[gardener]

Whew! What a meaty topic—and now I’ve read J-P’s response to our Oakman, and Oakman’s response to J-P. But what I’ll put up here now is what I wrote on the basis of the first post, in which the topic is announced in all of its potential dimensions.
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Quercus: I know that there are a few "older guys" out there. Care to comment?
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At 68 (which as you pointed out, is really my 69th year), I am possibly the oldest guy on the MH fitness forum and certainly on J-P’s bulletin board. And indeed yes, I do care to comment, for the issues you raise have been much on my mind for a couple of years at least.
I’m taking the liberty of rearranging the order of your topics.
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Quercus: I sought out and was skimming a book in a bookstore on male menopause. I kept reading things that rang true so I bought it. One interesting point that the author made was that, at this point in time, we all have a greater chance to live longer than ever before and to experience what a human lifespan should be.
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You and I are not in the same generation, and J-P, who has responded to your post with great insight, is yet a generation younger. But these three generations of ours share this chance for greater longevity than our ancestors could reasonably expect. (The same thing may not be true of the generation of those who are just now about to enter their teens, thanks to unsound diet and sedentary lifestyles.)
My father died when he was my age. My maternal grandather, whom I did not really know, died at 49—and kinfolk said he died of old age. My paternal grandfather made it to 69. He was an old man then, as was my father, who had several heart attacks and a couple of strokes, the last one fatal. My paternal grandfather did get some exercise: he raised and rode quarter horses. He talked about his life, usually, in terms of regret. My father was more than regretful; he was bitter, especially toward his children, his four sons. But the psychology here is extremely complex. right before he died I learned something important: he was haunted by the idea that he had not lived up to his own father’s expectations.
I do not feel old, or at least do not feel that my age limits me in any significant way, except for a really crappy sense of balance or proprioception. I am physically active. I work out three times a week, for the past nine months with a trainer (because I wanted to wean myself somewhat from machines and learn to use free weights without injury). I go kayaking. I take long walks with my wife at dawn on beach or boardwalk. I am interested in the garden my wife and I have been making for the past 30 of our 44 years of marriage. I am passionate about classical music. I read most of the New York Times every morning. I have very strong political views, one of which is that I devoutly wish that George W. Bush was still governing Texas and Dick Cheney still enjoying Sunday services at Highland Park Methodist Church.
And, most important of all, I am in robust good health, but have known the other thing as well. Although I can take credit for being fitter today than I ever was before, I owe a lot to some excellent doctors. I have twice had surgery to open a blocked carotid artery. Five years ago I had even more serious surgery, to remove a carcinoma in my right lung. My pulmonary doctor told me in April that there was no longer any point in routine chest x-rays or in regular visits to her office, that “in your case, we can use the words ‘cancer cured’.” My regular doctor keeps me supplied with stuff that keeps cholesterol and blood pressure down. I take a baby aspirin every morning. And there’s one other medicine, but I’ll save that for a bit later...(You also wrote about problems of greater longevity; relying on drugs to keep numbers normal is one of these.)
The other night my wife and I watched a TV documentary about the movie star Gene Tierney. At the end there was a clipping of her obituary, giving her age as 70. “She had a very long life,” my wife said.
“Ummmgh, dear, “ I mumbled, “she was just two years older than I am.”

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Because so relatively few others have experienced the road ahead (re: the living longer comment) and/or have shared their experience with it - the problem may be compounded by many men's unwillingness to express openly what they feel about most things - I don't know how to interpret my own feelings about it. Is this normal? Do I need to get busy working on something before it gets worse?
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But just think, my friend, about what you and I are doing here now. If you were of my generation, in the waning days of your 48th year, where would you have gone with those three questions of yours?
Yes, men have traditionally been unwilling “to express openly what we feel about most things.” We were brought up to belief that we should be strong and silent, that we should take on the chin whatever life throws at us. We kept quiet out of fear that others would find out ...what? something about us? That we were capable of being afraid, afraid of the dark, afraid of relationships going wrong, afraid of...the realization that our time on this earth is brief and that we are fleeting creatures. Many of us carried around all the way into adult life the hidden hurts we experienced in high school.
But the internet and a few websites and the possibility of speaking from the heart about things of the heart yet doing do anonymously has profoundly changed the possible relationships between male human beings. The MH forums are a case in point. “Dating” and “Health” are pretty slimy in places, and I wish there were two “Fitness” boards, one for those who are just learning how to shave and another for people who have knocked around for a few years. Nevertheless, some amazing stuff surfaces out of nowhere: meditations on fatherhood, Mahler (John) on Mahler (Gustav). And the protective shield of anonymity sometimes is set aside. Friendships do develop in cyberspace. Some of us know each other’s real names. Occasionally, as in a play by Ionesco, it may even turn out that two guys went to the same high school.
