Twenty-Six—Men Who Come
Younger men are different. Not in what they carry—the wanting, the curiosity, the body held at a slight distance from itself—but in how recently it all began and how little time they’ve had to build the walls that older men spend afternoons dismantling.
A man in his twenties or thirties who finds his way here is a particular kind of man. Not every young man wants to spend a Sunday afternoon with someone forty years his senior. The ones who do tend to know why, or half-know, or are here partly to find out.
Some are attracted to older men. Have always been, in the way that attraction works—not chosen, not constructed, just there. They’ve been told this is unusual often enough that they’ve started to believe it, which is why one of the first things they want to know is whether they’re unusual. They’re not.
But being told so by a contemporary lands differently than being told so by the man they’re attracted to, who is living proof that the attraction makes sense.
Some come because they believe—and they’re not entirely wrong—that older men are more grateful. Less available, less pursued, more appreciative of what’s offered. There’s a generosity in that assumption, even if the assumption itself is only partly accurate. Older men aren’t grateful exactly. They’re present. There’s a difference.
Some come to learn something. To find an edge, as though desire were a competitive sport and experience confers advantage. I understand the impulse but I’ve largely stopped trying to deliver on it directly.
What I’ve found is that the only thing worth saying to a man in his twenties about what lies ahead is that life does improve as you age—which lands exactly as well as it did when adults said it to you as a child. Which is to say, not at all. He’ll find out. That’s the only way anyone finds out.
What younger men share with older men, and what surprises them when they discover it, is the body question.
His body is owned by the media in a way that previous generations weren’t quite subjected to. The images are everywhere and they’re not neutral—they’re aspirational, curated, filtered, performing a version of the male body that almost no actual male body resembles.
He has grown up measuring himself against something that doesn’t exist and finding himself wanting in ways he can’t quite articulate because the standard he’s failing to meet was never real in the first place.
So he wants to know if his body is okay.
The same question as the man in his fifties. The same uncertainty underneath it. Just arrived at by a different route—not through decades of a sexless marriage and a body quietly forgotten, but through twenty-something years of images and comparison and the particular cruelty of a culture that has decided the male body is now a project to be optimised.
It is okay. It was always okay. The answer is the same regardless of age.
What the younger man has that the older man sometimes lacks is time. Time for the but to fall away gradually rather than all at once. Time to find out slowly, without urgency, what his body is and what it wants and what it’s capable of given the chance.
That’s not nothing. That’s everything, if he uses it.
I don’t tell him that either. He’ll find out.
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