I went to see the new Woody Allen film—‘You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger’—last week with some friends. We enjoyed it and I think it is one of his best films even though it really doesn’t cover so much new ground. He is always focused on personal relationships in one form or another and this film was no exception. The actors and actresses did excellent jobs, especially Anthony Hopkins and Gemma Watson as an older married couple who divorce when he finds her boring and resistant to the changes he wants to make to keep himself young; he falls in love with and marries a prostitute much younger than himself. His ex-wife flounders about trying to figure out her life, visiting a fortune teller who keeps telling her that it will all work out as well as getting her to believe that she has lived before. As might be expected, it goes to hell for Anthony Hopkins and his new wife when he discovers that she is still sleeping around, preferably with hunky younger men. She ends up pregnant but he knows deep down that it’s not his baby. He realizes he’s made a huge mistake at the end of the film. At some point during the film, before he finds out that he is going to be a father again, he asks his ex-wife for another chance, and she refuses. She has also met someone, an older widower who is a spiritualist. Their daughter’s marriage has also fallen apart; she is in love with her boss at the art gallery where she works, and her husband is in love with the neighbor woman that he watches from his window. There is more to the plot, but it is worth watching the film to find this out. I recommend it.
Strangely enough, my friends and I actually felt a bit sorry for Anthony Hopkins’ character. Yes he was stupid, yes he was vain, but his desire to stay young and to think young was not so strange and actually made him seem quite human. He made the typical mistakes that men his age make when they think they are going to have a wonderful new life without their old wives dragging them down. The problem is that they do enjoy that new life for a while; then reality hits—the younger women they’re with want children, a house, money, material goods, a good life, and they want these wealthy older men to provide it for them. And these men step up to the plate. I am always surprised by the eagerness with which older men leave their older wives for younger women; they start new families with these women when they are in their sixties and seventies. I cannot see the appeal in this. I couldn’t imagine wanting to take care of a screaming baby or babies again after I had done it once when I was younger and had more patience. These men don’t look ahead and see what they’re getting themselves into. They don’t really get their new and improved life after all—freedom, lots of sex, no responsibilities. They may get a new and eager sex partner for a while, and then they end up sharing her with her young children or not having much sex at all after the eager young thing discovers how exhausting it is to be a mother. So how is this new life so much different from the ‘boring old married life’ they left? Go figure.
But even if one understands this, still, growing old doesn’t seem to be an attractive thing, especially in today’s world where the emphasis is on being young and staying young forever. There doesn’t seem to be a point to growing old anymore. Years ago, the elderly were revered for their life experience and wisdom. Now they are considered bothersome in a social and in a work context—you are old at 53 and it’s difficult to find a new job if you are over that age. That has been researched in Norway and found to be true. So why would anyone think that turning 70 would be something to look forward to? It’s got to explain the craze for plastic surgery that turns women’s faces into feline-looking catastrophes or the mini-skirts on women who are over sixty, or the overuse of makeup and perfume. Or men’s obsessions with the gym and looking toned, with comb-overs to hide the bald spots and with hair implants, and all the rest. We want to look our best and that’s a good thing. But it’s not a good thing when we try to look thirty years younger than we are.
It’s a tough world we live in these days. Some women experience a double whammy of rejection. They have to deal with not being wanted in their workplaces because they are ‘too old’ or outdated as well as with husbands who are eyeing every young thing they see. Some younger women (married or not) have no respect for marriage whatsoever—they think nothing of going after older married men to have some fun. Texting, sexting, flirtatious comments, risqué photos, emails—they use all means at their disposal to get what they want. They may also provide these men with a shoulder to cry on (‘my wife doesn’t understand me’) or they provide them with a sense of virility if they cry on these men’s shoulders (‘my boss is mean to me or my boss is harassing me’) that leads to these men trying to help them. Either way, it is so clichéd and banal to witness, and I’ve seen it happen several times now. Some of them even inform the wives of these men that their husbands are interested in them in a desperate ploy to sow doubt and trouble in the marriage. I wonder if these women ever look ahead (at least the ones who are married) and realize that they will be facing the exact same threat from younger women when they themselves have reached middle and old age. I guess they don’t, because if they did, they would behave more respectfully. These types of situations help to reinforce my personal views about women and financial independence, especially if I am asked for advice. Love is love, and finances are finances. My advice to women is to make sure you can take care of yourself and to make sure you have plenty of money by the time you reach old age. That way, no matter what happens--your life will not go to ruin if your husband leaves you for some sweet young thing. If that’s feminism, so be it. I call it being smart and taking care of oneself as a woman. So many women seem to have forgotten this, and so few women seem to look ahead, and that seems strange to me given the fact that nearly one in two marriages still ends in divorce these days. Men always seem to land on their feet financially. Most of the women I know who have been ‘left’ for younger women do not. And without that financial cushion, there is no great new life for them.
