The Untimeliness of Love

On desire that arrives after the deadline we had set for it — and the particular courage required to refuse the story that says it came too late.

Nikos Marinos  ·  Relational Integrity Series

Carole arrives in November with the particular heaviness of someone who has forgotten how to carry lightness. She is sixty-two. She has been widowed for four years. In the particular calculus of grief, this is a precise moment — far enough from the death that people have stopped asking how she is with that particular inflection of voice, but not far enough that the absence has become simple, has been integrated into the architecture of daily life. The absence is still an active presence. It still determines what she does and does not do, how she moves through the world, and what she allows herself to want.

She is sitting in my office because of Pierre.

Pierre is sixty-six. He is a recently retired photographer with the kind of hands that suggest a life of making and looking closely at things. He came into Carole's life approximately eight months ago, introduced by mutual friends at a dinner party she attended partly out of obligation and partly out of a desire to be the kind of woman who still attended dinner parties. They spoke for perhaps forty minutes. They discussed photography and gardens and the particular way that Paris in spring has of making people believe, for a moment, that time can be reversed. When he asked for her number, she gave it to him because it seemed like the kind of thing a woman in her sixties might do, a normal gesture of social engagement with no particular weight to it.

"He called three times before I answered," she tells me.

She is not smiling when she says this, but there is something in her voice that suggests the memory is not entirely painful.

"And when you answered?"

"I knew," she says. "Immediately. I heard his voice, and I knew. And I thought — not now. No. This is not happening now."

· · ·

The now is the crucial word. Carole can articulate, with impressive precision, why Pierre is a good man, why the attraction makes logical sense, and why, in another life, at another time, she would be pleased by this development. She can also articulate, with equal precision, why it is an inconvenience. But the inconvenience, when you listen closely, is not logistical. It is not about the practical complications of beginning a new relationship at her age. It is about timing in a much deeper sense.

In Carole's internal chronology, the chapter in which she was a woman who was desired, a woman for whom desire was relevant, had been closed. Not closed badly, not closed with resentment — closed, rather, as a chapter closes, with the sense that its story had been told, its arc had been completed, and that to reopen it would be to deny the narrative logic of a life lived. She had been a wife for thirty-four years. She had been, in that marriage, someone who was wanted. And then her husband had died, and she had moved into a different kind of life, a quieter life, a life in which the fact of desire had begun to seem like something that belonged to a younger version of herself — or perhaps to other people, people with different bodies, different circumstances, people who had not yet learned what she had learned about loss.

"I feel like I'm pretending," she tells me. "Like I'm playing a role. Like I'm a woman in a film who is supposed to be delighted by this, and so I'm performing delight. But underneath, I'm just exhausted."

"Exhausted by what?"

She pauses. She looks at her hands, which are elegant, which are marked by age in the way that things marked by use and time become more themselves.

"By the fact that desire has come back," she says finally. "By the fact that I have to admit that I still want. That the wanting didn't die when Michel died. That I've spent four years telling myself that this part of my life was over, and now I have to acknowledge that it wasn't. That it never is."

There is something almost angry in this, beneath the exhaustion. Not anger at Pierre — he is, by all accounts, irreproachable. The anger is directed at her own aliveness, her own continuing capacity to feel. It is the anger of someone who has made peace with a particular narrative of her own life and now finds that the narrative is refusing to cooperate.

· · ·

The culture, of course, is happy to support this narrative. The culture has extremely precise ideas about when desire is attractive and when it becomes unseemly. For a woman, these ideas are remarkably narrow. A woman in her sixties who is interested in romantic attachment is, by the implicit standards of almost every image and script we have been given, slightly wrong. She is too old for this. She is supposed to have graduated to a different kind of life — the life of the grandmother, the confidante, the wise observer. She is not supposed to want to be wanted. She is supposed to have learned, by now, that desire is a young woman's problem, and that wisdom consists in the acceptance of irrelevance.

Carole knows this, of course. But knowing it intellectually is not the same as not having internalised it. She has spent four years, quite unintentionally, working on the project of becoming the kind of woman who doesn't want to be wanted. She has done the work of recalibrating her sense of herself. She has closed certain doors, not dramatically, but quietly. She has rearranged the furniture of her internal life to accommodate a particular kind of solitude. And now Pierre has arrived with his photographer's hands, his careful attention, and his genuine interest in her, and she has to admit that she is not actually ready to be irrelevant. That she does not actually want to be the wise observer. That some part of her — a part she had successfully sedated — is still alive and still interested in being alive in particular ways.

The grief is not about Pierre. It is about the years Carole spent closing herself down — the self-imposed widowhood that extended far beyond Michel's death, the way she had colluded with the culture's timeline and made it a truth about herself.

"What would it mean," I ask her, "if you let yourself want him?"

She looks at me with something like pain.

"It would mean admitting that I've been pretending for four years. That I've wasted time that I can't get back. It would mean opening myself to being hurt again. It would mean being the kind of woman who believes she deserves nice things, and I don't know if I believe that anymore."

