Daily Telegraph 6.1.11
Love, like youth and sex, can be wasted on the young. Naturally I didn’t think like that when I was young. No young person ever does. For the young, who reinvent the romantic wheel with every first flush of adolescent hormones, love is theirs alone, their beatifying joy and their anguished misery. Surely, they believe, no-one who isn’t shining with youth can ever fall in love.
But they can, and they do. Because, though limbs may begin to creak and complexions crease, when it comes to romance no-one is old in their heads. Hearts still leap at a smile from a beloved: just to be close to the object of devotion makes the world a warmer place.
When it comes to romance most of us are psychologically frozen at somewhere between the ages of sixteen and twenty. I know I am.
That’s the time in our lives when everything is new and at its most intense.
But if we think that’s the only time when our hearts metaphorically flutter, we’re wrong. The bathroom mirror may tell us one thing, but the one inside our heads shows a quite different picture – that of our own eternal youth.
Sometimes some of us, like seventy five year old Michael Andrews who briefly met and then fell head over heels in love with the 90 year old Duchess of Devonshire, can behave inappropriately when in the grip of a new romantic obsession. That can be sad.
“Silly old fool,” the cruel probably commented yesterday as the Duchess finally had to resort to magistrates to prevent her suitor from further pestering her with his letters and texts of adoration. But those who did forget what for millennia poets have called the divine madness that love can bring. And they overlook, too, that age is no impediment to infatuation.
Most songs and films, tell it differently. For them love needs the bloom of youth if it is to sell, so it’s tender and true, sweet sixteen and salad days innocent. That’s understandable. Young love is so much more tuneful and prettier on the eye, and we’ve all known that teenage tug of the heart, that glance or smile that can change a day and then a lifetime. One changed mine. We like to remember and relive those moments and feelings through others in melodies and movies.
But old love is no less intense. Traditionally we smiled at the charming image of a Darby and Joan later life. Robert Browning wrote “Grow old with me, the best is yet to be…” and that was the ideal. It was a pleasant dream, but ideals don’t last for ever. Age can wither hearts as well as bodies, and death will inevitably take one partner sooner than the other. In any couple there is always a survivor.
Until relatively recently that often meant years, even decades, of loneliness. For many it still does. And who is to say that for some memories of love are not enjoyed more than new ones?
But for others there are new possibilities now as attitudes change and lives get longer, fresh chances of romance and companionship, extra avenues for making relationships. Recently I met up with a former tutor from my Sixties’ university days. Now 81 and divorced he’s found a new love on an online dating site. She’s a widow. They’re very happy.
Not that any of this will be much consolation to the heartbroken Mr Andrews, who, it has to be said, might have been pitching his affections at someone somewhat out of his league. Not, I hasten to add, that the Duchess might have considered herself too grand for him. Absolutely not.
But didn’t he know that the lady is a keen Elvis Presley fan? Did he really think he could compete for her affections with Elvis? Divine madness indeed.
