Vanity Flare

Yes, middle-aged men are a bit vain. A few years ago, I started seeing a newly divorced man, 13 years my senior.

While I thought we were just having a bit of fun and not planning far ahead, him being so recently divorced and all that, he was apparently already searching for wife #2. So, affter three months, he said he‘d met another woman whom he thought had more potential. Needless to say she was closer to him in age, divorced parent of two, like him. I took this all very lightly at first, trying not to seem too disappointed that our fling was over, but after a while I realised I missed him. I couldn‘t lie to myself; I really liked him.

So, after about a month, I decided to swallow my pride and went knocking on his door, almost recreating that famous scene from Notting Hill. Although I didn’t give him an expensive original painting, I did bring him a little gift and bravely admitted that I had strong feelings for him, almost begging him on my knees to give us a real chance.

He wasn’t as abrupt as Hugh Grant had been to Julia Roberts but embraced me, kissed me and cuddled and said, with tears in his eyes, that he was terribly flattered, I was a wonderful woman and he was very fond of me. But no, he couldn’t see how we could make a relationship work. Besides, he had been seeing that other woman and things were going well there. I of course needed to hear that he liked her and not me (the brutal truth is always the best medicine) but he said that ‘wasn’t really the issue’. Then I needed to know whether he liked her simply more than me and received the ambiguous answer ‘It’s not a question of that, I just think I stand a better chance with her.’ I was very annoyed. Wishy-washy gestures are intolerable when you’re trying to straighten out your, and someone else’s, feelings.

So I asked him directly whether the age difference was a factor. He said yes, that he didn’t want to be gossiped about, didn’t want his friends and collegues to think he was going through midlife crisis and laugh at him behind his back. He’d also have to consider the feelings of his two teenage sons. Obviously he didn’t realise that, to children and teenagers, anyone above the age of 25 has one foot in the grave anyways. They’d probably not see me as girly as he did when they’d finally be introduced to me, IF it would ever come to that.

I had always heard that older men dreamt of few things more than parading around with a young, pretty woman by their arm so I was struggling with disbelief. I finally asked him: ‘Would you be ashamed of me?’ and he sighed apologetically, ‘Yes.’ No wishy-washy there. Fantastic. After everything he had said about me being so mature and lovely and gorgeous and intelligent and clever and well-read and fun and talented and blahblahblah...I’d be an embarrassment to him! Vanity obviously weighed more than his so-called feelings for me. Appearances were so important to him that instead of following his heart and jump in the deep end, it was safer to settle with a more accordingly woman who would better suit the mould that his ex-wife had left. Are we talking about a text book example?

Still, my astonishment had a bit more to do with discovering that this man, whom I had been so drawn to partially because of his IQ...was in fact handicapped by vanity! I slammed the door behind me, hard.