The woman who sat opposite me was not beautiful in any classical sense. In her early 50s, she had severely-cut hair, dry skin and a heavyset body.
She had come to have her cards read to see if she should continue with her affair or not – an affair with a man 30 years her junior.
“He’s out shopping at the moment,” she said. “I brought him to the city for the weekend so that we could have some time together. It’s hard at home – we don’t feel we can go out in public.”
Being in my mid-20s at the time, I was staggered to hear her dilemma. Typical of people my age, I was secretly disgusted by the thought of a fat, older woman having a robust sex life.
“What I want to know is if I should break it off,” she said to me.
It turned out she was married. She didn’t think her husband would ever find out, but she did realise she was betraying him.
“It will have to end sooner or later,” I said. “Maybe you should end it sooner and get it over with.”
She looked down at her hands.
“The problem is,” she said. “I’m not ready to give up sex.”
Her husband, more than a decade older, was in poor health and her role as wife was slowly morphing into a role as nurse. Naturally, this meant their sex life was dead – and it had been over for a long time. I hadn’t realized that women in their 50s still had love lives, much less that they could still long for hot, passionate sex.
Having recently crossed the boundary into mid life myself, I feel like smacking my smug, younger self – especially since I claimed to be an ardent feminist. But somehow, the thought of unattractive older people having sex seemed unnatural. That, for some women, hot sex may not be possible until they have their child bearing and general life responsibilities out of the way, never occurred to me. Or that guys might really get off on sleeping with uninhibited older women, who have learnt to be comfortable in their own skins – or even that the guys might have something to learn.
I’m not sure that we’ve progressed all that far since then. I see there is suddenly a lot of media about ‘cougars’ – a term for older women who go out with younger men. There are, in the US anyway, the inevitable reality television programmes about them. The women featured, from what I can see, are of the expensively-botoxed type, rather than the ordinary, middle-aged variety. And even when they’re as beautiful as the women on Desperate Housewives, there is something slightly seedy and derisive about the way the phenomenon is described – older women who sleep with younger men are still being laughed at.
Which is very much an Anglophone phenomenon. Whenever I visit France, in particular, or the European Mediterranean countries in general, I’m struck by how many glamorous older women there are around, who remain elegant, despite their wrinkles – and who are treated as though they matter.
That woman didn’t get much value out of coming to see me. I wish I could sit down with her now, because my reaction would now be very different.
“Don’t break it off,” I would say. “For as long as it’s bringing you joy, why not?”
And if the guy one day dumped her?
“Find yourself another one.”
I wholeheartedly agree but only if she broke off the marriage first. If I were the decrepit husband that’s how I would want it.