Age and Relationships
Partly in response to a post, the age of innocence, on a friend’s blog, and partly in response to the decision of a mid-50s colleague to get engaged to a mid-20s doctoral student, I’ve been chatting with various people about age and relationships. Now in the case of the mid-50s friend my reaction is both predictable and overdetermined. The May-December, student-teacher, relationship is so trite, so cliched, so fraught with potential problems, that it’s hard for me to look positively at it at all. It’s along the usual age-gender lines. He’s old and she’s young. And though he’s not her supervisor, they do work in the same field. I guess what bugs me there is the assumption that it’s what every man would want, if only they could have it. And this particular person seems only to date women in their 20s and 30s. Relationships come with an expiry date. Like bad produce, things end when they start showing their age. This youth fetish isn’t treated like a fetish. Rather, it’s normative. The dream we’d all live if we could. And for me, it’s not my dream at all. I have pretty much zero attraction to my 18-22 year old undergraduates. To continue with the produce analogy, they seem underripe. Another friend put it this way, they don’t seem quite fully formed. And on turf which matters to both me and my students, the intellectual landscape of contemporary philosophy, we’re fundamentally unequals. So all of the my thoughts on the age difference issue are pretty negative. But then on my way home from Toronto today I got to reading a new collection of short stories, called Touchy Subjects, by Emma Donoghue (who is also, I’m lucky to say, a neighbour). One of the stories, "Speaking in Tongues," recounts from both points of view the story of events leading up to a one night affair between two women, one a 17 year old and the other a writer in her mid-30s. It only lasts one night–though both characters think the "love" word might be a possibility–because each cannot imagine that the other could possibly be interested in more. It’s a lovely story, funny and touching. I love the discussion between the two women regarding the wrinkles under the eyes of the older woman. Other stories are also wonderful. You can read a review of the whole collection on the Guardian’s website. And you can also read an interview with Emma about the ideas behind the collection. Me, I’ll keep thinking about age and relationships and I resolve to stop calling my colleague’s new wife-to-be "the child-bride."
