The Golden Condom

by Jeanne Safer

  Older first-time brides and grooms feel a depth of emotion that contradicts jaundiced assumptions about matrimony, spouses, and themselves. Most can hardly believe their good fortune. Vanished is the cynical bravado and seeming indifference to their singlehood that masked the anxiety and despair they can only acknowledge fully in retrospect. “I was spectacularly lucky,” a still-astonished fifty-seven-year-old recent bride told me, “but I helped myself to become lucky. I had come to the conclusion long ago that there might not be anyone out there for me. There was a huge amount of emptiness and loneliness. When you’re in it, it’s almost an addiction and a drug; you can’t let it go.”

  “He has my back; nobody ever had it before,” a forty-seven-year-old woman celebrating her first anniversary told me, still amazed that it was so.

  Quietly, with deep emotion, a sixty-one-year-old man in the ninth year of his first marriage said, “This relationship allows me to give of myself, and I can receive now—things come in, they resonate.”

  And a forty-year-old bride-to-be said simply, “He’s home.”

  I have never before conducted interviews in which every one of my subjects was joyous.

  One prerequisite to finding a mate in midlife and beyond is admitting to yourself that you want one, that you need lasting intimacy to feel fulfilled. Many people are too afraid to say so because they cannot bear their own longing or have shut themselves off from it altogether. When you are shut off, you are blind to possibilities, no matter how numerous or fetching they may be.

  A sharp thirty-five-year-old woman architect whom I saw in therapy for two years had only had a few relationships, and these were exclusively with men who were not really interested in intimacy; the previous one had lived in a distant city and had expected her to do all the traveling, and the current one, whom she clung to despite ample evidence of his ambivalence, was a guilt-ridden divorced father who insisted on arranging their time together entirely around his children’s schedules. She complained with contempt and bitterness that no man she had ever known wanted a woman who was his intellectual or professional equal, and she doubted whether such paragons even existed. She insisted that her only options were men who were either beneath her or otherwise engaged, and she refused to consider that anything she might be communicating unconsciously contributed to her predicament; the male ego and sexism in society were the sources of her solitude, and she was convinced that these problems were insurmountable. In fact, her entire childhood and much of her adulthood had been spent trying to get her parents’ attention—an impossible task, since they were completely absorbed in caring for her younger brother, who had been paralyzed by a fall when he was an infant, an accident for which they held themselves responsible and spent their lives trying to remedy. She had learned early on to fend for herself and to neither ask for nor expect help from anyone, hoping in vain that her hard work and professional success would someday earn appreciation, but nothing she did was ever enough. She never could acknowledge that being intimate with a man and wanting him to prize her made her feel more threatened than being alone made her feel bereft.

  The willingness to take emotional risks—humiliation, rejection, disillusionment, revealing your needs, and letting yourself be vulnerable when you cannot control the outcome—can make all the difference, as it did for another patient of mine, who began seeing me when she was twenty-eight and stayed for the next twenty years. For the first five of those years, it certainly looked like she, too, was destined for a solitary life. But she hungered for love and was determined to seek it even though she initially despaired of ever finding it. Intense shame about her own neediness and fear of rejection inhibited her; she kept herself more aloof than she realized lest she reveal her naked longing for closeness, which caused her to exude a false aura of self-sufficiency and unapproachability.

  She, too, had been forced from childhood to rely only on herself. Her shockingly neglectful, childish mother envied the bond between her capable daughter and the charming, workaholic father who doted on her but never protected her or compensated for his wife’s deficiencies. Although the family was prosperous, the house was dark and dirty, there was never food in the refrigerator, and her mother was always late to pick her up from the deserted suburban train platform, leaving her to wait in the dark alone. Somehow, despite her upbringing, she managed to avoid cynicism if not depression and was less rigid and more open than my patient the architect was. Even as hope ebbed, through multiple disappointments with self-involved men, she persisted.

