by Jane Fonda
I asked Mary what they had in common. “He is very cultured,” she replied. “He belongs to the High Museum, he goes to the opera, to the ballet. And, like I said, he’s very independent.”
“And are you planning on getting married?” I asked. Mary explained that he’s been married three times, so no. “But he wants me to live with him. He lives in a condo downtown that he has a mortgage on. I own this house. I love this house. He is not here half the time because he travels all over the world selling agricultural equipment. I keep saying to myself, ‘Why would I want to live in a place I don’t like when he’s not even here?’ I’ve grown to like having my own space.”
I have spoken with a number of women and men who feel it can be good to extend the emailing and phone calling for weeks, even months, so that you really get to know the person before moving to the dating phase. However long you wait, be sure that you feel there is a real potential for compatibility before arranging a meeting. Like Mary, when you do meet, do it in a safe, public place and tell someone what you’re doing and where you will be, and carry a cellphone with you. Don’t commit to spending more than thirty minutes or so the first time. If he’s a dud, you don’t want to get stuck. And, under those circumstances in particular, offer to split the tab with him.
Out of the seventeen men she exchanged emails and phone calls with, Mary met only four of them face-to-face. I asked her if it was clear to her right away that they weren’t right. “Oh yes,” she said. “There was one guy I met twice. He told me he was going to join the Peace Corps, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s got nothing to do with me!’ But he was the only one I met more than once. When I look back on it, I feel like it really wasn’t going to work out with any of those guys.”
“How long did you date the man you’re with before you had sex?”
“Probably about three weeks.”
“And was it hard? I mean, in terms of you having been single for—”
“No, it wasn’t,” Mary said with certainty. “We went to Friday night at the High, where the museum has martinis and a jazz band and you can look at art. Then we went to eat. It was just a very nice evening and … no, it was not hard.”
If and when the time comes that you want to have sex with your new friend, be sure to be prepared with condoms and lubrication. If he resists using a condom, he’s probably not for you.
It can be tough when you think the first date went well but he doesn’t call again. Keep in mind that older men, far more than most older women, are looking for a serious, long-term commitment. “A perfectly nice date may not result in a follow-up if they don’t sense that you are exactly what they are looking for,” cautions Dr. Pepper Schwartz. “A quick rejection doesn’t feel good—but it’s the style of dating these days. People take their best guess right away.… If that’s their decision, there’s nothing to be done about it.… If he’s not calling, he’s not for you.”2
When and if a relationship does develop, be sure that the two of you have a clear understanding of what each expects out of it: Do you want a completely monogamous commitment, or to continue seeing other people? Do you envision getting together once or twice a month or more regularly but without moving in together? And if he won’t give you a home phone number or allow you to meet his children and friends, beware: He may be married.
Mary Madden wasn’t alone in finding it hard to tell a man she wasn’t interested. “You feel kind of sorry for them,” she said. “A Vietnam veteran emailed me one day because he’d spent the whole day at the VA hospital because he could not hear and he could not walk. I was like, this is just not going to work for me. But it was hard. It pulls on a lot of heartstrings.”
My heartstrings got pulled in the Third Act just when I felt certain I didn’t care anymore and wasn’t looking. Five days before I was going to have knee surgery, I was in Paris shooting (in French and English!) a commercial for L’Oréal skin-care products for older women. A pal of mine, the wonderfully funny writer Carrie Fisher, sent me an email to let me know that a longtime friend of hers, the music producer Richard Perry, upon discovering that I would be stuck in Los Angeles for at least a month because of the surgery, had asked her to organize a dinner where he could reconnect with me. I had first met him thirty-five years earlier, when he brought together a group of music industry heavyweights in his home to support my then husband, Tom Hayden, in his campaign for the U.S. Senate. I remembered the house, perched atop a hill overlooking all of Los Angeles, with a pool and a tennis court and tastefully decorated in an Art Deco style. (He still lives there … and now so do I, much of the time.)
Ten years later we ran into each other at a party in Aspen. Tom had chosen to stay home with the children, so I arrived alone, and when I saw Richard I asked him to be my date for the evening. We danced together all night; and I didn’t see him again for twenty-five years. But there was that distant memory. And there were the songs he produced, hit after hit. Many of them I would use in the Workout classes I taught. I guess “Slow Hand,” by the Pointer Sisters, was the one that always made me wonder what Richard was up to. I have to tell you, when I saw his name in Carrie’s email, my heart did a little flip. I showed the email to Matthew Shields, my hairstylist. “See this name? Richard Perry? This could be fun.” Barely ten days after the surgery, when I was still on crutches, we had our “reunion” dinner, and he’s been my honey ever since. At seventy-one it felt good to feel good again and also to know that I can remain who I am, not trying to tailor my personhood to meet a man’s fancy—well, maybe a little. When we’ve grown up (and that took a while for me), we are clearer about who we are, what we want and don’t want, and this can mean that later in life the unexpected can always happen—if we remain open to it.