· · ·

The last sentence holds what the earlier sentences are protecting: the sense that her worthiness to be loved, to be desired, to be someone for whom such things matter, has an expiration date. That she has passed that date. That at a certain age, the claim on love becomes smaller, less reasonable, less legitimate. That grace, if it exists, consists in the acceptance of diminishment.

This narrative is not unique to Carole. It is the dominant narrative about aging and desire — particularly for women. But the dominance of a narrative does not make it true. It makes it culturally powerful, which is different. The question, for Carole, is whether she can distinguish between what the culture is telling her she should want and what she actually wants. Whether she can recognise the ways in which she has taken the culture's timeline and made it her own.

Stephen Mitchell writes about the way we internalise social norms not as external impositions but as aspects of our own desire. We come to believe that we want what we've been told we should want. We come to believe that we should not want what we've been told we should not want. And by the time we're sixty, these impositions have become so much a part of us that they feel like the truth of who we are, rather than like choices that were made for us and then, slowly, by us.

"Tell me about Michel," I say, shifting ground slightly.

Her face, which had been closed, opens. This is what happens when you ask someone about the person they have lost. The face recognises that you are asking about something real.

"He was kind," she says. "Very kind. But he was also distant. Not emotionally distant — he loved me. But there was a part of him that was always somewhere else. He was interested in things that I couldn't quite access. Architecture. Philosophy. He would read late into the night, and I would lie next to him wanting to be part of what he was thinking about, but I couldn't quite reach him."

"And you stayed with him for thirty-four years."

"Yes. Because that was how he was, and I loved him, and you don't leave someone because they're not able to be fully present in the way you might wish they could be."

I let this sit for a moment. What she is describing is a relational capacity that Carole clearly possesses: the capacity to love someone while holding, in herself, the grief of what that love cannot reach. The capacity to stay in a relationship with an absence, with an incompleteness.

"And with Pierre?"

"With Pierre, there is no distance. He asks me questions about what I think. He listens to the answers. He looks at me like he is trying to see me. It's almost overwhelming."

"Why overwhelming?"

"Because I don't know how to be that visible. Because I'm not sure I deserve it. Because —" she stops. "Because if I let myself accept that he sees me, that he wants me, then I have to admit that I was not fully alive for four years. That I was hiding. That I did that to myself."

· · ·

To accept Pierre's love is to have to grieve this lost time. It is to have to acknowledge that the person she had decided to be — the dignified, quiet, retired version of herself — was a choice, and that this choice had costs.

And here is where the counterpressure must arrive: because the grief is real. The years are not recoverable. And there are genuine difficulties in a late-life love that are not only cultural. There is the vulnerability of reopening oneself to attachment after loss. There is the knowledge, in a way that younger people cannot quite know it, of how suddenly everything can be taken away. There is the sense, in Carole's body, of a clock that is ticking differently than before. The stakes feel higher because the time is shorter in proportion. The arithmetic of late love is not the same arithmetic as the love of thirty years ago, and to pretend otherwise would be its own form of dishonesty.

"If I let myself love him," Carole says slowly, "I'm letting myself become someone who has everything to lose."

"You're already someone who has everything to lose," I say quietly. "You're alive. That was always the case. The question is only whether you get to want something while that's true."

She cries then, in the particular way that people cry when they are mourning not something that has happened but something that they are finally allowing themselves to acknowledge.

· · ·

What emerges in the hours that follow is not a resolution but a kind of deepening into the reality of her own life. Carole begins to let herself imagine — tentatively, carefully — what it might mean to be a woman in her sixties who is loved by someone, who loves someone, who wants to be touched, who wants to be seen, who wants to remain, as she had remained with Michel, partially unavailable to the world in the service of attending to a particular person.

This is not the same as certainty. It is the beginning of the possibility of living differently in the time that remains — not denying the loss, not pretending that the years of self-imposed diminishment were not real, but accepting that the timeline she had been given, the one that said that her life as a desiring being had ended, was perhaps a timeline she had accepted too readily, too early, with too little resistance.

When I see her the following week, she tells me that Pierre has asked her to spend the summer with him in Provence, at his family's house. He has not proposed. He has done something more modest and more genuine: he has imagined a future that includes her and asked whether she wanted to be in it.

"What will you tell him?" I ask.

"I don't know yet," she says. "But I'm not saying no because I'm too old. I'm not saying no because I've decided that this isn't my time. If I say no, it will be for some other reason. But not because of that."

It is a small thing, this reclamation of the right to say no for her own reasons rather than for the culture's reasons. But in the quiet room, with the winter light coming through the windows, it seems like a kind of courage — not the courage to say yes, not yet, but the courage to allow herself the possibility of wanting to say yes. To allow herself to remain, in her own life, not a secondary character who has accepted her own marginalisation, but a protagonist who has not finished with the difficulty of being alive.

Whether she goes to Provence, I do not yet know. I think this is as it should be.