11. Dating at 55.... Part II
I have gone into great detail to describe these two women to make only one point. Spirit is ageless! The gleam in an eye, one whose countenance is always beaming and quick to smile or laugh, all indicate an attitude of boundless energy and a passion for life. Beauty is in the radiance, not necessarily in the tautness or flawlessness in one's skin. Twenty-one year old Harold fell in love with eighty year old Maude because of her spirit, we all did... that is why this film remains such a classic favorite. I often use films as reference points but I also suggest that most fiction is also based on fact.
There are no shortcuts through life when it comes to learning lessons and growing. Some of us have more trials and tests than others... but none of us gets a free ride. The difference is in how each of us passes or survives the lessons. Does one embrace each difficult experience as a lesson well earned and move forward, or does one repress her/his emotions and retain the anger/hurt? I submit here that wrinkles are proof of experience and survival, marks of character; but if the heart is covered with scar tissue, as opposed to remaining open and vulnerable, then the spirit cannot thrive and withers away slowly. This explains why Harold was old at twenty one and why Maude was so young at eighty.
AND... this is why some "older" men are really not that much fun to date. If they don't suffer from the Peter Pan syndrome, they sometimes suffer from the Rip Van "Wrinkle" syndrome. They seem to have been unconscious for a good part of their life and expect things to remain as they would like them to be, as opposed to how things really are. Rip Van Wrinkles possess a certain kind of rigidity to their thinking. They converse in a didactic manner and aren't usually that genuinely curious or interested in others. Men of position and power often suffer from this Rip Van Wrinkle syndrome, mostly because they have been accustomed to always getting their way.
Rip Van Wrinkles are stuck in another period of time when women's choices were not as great as they are today. Their attitudes are old-fashioned, out-dated and simply do not fly with most independent women with any sense of themselves. Issues of control, in order to keep a woman in her "proper"
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