More than Anything, We Don't Want to be Pathetic: a Note on Various Retirements

The past fortnight’s intense focus on President Biden’s age can – and probably should – prompt reflections on our own confrontations with time. 

Friends check in with me about my celibacy. (I am very discreet when it comes to what my clients share with me, but I have no signed NDA with myself. I overshare, probably compulsively, about whatever it is that is going on in my inner world. I’ve been doing it in one way or another for decades. This has its virtues and its drawbacks, but I like to think it gives other people permission to open up about their struggles.)

One of these friends asked a rather pointed question last week. “Is your celibacy in part because you yourself are only interested in much younger women, and they don’t find you attractive anymore? Can you not consider the possibility of dating someone your own age for a change?”

I wrote back: “I have not dated anyone close to my own age in a very, very long time. The younger women, rightly, want an attractiveness I no longer possess. My female peers, also rightly, want a strength and a calm and a capacity to self-soothe I have NEVER possessed.”

I recognize that this is, in part, a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Increasingly, I frame my decision to be celibate in terms of a reluctant retirement. “Men at forty learn to close softly the doors to rooms they will not be coming back to,” wrote the poet Donald Justice.  Some of those men close those doors because those rooms have no more allure for them. Some of those men close those doors because they accept that they themselves have no remaining allure for those who are still in those rooms.

It is axiomatic that very few athletes retire at their peak. Last week, half a billion people watched one of the all-time footballing greats, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, confront his own decline. At 39, Ronaldo is still graceful, still quick of mind but unmistakably slower of foot. In European Championship matches against Slovenia and France, he consistently missed shots and opportunities that he would not have missed five, ten, or twenty years earlier. Etched on Ronaldo’s face was the frustration that the muscles would not do as the brain commanded. At one point, he broke down and wept in disappointment and frustration. 

We know this story well, in part because in almost every sport, one ages out of greatness while still comparatively young.  Great gymnasts often peak before they are old enough to rent a car. Novak Djokovic is the grand old man of tennis, having just turned thirty-seven.  Tom Brady defied the odds to play quarterback into his forties. Most tennis players and quarterbacks are on the downslope of their careers well before being eligible to run for president.  The question is always the same: should you quit at the pinnacle, or should you keep fighting even in decline, because some work of noble note may ere be done. 

“Tho much is taken, much abides,” wrote Tennyson about the inexorability of getting old – and in the case of aging athletes, we watch that grim ratio shift before our eyes. More and more is taken, less and less abides. At least, more and more is taken in terms of doing the thing that made them famous. The belief that one’s bones can withstand one last visit to that old room, that you have one last winning shot that might yet fall in… when you’ve spent every moment since childhood convinced that your own mix of supreme effort and natural ability will guide you to glory, how do you walk away?

I am not Cristiano Ronaldo, or Novak Djokovic, or Tom Brady. I am not Joe Biden.  Surely it is a mistake to compare a decline in attractiveness – what my female peers call the “long slide into sexual invisibility” – to a diminution in cognitive or athletic ability.  It probably isn’t reasonable to expect men at forty to play sports at the highest level, and it probably isn’t reasonable to expect men in their eighties to be capable of fulfilling the duties of the office of president.  

But dating isn’t soccer, nor running the nation. Plenty of people my age or older date, have sex, marry and find fulfillment.  Well over a year since Victoria and I separated, is my refusal to even consider dating a sign of wisdom – or a signifier of cowardice? Is it a kind of ridiculous pique? Am I taking my proverbial marbles and going home because if I’m not attractive to women half my age any longer, I do not wish to play the game?  At fifty-seven, am I rather loudly and pointedly closing the door to a room in which I know I am no longer welcome – and deciding that while I’m at it, I’m going to walk out of the whole damn house to camp in defiant solitude in the garden? And if I am doing that, is that really so bad?

I am fortunate to make a living as a writer. (And I remain available for hire for your ghostwriting tasks.) I may not be as handsome as I was twenty-five years ago, nor as fit, but I am a much, much better writer than I was then. I’m not saying I’m Cormac McCarthy. I am no master of the craft. But I have improved considerably in recent years, and at least at the moment, I see no age-related decline in either ability or energy. A seventy-something friend who still makes a living in this same business told me he feels he peaked in his mid-sixties, after decades as a journalist, a novelist, and a ghostwriter. Paul McCartney (still performing at eighty-two) once sang that he was worried about being loved and fed at sixty-four; my writer friend tells me that’s the exact age at which he himself hit the apex of his abilities. Somewhere around traditional retirement age, this mentor of mine found himself at the near-perfect intersection of experience, energy, insight, and skill.  I know it is not so for all in this business, but it is a happy thought.

I retired from marathon running because the injuries mounted – and because a cardiologist told me that doing ultra races had caused my left ventricle to become abnormally and dangerously large. In more recent years, knee damage has made it impossible for me to run at all, so I walk.  I left a sport I love because I had no real choice.

Some athletes retire for that same reason. Others leave because even if they are not injured, their frailties make them a liability to their teammates. They leave because when they were younger, what they could do often led to victory – and they realize that what they can now no longer do increasingly leads to defeat.

Some leave in time to preserve their dignity. No one wants to be an object of ridicule.

No one wants to see a legendary soccer forward stare dumbly at his feet, wondering why they no longer do what they once did. No one wants to see and hear the leader of the free world, evidently confused and entirely unsure about how to complete a sentence. No one wants to see the old man – crumbling mutton disguised as fresh lamb – trying to flirt.  

I was raised to believe that there were three cardinal sins a gentleman should avoid at all costs. First, he should never be dull. Second, he should never be rude. And third – crucially -- he should never be pathetically needy. A gentleman works very hard to avoid provoking boredom, anger, pity, or disgust. As one ages, one can still find ways to be a charming raconteur and a sympathetic, curious ear. Indeed, one gets better at being both!  But if one does not adjust one’s romantic and sexual hopes and desires, one will nearly certainly evoke that dreaded pity and that terrible disgust. It makes me shudder. (I’d rather be lonely than shudder.)

Should Joe Biden step down, and let Kamala have a go? I think he should. Should Cristiano Ronaldo retire? Yes. Should I stay celibate – either permanently, or until I radically reappraise what relationships are and what I bring to the table? Absolutely yes.

And this made me laugh this morning.