In this particular phase of my mid-fifties, sadness reigns. Far and away, sadness dominates my emotional landscape. This isn’t to say I’m depressed, exactly. It’s not a miserable, pointless sadness. It’s not crippling or debilitating, but it is pervasive. And it has, if not the stench, at least the faint odor of death about it. It’s not quite nostalgic, but it is about the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. It’s a sort of omnipresent sense that more of my life is behind me than lies ahead, and that many of the things that heretofore have brought me the most pleasure and pain and engagement are changing in their cast.
The simplest, most straightforward way this manifests is with respect to the physical beauty of women. All my life, I’ve felt a slight twinge of deprivation in the presence of beauty, experiencing it often almost as a reminder of what I can’t have, even more than as a reminder of what is or what might be. That tendency in me seems to be mounting. Each beautiful woman I pass, I experience, at least for a moment, as something like a taunt, a cruel tease from the universe, reminding me of just where I sit in it.
When my head is clear, I have three counters to this:
- Beauty is beauty, to be appreciated, admired, worshipped even. There is much pleasure to be had in beauty, and the urge to possess is a diluted impulse that brings more pain than anything else.
- As a 56-year-old married man who’s been married for more than 25 years, I am surely among the most fortunate when it comes to the extent to which I have been free to avail myself of female beauty in the world, both in compulsive and driven ways in the time prior to 2009, and in relatively open and honest and healthy ways in the time since. And then…
- I’m not dead yet. It’s surely true that there are many women for whom I am either too old, too decrepit, or not attractive enough. At the same time, I’m a good-looking 56-year-old man, in good health, with a fit body. I have material and social and intellectual resources, and a shit-ton of sexual experience such that there are plenty of women for whom I’m quite a catch, in many instances so much the more so because I am married.
And when I remember all these things, I’m doing all right. Sometimes though, I forget, and when I forget, it’s very easy for a pretty face, a curvy body, a sexy outfit, to send me on a self-indulgent road of self-pity, remorse, and self-hate. I suppose the challenge is for me to feel the sadness that is not psychotic, the sadness correctly associated with the truth that I am aging, ailing, slowly dying, that my sexual viability is waning, and that the future will look different than the past, and feature more pain, more remembering, more fantasizing – and less pleasure and action.