I must wonder if your wife knows about your posting here, and about its content. My wife knows that I sometimes (!) go to forums dealing with health and fitness. I have told her that other things come up, but she thinks I’ve gotten an unexpected, long overdue concern about physical fitness, that it’s on the verge of obsessional, and that I seek out people with similar concerns. I don’t tell her that my real concern is making sense of being born male and all that goes with that, from age 6 to, I would imagine, the grave.
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I think the symptoms of this "dis-ease" are the all-too-common "husband leaves wife for younger woman" and screws up the lives of a variety of innocent bystanders in the process. In less severe cases, he just goes and buys a new corvette! In any case, there's something that happens to a lot of guys at this juncture in the road that causes them a lot of anxiety and they either suffer in silence (depressed) or make drastic changes in their lives!
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Yeah, it happens. I got a real close up view about 20 years ago. My best friend, a guy with whom I team taught a popular course on philosophical ideas in literature was approached by an older student, about ten years his junior, married, with a couple of kids. She said she had fallen in love with him. He said, no thanks, I’m married.Two days later their affair began. A month later, the lovebirds were in a seedy motel when a photographer burst in. The consequences were horrible all the way around, including the death of my friendship with the other teacher. Or, just this past semester, a colleague e-mailed a little mash note to his lover, but accidentally sent it to his wife instead. Hell ensued.
But in re the new Corvette it can sometimes not be a substitute for a sexual affair. When the Andropause hits, guys may have more money than they did at 25. The kids are out of the house and long done with college. $2000 for a new iBook doesn’t seem very expensive, or $45,000 for a shiny new Lexus (although I drive a Passat). I’ve almost got the stereo that conforms to my idea of how recorded timpani on a Mahler symphony should shake the house without destroying the speakers. This weekend when my wife and I are traveling a short distance to see our eldest granddaughter graduate from junior high, we made hotel reservations without looking for the cheapest motel without cockroaches or stains on every surface from bodily fluids of strangers.
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In my own case, I don't want to screw up my own life or those who I love so I'm struggling with my own feelings. I've been working out for several years now and I haven't had any significant problems with the physical symptoms of this yet. [...]. I find myself extremely attracted to younger women and feel as though they respond to me. I recently found myself in a situation where I had to get the hell out quickly because I was afraid that I was on the verge of making a mistake that I would have deeply regretted.
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There are some younger women, friends of my wife, with whom I banter and flirt, but it’s only play. There was one point, around my fortieth birthday, when I was on the kind of verge of making a mistake of the kind you mention.
It strikes me that the trajectory of our lives is one in which we move from having almost endless possible choices to make to gradually defining our identity, who we are, by the choices we actually do make. We may date, play the field, consider as our life’s partner Sue, Rita, Gwen, Peggy, and Elizabeth (or Sam or Bill). But then, if we make a choice, we forego all the possibilities we didn’t chose. I really do believe in “forsaking all others, in sickness and in health.”
I’ve never had an affair. There are two reasons, one nice, perhaps even admirable, and the other not so nice.
The good reason is that if someone is unfaithful to his wife, he is also unfaithful to himself, to the person he has pledged himself to be.
The other reason is that I am a very bad liar, and my wife very good at detecting the tiniest fib.
I must also add that during my 30s and 40s I was a pudge. Other people hit on me very seldom. I’m now in decent shape. I recognize certain expressions of interest. I have some interests of my own. At one point, shortly after I got some hormonal matters tended to (about which more anon, I could look at a Xerox machine and find it oddly attractive.
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I haven't actually had my testosterone checked to see what it actually is
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Okay, and now we come to it, to testosterone and what I can say about it. I haven’t kept the story about me and my testosterone a secret, and have told it on occasion on the internet, so you may already know the story, but here it is.
Three years ago I weighed over 200 pounds. My body fat was in excess of 30%. I had no energy. At my college I would take the elevator up one story, and if alone, I would sit down on the floor. A little apprehension about driving had blossomed into a full-fledged phobia that was a major problem in family relationships. During a routine physical, my doctor asked about my libido and I said, “Just fine.” By that I meant I was running on empty, but that was okay. I was an old man. I felt old. And old men aren’t supposed to have very active libidos, for then they are dirty old men.
