How Deep Can You Go?
I have reached an age at which I no longer want to be younger, and this may be one of the most unexpected freedoms of my life. I don’t mean that I have graciously accepted the inevitable or learned to make peace with what time has taken from me. I mean something much less polite: I genuinely prefer the woman I am now.
I feel beautiful. Very beautiful, actually. I feel feminine, sensual and alive in a way I did not fully understand when I was younger, because back then beauty was still partly something I experienced through other people’s eyes. I knew when I was being looked at, desired, admired or chosen, and without realizing it I sometimes allowed those reactions to become evidence about myself. Age has slowly dismantled that dependency. I know how I feel inside my body now. I know what happens when I put on a dress I love, when I wear something extravagant simply because it amuses me, when I catch my own reflection unexpectedly and recognize the woman looking back. I know my femininity from the inside.
And I would not trade this age for any of the years behind me.
I would not exchange this mind for smoother skin. I would not give back what I know in order to recover what I looked like before I knew it. I would not trade discernment for innocence, autonomy for approval, experience for possibility or the strange and magnificent feeling of finally belonging to myself for a few additional years of effortless desirability.
Youth is beautiful, but youth is not an accomplishment. It happens to us.
Becoming is different.
Becoming costs something.
Almost five decades of life live inside me now, and they cannot be photographed. There is a profession I fought to master, children I have raised, things I have built and imagined, books that changed the architecture of my mind, friendships that survived distance and time, paintings, music, roads, mountains, ridiculous adventures, losses I thought would destroy me and mornings on which I discovered that they hadn’t. There are mistakes I would never repeat and several I probably would. There are people I loved wisely and people I loved with spectacularly poor judgment. There are places I reached frightened, places I reached alone and places in which I unexpectedly found myself again.
I am an architect, and perhaps architecture has permanently damaged my ability to be impressed by façades alone. I know that the surface may seduce the eye, but the real question begins somewhere behind it. What holds the structure? What has it survived? Where are the loads transferred? What was rebuilt after failure? What remains standing when decoration is removed?
I have spent years learning what carries mine.
And yet women are still invited into this extraordinarily primitive marketplace where age, beauty and desirability are treated as measurable quantities and male attention somehow becomes the currency. We learn to look sideways at one another, particularly when a man’s attention moves. We notice immediately who is younger, thinner, smoother, more conventionally beautiful, and before we know it we are performing a brutal little calculation in which another woman’s beauty becomes evidence against our own.
I have done it.
I am done doing it.
A younger woman is not my competitor. Her youth does not humiliate my age and her beauty does not subtract anything from mine. Let her be breathtaking. Let her wear impossible dresses, occupy glossy covers, collect glances, make terrible decisions, fall catastrophically in love and believe, for a while, that she invented everything. I hope she enjoys the glorious arrogance of being young, and I hope one day she arrives where I am and discovers that she has not been disappearing.
She has been accumulating.
I will gladly leave the glossy covers to young and beautiful women.
I would rather be the content of a profound book.
Not because I no longer care about beauty. I care enormously about beauty. I simply refuse to accept that beauty ends where complexity begins, or that a woman’s value declines as the evidence of her life becomes visible.
My experience is not compensation for lost youth.
It is not the consolation prize.
It is the fucking prize.
What interests me now is something entirely different from the question of whether a man finds me attractive enough to choose me over somebody else.
The question is whether he can go deep enough to meet me.
How deep can you go?
Not how young can the woman beside you be. Not how beautiful according to the most immediately recognizable standards. Not how impressive she looks walking into a room, how flattering her attention feels or how successfully her presence confirms something about you.
How deep can you go?
Can you remain interested after the visual inventory is complete?
Can you recognize femininity when it comes without helplessness, sensuality when it comes with intelligence, softness when it coexists with strength and beauty when it carries history on its face?
Can you desire a woman without needing her to be less experienced than you?
Can you admire her without needing to educate her, rescue her, dominate her or become the most interesting thing that has ever happened to her?
Can you sit across from a woman who already has a world and resist the temptation to make yourself its centre?
Can you remain curious when she disagrees with you intelligently?
Can you handle a woman whose life did not begin when you entered it?
Can you love someone you cannot impress merely by being a man?
That, to me, is depth.
Because there is nothing particularly sophisticated about attraction to youth. Biology mastered that long before human beings developed architecture, literature, philosophy or self-awareness. A young beautiful body can provoke desire without requiring much imagination from the person looking at it. But encountering a woman who has lived — really lived — asks for another kind of perception. It requires the ability to understand that sensuality can become richer rather than poorer with knowledge, that femininity does not expire when innocence does and that a woman who knows herself may be considerably more difficult to possess precisely because she no longer needs possession to feel valuable.
Not everyone wants to go there.
Not everyone can.
And perhaps that is the part I misunderstood for years. I interpreted another person’s inability to reach me as evidence that I was somehow insufficient, when sometimes the simpler explanation was that I was asking for a depth he had no desire to enter.
There is no insult in that. There is simply incompatibility.
But there is also no reason for me to drown myself in the shallows so that someone else can feel tall.
A man is free to prefer younger women. He is free to prefer blondes, brunettes, quieter women, easier women, complicated women, athletes, intellectuals, women who adore him, women who challenge him or women who never ask him a single uncomfortable question. Desire is personal and attraction cannot be negotiated into existence.
