I’m sitting in my grandmother’s retirement home in Denmark. It’s in a town the size of a dimple, built between asymmetrical patches of grazing fields and the small muffs of forest that fill in the seams. You could walk into the town and out the other end in ten minutes if you didn’t know which turns to take to get somewhere. It’s a romantic walk, going from the small train platform, down the narrow sidewalk just big enough for two people heading in opposite directions to squeeze by each other, going past the shrunken houses with straw roofs, their tops joining in a soft round edge that, in the golden orange light of the late-afternoon, makes me think of a naked hip and leg reaching out from under a blanket.
There are five other women in my grandmother’s ward that I recognize. They all look slightly miniaturized and their eyes have a clear, shiny layer that give the impression their irises are on their way to somewhere else. The tallest one is confined to a wheelchair where her skinny frame collapses around a point in her stomach, and her bony hands clasp the opposite wrists, revealing dark violet splotches, like wine stains seeping outward. She periodically calls for help to the attendant, a spry forty-year old woman with spiked hair in an unnatural shade of red.
“What is it, Anne?” she says in a musical kind of way, her voice rising on the last vowel of her name. The answer is barely audible, a mumble that falls into the air and evaporates. She asks when the next train is coming, her husband is supposed to take the train to work. There is no good answer to this question. The attendant bends over in front of the woman and touches her arm softly. Her voice is impenetrably cheerful, like an early Mozart symphony viced into a major key.
It feels like the iris begins to narrow in front of the lens a in a place like this. When I was younger I never felt I was exactly where I’d wanted to be. At best, I’d have said I was on a road that I felt confident would lead me somewhere desirable.
I begin to realize, sitting here, that I have arrived at wherever it was that I was going. That all of my optimism, planning, and hopes for a happy life have conflated into the present. I am at my zenith. If it’s not now, in this moment, or in the widening waves just behind me, it will likely never come.
I remember noticing at an early age that couples in Denmark didn’t always form along the same lines of reciprocal attractiveness they did in America. I’d notice handsome athletic men walking hand-in-hand with doughy women whose teeth jutted from their lips at startling angles. And likewise, slender symmetrical women that looked like they’d been proportioned in a computer laughed at the whispered thoughts of lumbering donut men in loose jeans overhung with nubby mounds of old indulgence.
In America you can get something by virtue of having been born with a lucky assembly of genes. The outer is taken as a portentous metaphor for the person inside, the more symmetrical the more desirable. Being born with these lucky odds, one realizes that one can actually get things by virtue of appearance. You can sometimes find this when you scrape away at what a person means when they describe something as beautiful. It’s often time a placeholder for desirability that derives more from an economy of outer value.
OKCupid recently published some data showing how male fixation on younger women skews the online dating pool. An average 48 year old man will set his profile as open to meeting women up to 16 years younger, while only allowing for women 4 years older to enter his consideration. An average 30 year-old will go up to 5 years older and 8 years younger.
“No matter what he’s telling himself on his setting page,” OKCupid’s Christian Rudder wrote. “A 30 year-old man spends as much time messaging 18 and 19 year-olds as he does women his own age. On the other hand, women only a few years older are largely neglected.”
It’s an ironic act of self-denial to see men in their 30’s and 40’s, on the slope of sexual deflation, fixate on women who are still in their peaks or approaching them. It’s the flipside of the sexual economy of teenagers, who build up their self-worth with the desirability of their partner. The ageing man seeks to replace the slowly departing parts of himself with someone who can project to the world that he’s still got it.
I sometimes think of my grandmother’s nursing home as the kind of place you’d prepare for a group of people being jettisoned into space and who are never coming back. It’s thoughtfully clean and bright. Floor-to-ceiling windows look in on long white hallways with exposed blonde wooden beams and cheerful nooks. On one wall is a series of old kitchen and garden utensils painted over in blue and hung above a daily calendar. On another wall a cracking landscape painting of the countryside, dark rainclouds gathering over the waving fields of wheat, a lone house standing at the edge of a forest with a trail of smoke reaching into the gray.
Her room is the kind of recreation of every place she’d lived in that you’d get if someone probed her mind and pulled from it the twenty most familiar things. The red velvet sofa, the giant gothic cabinet, the framed photos of my grandfather, mom, aunt, and grandchildren, held in shiny metal frames. Before he died, my grandfather suspected she wouldn’t be able to survive in a place like this, and keeping her out of one was one of the threads that drew him through each day in spite of the various pains of age he suffered.
But she does survive, and has. Her memory has lost its shape, bubbling images and names out at random, their connection to real people and places becoming more pliable. And still she remembers lunch, and 3PM coffee that everyone gets with a small piece of cake, and the gathering to watch soap operas before dinner, including one dour and especially Danish one about a divorced couple who sometimes still have sex and share custody of their child. This seems like its own kind of modern fairytale when watching it p with an audience of white-haired ladies whose heads droop slightly, as if they were being hypnotized.
There is a female analog to the male fixation on youth and beauty according to OKCupid. It comes with a favoring of older men so that an average 26 year-old woman is likely to be unwilling to date anyone more than 2 years younger, but will be open to dating men 8 years older. The difference balances itself out over time, but women tend to remain much more open to dating older men as they age on average, claims Rudder.
All of which is a way of saying something you might already know. Men and women have different senses of beauty, and when two people pass in the human drift and decide to hold on to each other for a little while, each person may well see in the other something different. I’ve wondered about this with the women I’ve dated. I’d be too willing to describe all of the things that drew me to them and kept me there, but I’ve never been able to understand what was in it for them. In the best cases I could catch glimpses of my shape passing through their lives, feel the bony angles of that person they were holding on to.
My cousin made a calendar for my grandmother with pictures of her two great grandchildren, cheerful blonde babies caught in the shallow focus with teething smiles and curious eyes. My grandmother bends down to the picture and touches her nose to the paper with a kissing sound. “Look at her, there she is,” she says.
Then she wanders over to the window and sits in her armchair. She exhales. “Jah,” she says. Pictures of my grandfather look at her in her chair from the wall, the side table, and the heavy gothic cabinet on the far wall. She looks at the small apple tree outside, it’s small, speckled fruit fallen on the grass at its root. I start to think about how the Danish word for mother sounds just like “more” in English. And grandmother, “more, more.”
As I get up to leave, she turns to me.
“Are we going somewhere?”
Image via mcohen.chromiste
Michael Thomsen
Michael Thomsen is a New York-based writer. He has written about game culture, entertainment, and sex for IGN, Nerve, Edge Magazine, Gamasutra, and The Escapist. He has also been a contributor to the ABC World News Webcast and the Q Show with Jian Ghomseshi. ...
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18 year-old, dating, denmark, Love, men, OKCupid, retirement, youth