  We never discussed it directly, but witnessing her misery and seeing the opportunities she was too blind or paralyzed to pursue made me decide to become her relationship coach as well as her therapist. I felt that a woman with a mother as inadequate—and a father as enticing but limited—as hers needed hands-on instruction about how to navigate the world as much as she needed insight into herself.

  Although “life coaching” has now become ubiquitous, offering direct guidance was an unusual role at the time for someone who had been trained, as I had been, in the classic psychoanalytic tradition of not giving advice or talking very much in order to keep the focus on the patient’s experience. Fortunately, my own analyst had violated both these directives, and I naturally emulated his hands-on style.

  Therefore, while my lonely patient and I were investigating her history and her current struggles to express herself and to feel she deserved to be heard in her professional life—she was a lawyer who was afraid to speak up even when arguing a case before a judge—we also discussed in detail the rudiments of how to interact with men. I showed her how she came across to the opposite sex in social situations. I pointed out how she communicated, what she concealed, and what she had to learn to reveal. I detected that male colleagues and acquaintances were attracted to her long before she did and made sure it did not escape her notice. I advised her explicitly about how to converse with men who intrigued her, translating or interpreting nuances that were initially lost on her. I showed her how to recognize and return subtle advances no matter how much she wanted to bolt and even if she assumed, incorrectly, that someone was not interested romantically and wanted only her companionship. Afraid and hesitant as she was, she drank it all in.

  “Take the initiative,” I told her once when she described a bashful but thoughtful and charming man she had met tango dancing and whom she had written off because he had never unequivocally approached her. “Suggest going out for coffee. He’s as shy as you are. I think he likes you and is waiting for a sign.” He was. They married three years later, when she was thirty-eight, and are married still. She is now a judge herself, as well as a popular tango teacher.

  Why did I feel compelled to intervene? I saw in her situation what could have easily been my own fate. She once told me that she was so ashamed of being single that she felt she had no right to walk down the street alone or have a meal in a restaurant by herself on Saturday night, and that sometimes, especially on weekends, she forced herself to stay up until she could justify going to bed, knowing she would feel as empty and alone when she arose as when she lay down. I had felt all these things myself.

  I was thirty years old when I met the man I would marry at thirty-three, so I just squeaked under the age limit that would have qualified me as a late marrier, according to demographers. The thirty-year marker would be made infamous by a 1986 Newsweek cover story (“The Marriage Crunch”). Citing seemingly impeccable scientific evidence, Newsweek proclaimed that virtually all women over age thirty were condemned to what used to be called spinsterhood. The chances of a thirty-year-old woman marrying were 20 percent, declining by age thirty-five to 5 percent and then dropping precipitously until by age forty, the likelihood of her becoming a first-time bride hit 2.5 percent—lower, so the story notoriously intoned, than her chances of being attacked by a terrorist.1 These statistics, which turned out to be seriously flawed, were taken as gospel by the media and by terrified women and were not recanted by the magazine until twenty years later
.

  I didn’t need a magazine to tell me that nobody I wanted would ever want to marry me. This was an old and deeply held conviction of mine, rooted in my childhood experience, that persisted despite the fact that someone I cared about had actually proposed to me when I was graduating from college and I had been the one to refuse; I was lucky enough to realize at the time that neither his personality nor the life he envisioned were right for me. My dark presumption was catastrophically confirmed even more compellingly when the man I lived with for five years while in graduate school, who did seem right for me, left me abruptly on the verge of our being engaged, announcing at the door that he had ended a long affair with a mutual friend of ours the year before. I only realized in retrospect how blind I had been to aspects of his character that should have disqualified him. It took me the rest of my twenties to recover, during which I loved a series of men who were uncommunicative, ambivalent, distant, troubled, or inaccessible and whom I desperately tried to convert into real prospects, lamenting all the while that there was no one to truly love me. The only man to hug me on my twenty-eighth birthday was my unorthodox analyst.

