The older man and the boy


I love Halpoid's blog posts, especially the latest one.  As I was reading about how he feels with regard to  being with a much younger woman I began to recall my own experience as a young woman disastrously loving a much older man. Older men with much younger women, older women with much younger men. Is age a defining factor in intimate relationships? Yes and no. It is a complex issue. More than the physical age it is our emotional age that needs to be taken into account and this is shaped by the relationship we have had (or not had) with our parents/carers, which will give us a blueprint for  approaching intimate relationships in our adult life. I discussed this in an earlier post about attachment theory. We can change the blueprint. As we become conscious of our patterns, we can let go of them. It is not easy but it is certainly possible. Sometimes it takes a whole lifetime before we are able to do it. Sometimes we never manage to do it, I certainly know people going through life in a state of complete denial about the issues they carry within. Sometimes we do it very early on - some of us are gifted with awareness and the ability to make changes within, in a seemingly effortless way. These are the people with 'old' souls, who seem to have been born with wisdom.
I have always been conscious of my own issues at some level, but have not always been able to resolve them. I have not actually. They reappear in my life and I do not recognise them. The therapy I am involved in now is helping me to make sense of what has happened in my life journey.
I grew up with a very distant father, even though he was physically present. I had several sisters and half sisters, so competing for his attention was part of our routine, there were too many of us. Though he claimed to love everyone the same way it was a conditional type of love: if you do this, I will reward you with my affection. Most of all, it was his detachment that really hurt and his inability to show a real interest in us as children. I would often talk to him only to find he had not listened to a word of what I had said.  He loved us and cared for us materially but in a very indifferent sort of way, he was always too tired to enjoy being with us (something to do with age perhaps? He had me and my sister when he was already in his fifties, his other children were in their teens). He also had strict rules about what could and could not be done and these often seemed very arbitrary.




 I loved him intensely but I constantly fought with him, most of the time I disagreed with him and that was unacceptable. I always wanted to know why I should do this or that and he would refuse to tell me, I just had to do it. So I had to spend much time hiding from him, trying not to be around him, waiting till he would be in a better mood, to avoid being the target of his aggression. My father never touched me or hurt me physically  but he was very intimidating, I was quite scared of him. It got worse as I grew older, and eventually I left home, keen to live independently. He was not happy with it. For over two years he cut me off and refused to speak with me. I only communicated with my mother. He still supported me, I was a student, but simply would not acknowledge my existence.
At  twenty-two and away from home I met a man who was forty-eight. He'd been married to a very charismatic woman who had finally left him after his nth affair some five years earlier. This man's compulsion to seek out new women all the time would have put Mick Jagger to shame. They had three children, one of whom slightly younger than me.  I started dating the eldest son, who was at college during term time, but with his dad during vacations. I cant remember why he was with his father as he much preferred living with his mother, to whom he was fiercely loyal, but as I recall, it had something to do with his mother's location, she had moved to the States. This gave me a chance to go to his house quite often and get to know his father. At some point I told my boyfriend that I really liked his father, who was always very flirtatious with me and had invited me to lunch with him a few times. Of course it went down very badly. Suddenly I was a demented bitch, with no sense of shame etcetera etcetera. Notice how I would be taking all the blame, but it always takes two to tango.


That  was a major mistake (or should I say lesson?) in my life, I suffered a great deal because it took me a while to realise I was only a piece of meat. At twenty-two I was pretty, intelligent and intellectually curious  but also very naive and very vulnerable.  It ended in tears, my tears, that is. It meant losing a few friends too because the boyfriend never forgave me, despite knowing that his father had quite a reputation, the word went round that I was immoral and had initiated the whole thing.
Thinking back this is but a reflection of a major pattern in my life. People and circumstances always changed, ages were different and quite inconsequential, but the pattern of trying to reach out to someone who is emotionally unavailable, of feeling insecure and unloved, of being identified as the one at fault for this or that reason, of being ostracised by a small community, has been constant. Every time it metamorphoses into something else and I dont recognise it until much later, when I begin to hurt. It makes me wonder why angels or angel like beings bother to pull me back when I am about to be run over, I really cant see the point...
Here 's to a beautiful sunny morning. I look forward to my photoshoot in Scotland.

(All photos modelled  by Alex B. All photos in this post were taken  by Neil Huxtable  but postprocessed by me save the last one kindly postprocessed by LmAnt. )

Comments

  1. Hmmm...Mistakes for some people become lessons. Others refuse the lesson and keep making them.

    It sounds like this father of the boyfriend was a real Don Juan. (In the Mozart opera, as you know, Don Giovanni attempts to seduce a peasant girl on her wedding day--the height of debauchery by most standards, even in that debauched era.) I suppose you've forgiven yourself and whoever else needs forgiving about this matter, but the primary guilt, if there is guilt, is his. It's a good thing you got out of it with a whole heart.

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