[gardener]

Here are some passages from JP, & my comments.

First, being attracted to young beautiful women is just being a heterosexual male... Nothing unusual about that. That ideal age seems to fall somewhere between 18 and 35, and notice that when you were 15 you thought they were attractive, when you were 25 you thought they were attractive, when you were 35 you still thought they were attractive, and at 50 they are STILL attractive. At 90 they will still be attractive! What does that tell you? It tells me that women at the are at the peak of their physical appearance at the ages between 18-35).
J-P, I suppose you’re right about women’s peak of physical appearance falling generally between 1 and 35, if you mean that after 35 gray hair may announce itself, the midsection may thicken, and so on. But you may find that as your years increase you will continue to find some women who are your age entirely attractive. (I had a thing for Kathatine Hepburn well into her 70s.)
Also, we need to distinguish between just finding women attractive, in the sense of noticing that someone is attractive, and continuing to find attractive a special person over a long period. When I first caught sight of the woman who became my wife, something clicked. She was very, very beautiful at 21, with the beauty of a young woman. Our granddaughters are beginning to show the same kind of beauty. Meanwhile, my wife is still very beautiful, though unaware of it. But it is a later-in-life kind of beauty.

An older man is often much more appealing to younger women, who are more motivated by personality, power, and success than looks. So if you are an older male, AND you look good, and project yourself with confidence, you probably are very appealing to many younger women.
Another way of looking at this is that the male contemporaries of these youger women have yet to transcend theirimmaturity and strange combination of self-centeredness and lack of real self-assurance. This shows up on the MH forums especially, but also occasionally on th fitness board. The goal of some of these younger guys isn’t really fitness. It’s gettingbig; it’s looking good on the beach; or it’s impresing potential girl friends.. Many guys in their mid- to late teens are on the geeky side. We get more interesting as we grow up.
But note: some young males are appealing because of their maturity of mind and character. And some older guys are perpetually clueless.


Now lets look into the place that no man wants to look. We have many identities... We have our true self, we have the self that we think we are, the self that we think everyone else sees, and then we have the self that everyone does see that we THINK that they don't see and would absolutely die if we really knew just obvious those things are. That is the hardest reflection to look at though. It is there, but we play VERY deep games of denial with ourselves because it is almost physically painful to see ourselves through other people's eyes. That reflection is painful to gaze upon, so most people don't (that whole Freudian concept of avoiding seeking pleasure, avoinding displeasure I guess)
Yes, of course. We may pick our noses all the way to kingdom come if we think no one can see. (Does anyone still read John Barth? His secondnovel, End of the Road, has a devastating scene. Jake Horner, a college English instructor, wants to have an affair with Rennie Morgan,the wife of Jake’s faculty colleague, Joe Morgan. Rennie tells Jake that Joe has perfect integrity, that he is always the same person, through and through. Jake suggests that he and Rennie spy on Joe as he shaves. And then....)
Yes, often we do have multiple identities. (I don’t present myself on this board in the same way I present myself to those I am in regular personal contact.) But there’s another kind of multiple identity that concerns our lives as they unfold over time. I want to say that I am the same person I was yesterday, last year, in 1990, in 1970, and so on. But my access to myself in the past is a function of memory. The problem is that we forget far more than we remember.. But paradoxically, I also want to say that I am not who I once was. I can change. I have changed. And of course all these changes are positive. (Ha!) When my mother descended forever into the oblivion and fog of Alzheimer’s I inherited the diary she kept during the time she was trying to decide whether to marry my father or not. But I’ll save that one for later.
Sadly, many men out there also are in such a desperate state of identity crisis, realizing that they are no longer young and attractive, that they don't see how silly they look when they buy their corvettes and Harleys, doing a ridiculous comb-over -- as if NO ONE will realize that the hair is just dragged across the bald spot and not actually springing up from the scalp. They are desperate, and what they project is not confidence, but obvious clinging to any vestiges of their lost youth.
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This applies to women, too. The other day I happened on television recent interviews with both Mary Tyler Moore and Maggie Smith. Moore had had so much plastic surgery that her navel had migrated to her upper lip. Smith looked her age, wore her wrinkles proudly. She was by far the more attractive human being.
And, my Arkansas friend, what you wrote about validationand the requirements for honesty in those long-term relationships that arise in exclusive commitments is downright profound.