Twenty-Five—Men Who Come
You’re only young once but you can stay immature indefinitely.—Ogden Nash
I’ve thought about that line often. Not as a joke exactly, though it is funny. As a quiet argument against the story most men tell themselves about age and what it means and what it closes down.
A man is the way he is no matter his age. The curiosity doesn’t change. The wanting doesn’t change. What changes is the accumulation of reasons not to act on either—the marriage, the career, the community, the architecture of a life that has been carefully constructed around a particular version of himself. Age doesn’t diminish the wanting. It just adds more weight to the reasons for keeping it quiet.
I’ve worked with men of twenty. Still assembling themselves, still at the beginning of the body image battle that most men will fight quietly for the rest of their lives. Twenty years old and already uncertain about the body they’re in, already managing the wanting, already aware that some of what they feel doesn’t fit neatly into the available categories.
Men in their thirties who have done everything right. The career, the relationship, the broad-minded progressive life that was supposed to have resolved all of this. And underneath it, still, the question. Still the loop. Still the thing that didn’t get resolved by doing everything right because it was never about doing anything wrong.
The largest group—the men I’ve seen most consistently across the decades—sit between forty-five and sixty. Men at a hinge point. The career ending or changed. The marriage ended or changed or simply arrived somewhere neither of them planned. The children grown and gone and the house suddenly quiet in a way that makes space for thoughts that the noise had been keeping out.
Something happens in these years. An event, sometimes—a divorce, a redundancy, a loss, a birthday with a zero in it. Sometimes nothing so definable. Just a morning when a man looks at the rest of his life and thinks: maybe I should try men.
Not necessarily because he’s gay. Not necessarily because the marriage failed or the life was wrong. Just because the door has been there his whole life and he is suddenly, acutely aware that he is not going to live forever and he has not yet opened it and he would like to know what’s on the other side before he runs out of time to find out.
That’s not a crisis. That’s not a breakdown. That’s a man paying attention to himself, possibly for the first time in decades, and deciding that the question deserves an answer.
He’s right.
And then there are the men in their seventies, their eighties. My oldest regular client was ninety-two, still coming to see me at ninety-five, still himself in every way that mattered. Not an exception. Just the far end of a curve that never really flattened the way the statistics said it would.
A man is the way he is no matter his age.
That’s not optimism. That’s just what I’ve seen.
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