“How’s your love life?”
“Not as exciting as yours, Grandma.”
My grandmother is 86 years old and she has a long distance
boyfriend. She’s just been telling me about how every night at 8 pm her time
and 10 pm his time (she lives in New Mexico, he lives in New Jersey), he calls
her and asks, “Ready to pour?”
They drink one gin and tonic and talk for an hour before bed.
This happens every night. She tells me that he’s started calling in the
mornings too, “Just to say Good Morning.” I ask how they constantly find things
to talk about.
“I don’t know, honey, we just do. We talk about politics and
the people we used to know. We tell each other about what we did that day.”
I remember that feeling of wanting to tell a partner
everything—purposefully remembering things from your day just so you could tell
them about it later, every mundane little detail. I had that with Mr. Intimidated,
which is how I knew I actually really liked him. Grandma tells me that her boyfriend admitted to making notes throughout his day so he wouldn't forget to tell her things.
“He makes me feel like a girl,” she tells me earnestly. “I
never thought I’d feel that way again.”
My grandmother and her boyfriend, Bob, grew up together in
the same tiny New Jersey town where he still lives. They knew all the same
people, most of whom are now dead. Bob remembers more than she does about their
high school days together—he remembers things about my grandmother that she doesn’t
remember herself. Like about that time they were playing tennis in gym
class and she got a cramp in her leg and had to sit down and the gym teacher
came over and asked Bob, “What did you do to her?” Or when she fainted outside
the school and knocked down a professor.
Bob remembers these details because he’s been in love with my
grandmother for 60 years. My grandfather died three years ago and this man—a widower
himself—waited a respectable two years before swooping in on the long lost love
of his life. She wasn’t sure at first and she resisted him for several months—I
think she felt some moral obligation about being faithful to the memory of my grandfather.
But Bob just kept on coming, undeterred by her reticence.
“I feel silly now about resisting him,” she admits.
When Bob came to visit her in Santa Fe several months ago,
my grandmother laid down the ground rules: “Hopper seat down” (she calls the
toilet a hopper), “you have to help with the cooking, and... NO SEX.” Her
boyfriend joked: “If you wanted to have sex, I’d have to bring someone in.” At
first I interpreted this to mean a prostitute and I was momentarily shocked.
Then my grandmother laughed, apparently charmed by his little joke. I guess he
meant a doctor or something. Someone to administer the Viagra? I don’t know.
One of her favorite things about Bob is the fact that he can
keep the names of her three daughters straight. The fact that he remembers that
her granddaughter lives in Los Angeles.
“He has a good memory and he obviously cares about you,” I
say.
I consider telling her about the guy I had been chatting
with on OKCupid for a couple weeks who then, a year later when I got back on
the site, opened with the same pick up line he’d used on me the first time
around. I remembered the line and I remembered him. We had gone so far as to
exchange numbers and had texted on a daily basis—we were pretty close to
actually meeting in person before it fizzled out. He’d apparently forgotten all
these details and was starting from zero with me. I wondered if he still had my
number in his phone. I consider telling her about the chef I was chatting with
recently and was really excited to meet. We had made a date, he had to cancel
at the last minute, he wanted to reschedule. I said okay and then never heard
from him again.
When my grandmother asks about my love life, I’m tempted to
mention the fact that I recently deleted all my dating apps after reading a
particularly depressing article about Tinder in Vanity Fair. Midway through the article, I grabbed my phone and
promptly deleted ALL the apps: Tinder, OKC, Hinge, Happn, even Bumble. I
decided I didn’t want to feed into this culture that was turning men into
sociopathic pussy-monsters and women into simpering attention whores. I decided
I would meet someone the old fashioned way: IRL.
I can’t explain any of this to my grandmother because it
simply wouldn’t make sense to her. On a fundamental level, her generation
doesn’t understand having a game on your phone where you swipe through millions
of human faces trying to find someone to have sex with. Her boyfriend has been
in love with her for 60 goddamn years! They talk on the phone every night.
She’s living in some nostalgic Nora Ephron romance flick from the 90s. Every
time she tells me about Bob, I get off the phone and quickly jot down some
notes.
“I have to write this story!” I tell myself. It’s too good
to be true. This isn’t real life. It’s some relic from a sweet unattainable
past.
I remember my grandmother watching this short film I made in
which the three young women gather in the kitchen explicitly talking about sex
and masturbation. I had been nervous to show it to her, but her reaction was
amazing.
“Do you girls really talk like that?” She asked, intrigued.
“Yeah, we do,” I told her.
“That’s really great,” she said to my surprise, “In my day
you simply didn’t talk about that stuff.”
I think about the fact that my grandmother has only had sex
with one man her entire life. The fact that she got married right out of high
school, didn’t go to college, and had three daughters. I think about how she
was the star of all her school plays, a real beauty, but didn’t have enough
belief in herself or encouragement from her parents to pursue a career in acting. The fact that
she is also a poet and a painter, and considers these talents to be just
hobbies. And that she never really liked to cook—my grandfather was the one who
loved being in the kitchen. My grandmother grew up in a generation where women
were expected to stay home and bare children. And that’s it. And I think if my
grandmother had been born of my generation, she wouldn’t have chosen that path.
She probably would have been an artist. Maybe an actress. She would have had a
choice.
When I ask my grandmother if she has any plans to visit Bob
in New Jersey, she says she doesn’t have any desire to, that she really doesn’t
want to stay with him. She insinuates it’s because she doesn’t want to have
sex.
“If I were your age maybe I’d want to visit him…. You can
guess what I mean.” She laughs. I laugh too. Last time I saw my grandmother she
declared that she’d never have sex again. I just stared at her, mouth dropped
open, like ‘how could you ever say that?’ Especially after having had sex with
the same man for my entire life, I feel like I’d be chomping at the bit to see
what else was out there.
“I just don’t want to anymore,” she said at the time,
resigned. I guess it makes sense. Biologically speaking it makes no sense at
all for a woman to still want sex at age 86. Still, I can’t imagine myself ever
saying the words, I’ll never have sex
again. Maybe on my deathbed.
Considering the generation my grandmother grew up in, it’s
not totally inconceivable that she never actually enjoyed sex in the first
place. It’s even possible she’s never had an orgasm. When I sent her a DVD of
the first season of Masters of Sex for
her birthday, her response was that she found it “silly to even study these
things.” I explained to her that before the studies of Masters and Johnson, female
sexuality was cloaked in shame and misunderstanding and that, although
imperfect, even just the fact of their study was a step in the right direction.
Despite finding it silly, she still said, “I’ll probably watch the rest of the
seasons.”
Although I don’t idealize my grandmother’s generation and I
certainly wouldn’t want to go back to a time when women had no sexual freedom
to speak of, I think something has been lost in this age of endless choice. I’m
nostalgic for a time when, if you wanted to talk to the person you had a crush
on, you had to call them on the phone or drive to their house. You couldn’t
just send them a text or stalk them on Facebook. There was more risk involved,
and therefore more investment. You couldn’t swipe through a hundred potential
dates a night. You had to talk to one person at a time and risk actually liking
that person. Is romance dead? No. But it’s definitely old and potentially
dying.