  It took intensive work in therapy—which in my case meant seven years, four times a week—to unearth the real reasons I gravitated to men who could not cherish me: my father, my mother, my parents’ relationship, and my sense of myself. As a direct result of these labors, I eventually ceased trying to convert unresponsive people, both male and female, into responsive ones. Unavailable men lost much of their luster, and I began to feel I deserved requited love. At thirty, I finally met my future husband in a singing group that performed Renaissance religious music on street corners in New York City. He was a sweet-voiced journalist eight years younger than I, whose politics were diametrically opposed to mine, and he chose me despite the adamant disapproval of his family, which I dared not believe he would defy until he actually proposed to me. Thirty-five years later, I can hardly believe I found him.

  ROCKY ROADS TO LOVE

  There are many routes to finding a mate later in life, and few of them run smoothly. Therapy facilitates the search by alleviating anxiety and diminishing unconscious impediments to recognizing or responding to a soul mate, should one appear. Some people resolve to defy the odds and actively seek a spouse; the less sanguine cast fate to chance and hope a prospective spouse will seek them, putting themselves at least passively in the way of opportunity. And sometimes a lover finds a beloved by finding himself.

  * * *

  Anna Schneider, a fifty-seven-year-old television producer-director, would never admit that she longed to be loved; she kept herself so busy that she hadn’t let herself think about it for years, and she revealed her feelings hesitantly. No casual observer would notice that this dashing, intense woman had a reclusive streak, that she had spent the limited time she allotted to her private life painfully lonely, or that she had quietly given up on marriage decades earlier. “I put my career first,” she explained. “I’ve been highly successful and very well known in my field.” Even though many people find time for both a career and a relationship, she certainly picked the right profession to confirm her rationalization; her job was so demanding and she immersed herself so deeply in it that she found little time to think about what was missing emotionally, or why.

  Secretly, Anna feared that her being alone forever was “not an unlikely possibility,” since most of her friends were single or divorced. “I know that desperate feeling many women get,” she said, uneasily including herself in their number. “You think only short term: how will I get through this holiday or weekend?” So, like others in her situation, she focused instead on achievements as the basis for her identity. But unlike my two patients the architect and the lawyer, who vocally resented or worried about the dearth of men in their lives, she had made strenuous efforts to suppress any desire for intimacy, because she felt she did not have a knack for it, and she was a self-critical perfectionist. “I’m not that good at relationships,” she admitted. “I don’t like to be too analytical about my emotions; there are all kinds of ways I feel inadequate. I’d rather think about work.” Her confidence was confined to her professional acumen, for which she had to rely only on herself; as long as she was successful, nobody needed to know about her private anxieties.

  For someone who had so painstakingly cultivated both her friendships and her career, it was surprising that Anna described her two previous ten-year relationships (the last one twenty years earlier) as “happenstance.” Even when she was younger, she had never actively pursued a man. “My default was to be involved with people who were not available,” she said. For years, she had prevented herself from acknowledging that there was a hole in her life; she almost obsessively avoided thinking about it because she felt helpless to fill it.

  Though Anna comes across as warm and engaging, there is something guarded and closed off about her. “I’m not intimate with my own family,” she admitted. “My father is thoughtful and knowledgeable, but I’m not emotionally close with him.” She does not share much of herself, even with herself; activity, rather than introspection, is her métier. I got the feeling that beneath the energetic, stylish façade there was something untouchable that she broadcast to men. Her bright exterior masked sadness within.

  Then, eight years ago, her life began to change profoundly as a result of a whirlwind courtship by a colleague whom she never expected to pursue her, let alone want ardently to wed her.