CHAPTER 16
Generativity: Leaving Footprints
Old age is like a minefield: if you see footprints leading to the other side, step in them.1
—GEORGE VAILLANT
If the task of young adults is to create biological heirs, the task of old age is to create social heirs.2
—GEORGE VAILLANT
Speaking at the Raises not Roses festival in 1979.
OTHER THAN DISEASE, THE PARAMOUNT DANGERS OF ACT III are loneliness, depression, and lack of purpose. These are, to a large degree, matters that have to do with the personal choices we make at this stage of our lives, what we choose to do or not do. When we feel we have purpose in our lives, the loneliness and depression seem to fade more into the background. Okay, so my back aches, but I’m passionate about what I’m doing. Sure, I lost my network of friends at the office when I retired, but I’m going out and making new ones.
Just as the Third Act is the time for journeying inward to allow the flowering of consciousness and growth, it is also the time to radiate that consciousness outward as a resource not only for our own self-fulfillment but for the world, as well.
Think of the bright blooms that burst forth from invisible, underground rhizomes to catch the sun. This new spring growth carries the sunshine—transmuted to sugar, thanks to chlorophyll—back to nourish the root. In us humans, the process is also circular: The outward manifestation of our inner growth is what loops back and ensures that our inner self is nourished.
But it is the outer–what we do—that becomes our personal footprint, our ultimate identity. We are what we do.
Life can be taken away without death. We can let depression, self-pity, resentment, and grumpiness fossilize us so we’re not of much use to anyone. But why shortchange ourselves, now of all times? Is that what we want our legacy to be? Why not deliberately start to live so that the breakdown of the youthful self can lead to the breakthrough of an emerging elder self?3
The Jungian analyst Helen Luke wrote, “To our wonder, we may find that now it is time to become aware of our oneness with everything and everyone other. Instead of ‘I am not this, I am not that person or thing or image,’ we begin to affirm, ‘I am both this and that’ and to glimpse the meaning of ‘I am’ as the name of
God.”
I took this picture of Dad holding baby Malcolm.
We can consciously cultivate these inner qualities in ourselves—trustworthiness, less ego, acceptance of differences. This is how we assume the role of sages, shamans, wise women who radiate a vision that beckons those who are younger more fearlessly into their own Third Acts. The very young may no longer need us to forage for food, an evolutionary imperative for grandmothers in hunter-gatherer times, but they need us to teach and inspire them. It is understandable for us, especially those of us at the far end of Act III, to feel a special affinity for children. Unlike those in midlife, the very young share with the old a proximity to what Joan Erikson called “the shadow of non-being,” the thin membrane that separates life and nonexistence, which is forgotten in the glare of midlife.
There’s a lofty word for this nurturing of the younger generations, or of individuals of any age: “Generativity.” It’s something the experts all agree is a central component of successful aging. The psychiatrist Erik Erikson coined the term to describe moving from a focus on oneself to a focus on a broader social radius, giving to the community and to the larger world. It involves the ability to care for and guide the next generation, to give of oneself to those coming up, by mentoring, coaching, guiding, nurturing them. The young have inherited certain traits genetically; we can pass on other traits to them through teaching and example.
With my son, Troy, in 2007.
KURT MARKUS
My granddaughter Viva, around four years old.
Me as the Easter bunny in 1976.
Me as the Easter bunny in 2011, with my granddaughter Viva (second from right).
Generativity also means being concerned with the future of the planet. You can think of it as revolutionary. If Generativity were more widely embedded in our social fabric, with all the caring and compassion for young people that it signifies, everything would be different.
For me, the word conjures up the notions of generation, generating, and creativity: Our generation must generate (with creativity) caring and nurturance for things and people other than ourselves. We must become advocates for the future.
There’s lots in it for us, too, including physiological benefits. It has been shown that endorphins that strengthen the immune system and increase our longevity are released when we are fully engaged in “broadening our social radius” by helping others, especially the younger generations—and this is what Generativity means.
Dr. George Vaillant, in his book Aging Well, based on the thirty-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development, writes that in all the groups that were studied, “mastery of Generativity tripled the chances that the decade of the 70s would be for these men and women a time of joy and not of despair.” Surprisingly and deliciously, the study also revealed—as I said in the Preface—that among the women, “mastering Generativity … was the best predictor of whether they reported attaining regular orgasm”!4
In Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl wrote, “Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.” I like the metaphor Frankl uses to illustrate why the tension of striving, even in the elderly, is positive: “If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.”
I think one reason Katharine Hepburn remained strong into her advanced age was because, like an old arch, she assumed the load of the elder. When we worked together on On Golden Pond, she very deliberately took me under her wing, using every opportunity to pass on her wisdom. She let me know she’d been watching as I overcame my fear of doing a backflip for the film and said that mastering something you fear is what keeps you from getting “soggy” in life.