What I reject is the ridiculous assumption that preference creates hierarchy.
A man’s desire is not an aesthetic authority.
His choice does not certify one woman’s value and revoke another’s. His attention is not a prize. His rejection is not a diagnosis. His attraction is not an international unit of measurement for femininity.
He is simply a man.
One human being with a history, an appetite, fears, desires, blind spots, capacities and limitations, choosing according to whatever combination of those things happens to govern him.
The judge’s chair was never a throne.
I was the one who built the courtroom around it.
And I have demolished it.
I no longer want to be selected. The word itself feels strangely degrading now, as though women were displayed in some elegant catalogue while somebody compared specifications and decided which combination of age, body, beauty, intelligence and emotional convenience offered the best value.
I am not a candidate.
I am not auditioning for the position of Woman Worth Loving.
I don’t need a man to give me marks for my face, my body, my femininity, my clothes, my age, my intelligence or the way I occupy a room. I don’t need to know where I rank beside another woman because I have stopped recognizing the ranking system.
And I certainly don’t need to defeat another woman in order to feel beautiful.
I already feel beautiful.
That is the inconvenient part.
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I like this face. I like this body. I like the woman inside it. I like my dresses, my boots, my hair, my ridiculous clothes and the fact that I have no intention of becoming aesthetically obedient just because I am approaching fifty. I like that I can be elegant one evening and completely unreasonable the next. I like my femininity precisely because it belongs to me now rather than to whoever happens to be looking.
I also admire my madness.
Perhaps especially my madness.
Life has tried repeatedly to make me sensible and has failed in ways I find deeply reassuring. I can still become irrationally excited about a mountain road, a concert, a painting, an extraordinary building, a landscape, a night that lasts too long or an idea that arrives at an inconvenient hour. I still want to know what is behind the next bend. I still want to learn things that serve no practical purpose. I still occasionally choose beauty over efficiency and curiosity over good judgment.
I am old enough to know better and alive enough not always to care.
Why would I exchange this woman for the girl she used to be?
She was beautiful.
I love her.
But she had no idea yet what she was carrying.
I do.
And perhaps this is why the question has changed so radically for me. I used to wonder whether I was enough for someone. Beautiful enough, feminine enough, interesting enough, desirable enough, easy enough to love.
Now I find myself wondering something else.
Are you deep enough?
Not rich enough, successful enough, handsome enough or sophisticated enough. I have reached an age at which those things impress me considerably less than they once might have.
Can you go deep?
Can you enter another person’s world without immediately trying to rearrange the furniture?
Can you encounter complexity without calling it drama, intensity without calling it instability, independence without experiencing it as rejection?
Can you tolerate not being needed and discover the much more beautiful possibility of being wanted?
Can you remain when fascination becomes familiarity?
Can you see a woman aging without experiencing her changing body as depreciation?
Can you understand that the lines around her eyes are not defects in the photograph but sentences in the story?
Can you love the book after the cover changes?
Because the cover will change.
Every cover does.
And if your entire relationship with beauty depends upon pretending otherwise, you will spend your life replacing books before you have learned how to read one.
I don’t want that life.
I want people for whom I, too, am a happy experience. People who remember the days we shared with warmth, who can speak about me with affection, who are glad that somewhere in this improbable existence our paths crossed. I want the people who do not need to diminish what we lived in order to move forward, who do not treat closeness as something embarrassing they must later distance themselves from.
Life does an enormous amount of sifting.
I am beginning to let it.
I no longer need everyone to understand me, keep me, desire me or choose me. I will keep the people for whom I am precious in my particular way, the ones beside whom I do not have to constantly wonder whether I am allowed to matter.
The others may go.
I don’t say that bitterly.
They are allowed their choices.
So am I.
And mine, finally, is myself.
I am here, and I am remarkably well inside my own life. I know how to do many things. I know how to build, create, work, learn, raise children, travel, walk through mountains, paint, photograph,begin again and occasionally survive myself. I recognize pieces of who I am in many places, and increasingly I recognize myself even when nobody else is looking.
The sun rises for me too. Every day!
It does not check first whether somebody chose me. Fuck off!!!
It does not ask who stopped calling, who found someone younger, who considered somebody else more interesting, who misunderstood me or who decided I was too much or too less.
It rises.
And I am here.
So let the glossy covers shine. Let youth be magnificent. Let beautiful women be beautiful without requiring older women to disappear in response. There is enough light for all of us.
I know what I prefer to be.
I would rather be the book that becomes more interesting after the first hundred pages, the one that cannot be summarized by its cover, the one with passages you have to read twice and pages that make sense only after you have lived a little yourself. I would rather contain contradictions, difficult chapters, marginal notes, damaged pages, unexpected beauty and entire sections that are not available to the casual reader.
I have spent almost five decades writing this book.
I am not going to tear out the difficult chapters now to make it easier to browse.
And I am certainly not going to beg someone who collects covers to read me.
I know how beautiful I am.
I know how feminine I am.
I know how intelligent I am.
I know how much I have lived.
I know how much I still want to live.
I know what I bring into a room, into a friendship, into a profession, into a conversation, into a bed and into another person’s life.
I don’t need a score anymore.
I don’t need to be selected.
I don’t need to win.
The only question left is far more interesting.
How deep can you go?