But then my doctor decided not to trust my “just fine” answer. He ordered two new tests. One was to see if my pituitary was producing the luteinizing hormone that instructs the testes to produce testosterone. That test was okay. The other test was for free serum testosterone, to see if the testes were obeying instructions. They were very disobedient. “My friend,” my doctor told me, “you are a eunuch.” But then he told me that nowadays my condition was entirely remediable. All I had to do was open a little pack of clear gel called Androgel each morning and rub it into the skin of my upper arms and shoulders. He was putting me on testosterone replacement therapy (TRT).
It took only a few hours for the stuff to work. I felt a tremendous sense of well-being, of almost euphoria. I felt like years, decades even, had dropped away. Energy soared. And, what’s this...a little nudge...a little feeling of warmth in my....Good Lord Almighty, that libido was back!
In retrospect, adding Androgel to my daily routine was the second most important event in my medical history, second only to successful lung surgery. It was directly responsible for the burst of energy that spurred me to start working out regularly and strenuously, and with excellent results. It suppressed that driving phobia, and banished recurrent bouts of depression.
But it also brought problems. It was probably over a twenty year period that I began to slump into the state I was in, including the decline and almost disappearance of desire. My wife and I never discussed what was going on. For her, my absent desire translated into “I am no longer desirable.” She became accustomed to life with a near-eunuch, but now this wretch smears goo on his shoulder and he gets horny. Is this going to last? Can he be trusted?
The ads for Androgel are deceptive, in that their premise is; libido declines, medicine fixes, and everything is hunky dorey right away. It doesn’t work that way. Real sexuality is something between people, not in just one person. If one person’s desire wanes, the other must accommodate in some way, must work out a way to live. Anything that then alters the equation—as for example, somebody who has drifted into asexuality suddenly becoming a sexual being once again—is unsettling. (I suspect that Viagra and its effects aren’t always welcomed eagerly by both parties in a long-standing relationship.)
It took time to work out some very basic aspects of our relationship, and I know that I will never be able to entirely undo some of the harm I did during my years of drought.
Unlike my father, I do not believe in living with regret about the past, for it cannot be altered. I also do not believe that problems in a marriage are always a matter of one partner being wrong. My wife and I can both be faulted (if fault needs to be assigned) for not communicating honestly. There has soemtimes been a problem, also, with her language. She is prone to say “You always...” or “You never... She would say, for example, “You never pick up your socks.” And I would answer, “But I picked them up yesterday.” In this pattern, there is something else, too. People can’t live together for decades without knowing each other very well indeed. But intimate knowledge of others can never be absolute; no human being has the kind of knowledge that religious people attribute to God. When I decided to go to the gym and make myself into a really fit human being, my wife thought it wouldn’t last more than a month, perhaps even a week. And she told me so. She didn’t know me as well as she thought.
One question presented itself almost immediately in regard to TRT and Androgel. Was my using this stuff a private matter that I should keep secret? There was one argument in favor of secrecy. TRT. well the very name says it: it replaces testosterone. Testosterone is among other things the male sex hormone. It raises the libido Libido is the desire for sex. Therefore if I tell someone I’m taking the stuff, they will assume, correctly, that I’m sexually active, which in a certain way is nobody else’s business.
But there was another argument, and a very powerful one, for not keeping this part of my medical history private. My life would have benefited tremendously if in, say, 1985 or 1990, I had learned about my increasing hormonal deficiency. Maybe someone who learned about my history would be inspired to have himself checked out, and as a result start therapy at 45 or 50, not 65.
Occasionally I run into someone I haven’t seen in three years. They expect a puffy, flabby, played-out male clearly in his declining years. Instead they get somebody who is in excellent shape at 68, who is lean and muscular, a man who used to slouch and slump but now stands erect. “What happened to you?” they ask. I always tell them that I got religion (metaphorically, not actually) and started working out. If the people who ask are males, in their late 30s or 40s, and looking a little bit weary, I may put in a word for something called TRT.

Okay, cut to the main point, my friend. To be alive, male, heterosexual, and fit means to have thoughts of forbidden pleasures, of getting involved in stuff we know would be dumb but sounds like it could be fun. If a guy is in shape, possibilities may present themselves, and they’re flattering, but dangerous.
Years ago, when I was in my twenties, a slightly older teaching colleague told me about a freshman in his English comp class, a girl named Jennifer Sane. “Oh, to be 18 and in love with Jennifer Sane, not married to the woman with whom I have produced three sons. But then I realize. This woman and I will grow old together. One of us will bury the other. And she will forgive me for the pee-stains on my underwear.”