One day while we were having tea together, Hepburn told me how she would get up every morning at five to write about her life’s experiences. One chapter, she said, was called “Failure.” “You know, Jane,” she remarked, “we learn far more from failure than we ever do from success.”
Katharine Hepburn, Dad, and me on the set of On Golden Pond.
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
On Golden Pond
KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
She made me understand the value of self-consciousness. We tend to think of self-consciousness as something bad—as being awkward or uncomfortable with oneself. But the way Hepburn made me see it was more as a consciousness of self, an awareness of how our presence affects people. “This is your package,” she said to me once, pinching my cheek. “We all have our package, what presents us to the world. What do you want your package to say about you?”
RON GALELLA/WIRE IMAGE
My late friend the singer Michael Jackson spent several days visiting the set and watching Katharine and my father act. In between scenes, Hepburn would make a point of having Michael pull up a chair next to her so she could tell him stories. One of them was about Laurette Taylor, one of the great American theater actresses. Katharine had seen Taylor early in her career, when she had been “absolutely brilliant” in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. A number of years later, when Taylor had become famous, Katharine saw her again in that role. “The magic was gone,” said Hepburn, watching Michael to see if he was paying attention. “She’d become too successful. Lost the hunger. Sad, sad, sad.” It was an important lesson for a rising star, which Michael was at the time. Hepburn never hammered me over the head with her wisdom. She simply layered it into our daily contacts in ways that made me think and feel challenged.
Speaking at Harvard in 2000.
I work with teenagers, through my nonprofit organization in Georgia, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention. When I am with them, I try always to remember what my friend and mentor in the field of youth development, Dr. Michael Carrera, says: “Young people may forget what you say or what you do. But they will never forget how you made them feel.” Helping the young feel worthy, loved, challenged, and hopeful is what will make them strong and resilient. And more often than not, what they need is for us to listen, really listen—with our hearts, countenancing them with our eyes, not tuning out while we figure out what to say back to them.
These are the footprints we want to leave behind, ones they can step into confidently as they move through midlife and into their own Third Acts.
In Santa Monica, California, I discovered a real hub of Generativity at WISE & Healthy Aging. The center has been around since 1976 and has gained a national reputation for its innovative programs for seniors, especially its Peer Counseling Program, where volunteers become trained paraprofessionals, supervised by a licensed therapist. I talked to a seventy-one-year-old woman who was a retired lawyer. She told me, “I found that after law, I needed to utilize a different part of my brain, and volunteering here provides that opportunity. I meet people that I probably would never meet in day-to-day life, and the problems that they face are sometimes extremely difficult—insurmountable health problems, financial problems, problems with their children. I feel very gratified in thinking that in some way I can improve the quality of their lives, and I feel the quality of my life has been improved substantially as a result of the training here and my involvement with the group.”
An elderly widower told me he had been suffering from depression when a friend urged him to come to the center and volunteer. “Depression isn’t contagious, you know,” the friend had told him. “It works the other way.” “He was right,” the man said cheerily. “When I started volunteering I got over the depression. It’s a whole new life.”
The men and women volunteers, all seniors themselves, have been able to replace the lost social networks they had at work or through marriage with a new network that includes their clients and their fellow counselors.
A retired school psychologist loves her work as a volunteer. “I had all that background and thought I should use it f
or something,” she told me, adding that the greatest part for her are the new relationships she’s formed with the people she works with. “It’s just so wonderful. We’re not just chatting; we have such meaningful exchanges.”
Lois has been a counselor at the center for twenty-two years and believes that this is what she always wanted to do. “I was very busy my whole life helping my husband with his real estate business,” she said. “I had no choice. I felt obligated to my husband. So this was like getting a second chance at a new life.”
I met Jake, who volunteers with the center’s Friendly Visitor Program and brought with him his ninety-five-year-old client Karl, who lives in a nursing home and can’t get around on his own anymore. Karl has bonded with Jake. Karl is the man I quoted earlier who, when I asked how old he was, replied with the playful humor that seems so characteristic of the very old: “I don’t know how old I am, but I was around when the Dead Sea was only sick.” I hated to think what life would be like for Karl if he didn’t have Jake to talk to. “We see eye to eye on so many subjects—politics, humor,” says Karl of Jake.
Evelyn Freeman, the beautiful ninety-one-year-old founder of the Peer Counseling Program, says, “If I were going to look for one word that describes what goes on here with the counselors and the clients, the word would be ‘joy.’ The joy of being productive. The joy of doing something meaningful. The joy of knowing that you can enlarge your life at a time when many people think it gets smaller. The joy of knowing that each of us has the potential for change for as long as we live.”