more authoritative, more effective, and less willing to trade submission for security.”
⁵
Scientists I interviewed at the Stanford Center on Longevity say there is no empirical scientific evidence to prove that this recalibration of gender roles is the norm, as Gutmann and others claim. But it seems natural that the hormonal changes associated with aging, along with the man’s retirement, would lead to a leveling out of gender differences. And it makes sense that the balancing out of what previously were narrow, socially proscribed gender roles would lead to greater integrity, wholeness, and authenticity for both men and women. Most of the women I have interviewed and read about have experienced this “gender balancing”—with men potentially regaining the humanness they lost in early boyhood and women potentially regaining, with age, the agency and assertiveness they had prior to adolescence. If this androgenization represents the peak of maturity and communion for both genders, why not strive for it?

Interestingly, my age cohort and the boomer generation immediately following may be the last to experience this late-life androgenization. It appears (and I pray this is true) that sex roles for Generation X women and men are already undergoing the kind of relaxation that may, if psychologists are correct, augur happier partnerships earlier in life. A 2007
Time
magazine article said that “the number of stay-at-home fathers has tripled in the past ten years” and that these “new Dads” “are challenging old definitions of masculinity.” “Masculinity has traditionally been associated with work and work-related success, with competition, power, prestige, dominance over women, restrictive emotionality—that’s a big one,” says Aaron Rochlen, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas, who studies fatherhood and masculinity. “Other research shows that fathers who stop being men of the old mold have better adjusted children, better marriages and better work lives—better mental and physical health, even. Basically,” Rochlen concludes, “masculinity is bad for you.”
⁶