  Anna was not looking for a mate when she met Dan, a senior television executive, at one of the countless conferences she was always attending. They had an enormous amount in common, and he was an excellent, enthusiastic mentor. Although his intelligence and expertise impressed her and she enjoyed his company, she never considered him a real prospect because he was fourteen years older and married, although unhappily. “I was a little surprised that he was so keen to stay in touch with me,” she said. And the honorable way he behaved, declaring himself early on and soon thereafter getting separated and divorced, impressed her. (“He was thoroughly serious, completely clean, and pure.”) For him, courting her was anything but happenstance. He was the one who had to convince her to marry. “The idea came from him,” she said. “He was keen to do it; he felt it was important.” And, like the shy creature she was, it took quite a while for her to consent.

  Getting engaged was exciting (“I thought it would be really fun because I’d never done it, and there’s so much promise around it,” she told me, as though she were describing a challenging new TV series she was creating), but she had continuing doubts about whether she was marriage material. “I like a little space around me; I may not want to be truly, truly intimate with anyone,” she worried. As is often the case with someone who has arranged her entire adult life to her own specifications, she felt resistant to the change and compromise living with another person always involves—even though they managed to slow down the pace of acclimation by living in different cities during the week and seeing each other only on weekends. “People think it’s very odd, but it works for us,” she declared.

  On a deeper level, she was terrified to rely on anybody, to let down a guard that had long been in place. She didn’t want to have to reveal herself, something she never had to do before; she knew that marriage would require more openness than she was comfortable with, but Dan was confident and willing to wait. Since Dan’s wife had demanded and required constant caretaking, Anna’s self-containment and competence must have felt refreshing; looking after someone who, as an equal, looks after herself, feels like a choice—even a privilege—not a demand. After a lengthy engagement, they married when she was fifty-six, eighteen months before we spoke. Only now are they starting to look for a place to live together.

  How did this confirmed loner, well into middle age, feel safe enough to go through with it? She had attended conferences for years and never met anyone before. The difference this time was that Dan, a man she admired, made all the moves and took all the risks. He was the one
to seek her out, to recognize that she was what he was looking for, and to act decisively to win her. Being chosen and seriously pursued meant everything to her. It made her feel worthwhile, as being loved does when you have not had enough of true devotion.

  * * *

  Like many first marriages in maturity, theirs is unconventional; the relationship is about the two of them and the world they share, not family life—she is childless by choice—of which he has had his fill. Slowly she is starting to let herself need him. Anna’s eyes shine as she talks about Dan, and she shyly begins to smile. “I was willing to take the leap,” she said. “I was finally old enough.” Marriage is always a leap of faith; she was finally brave enough. She does not mention it, and perhaps doesn’t even realize it, but there is something retroactively curative in the way he cares for her that was probably absent in her childhood.

  Love and marriage are a brave new world for Anna, and she is still adjusting, anxiety mingling with her delight. “I’ve had a hard time figuring out what a relationship really is,” she acknowledged. “I don’t do a lot of caretaking. I don’t do traditional things like cooking. I had built a lifestyle and work life for myself. There’s a lot you don’t know about a real relationship until you’re in one, until you finally say, ‘I’m committed, I’m here.’” She finds herself wanting to be alone with Dan much more than she imagined she would. “Now that we’re married, I don’t feel as compelled to be out and about all the time,” she observed. She likes having someone to come home to, at least on weekends.

  Mortality has a new meaning too. Considering their age discrepancy, I asked her if she was afraid of his dying. She answered decisively, if probably unrealistically. “Yes, but I think I’ll go first; he’s much healthier than I am.” Then, recalling her solitary years, she acknowledged that she might well face aloneness again, even if it would be a different aloneness. “I’ve learned what it’s like to have a real sense of security with someone who is always there, but I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to have to be on my own and resourceful. I think I might be less able to do it than when I was young, and that would be my fear.” This legitimate fear does not faze her, however, because she is secure in Dan’s love. “I have real comfort—I know he’s there. I count on him a lot, actually for more and more. I get a lot of guidance from him; he’s good at figuring out problems and helping me.”