“We’re not poor!” I told my father, excitedly, when I got back to Miami. By Mexican standards, our midmarket Toyota was a luxury object. But he wasn’t comforted by my new perspective. He didn’t want to debunk Miami’s games. He just wanted to stop losing at them. One day, sitting in the Toyota in our driveway, beneath the mango trees, he made a confession.
“I don’t know how to make money,” he told me.
I had no idea, either. After college, I briefly worked for an Israeli internet start-up whose entire business model, as I understood it, was to post information about Jewish holidays. To my credit, I did wonder why it had so many employees, most of them young men. What I didn’t notice was that, behind a closed door twenty feet from where I sat, a team of programmers ran its real business: online pornography. (A former coworker revealed this to me years after we’d both left.)
I entered adulthood still lacking laser-sharp powers of perception. I wanted to have a brain like a knife, but mine was more like a spoon. I could dig into things, but it took me some time. Though I wasn’t stupid, I was far from cunning. My insights sometimes came years after the fact. When something bad or even surprising happened, my first impulse was to ignore it.
So I decided to become a journalist. Some people become reporters because they’re keen observers, or because they want to expose wrongdoing. I had a different reason: I wanted to finally figure out what was going on.
You know you’re in your forties when . . .
You’re matter-of-fact about chin hair.
You’ve discovered cellulite on your arms.
Everyone you meet looks a little bit familiar.
You sometimes wake up hungover even when you’ve had nothing to drink.
Having older friends no longer makes you feel young.
2
how to choose a partner
I EVENTUALLY MADE AN IMPORTANT life decision: if I can’t be a grown-up, I’ll sleep with one.
Symmetrical Hollywood film stars didn’t make my heart beat faster. I liked my men shlumpy and brilliant. In high school, I’d taped a head shot of Barney Frank—the brainy, liberal congressman from Massachusetts—to my bedroom wall. (Since it was a celebrity crush, it seemed irrelevant that he was gay.)
In real life, I dated men who were, if not wiser than me, then at least quite a bit older. I was especially drawn to foreigners who read newspapers in exotic languages. I embarked on a romantic world tour, dating a German-speaking genius in New York who was unable to make eye contact and a Hungarian psychiatrist who—when dumping me—explained that I simply wasn’t emotionally wounded enough for him.
My pool of eligible foreigners expanded when I was hired by a newspaper to cover Latin America. During a stint in Brazil, I made a tear through the Jewish men of São Paulo, ending up with a DJ who lived with his mother and—judging by the dirty looks she gave me at breakfast—had recently had a fling with his live-in maid.
I was easily dazzled by worldliness. A Russian suitor of mine spoke four languages fluently; it took me nearly a year to realize that he didn’t have a sense of humor in any of them.
I knew it was a bad sign when a Mexican banker brought nothing to read on our beach holiday except a bond-trading manual. But I only ended things after I gave him a leather-bound journal for his birthday and he asked what he was supposed to do with an empty book.
When I finally went American and dated a lawyer’s son from the Chicago suburbs, he decided that I wasn’t exotic enough for him. “Sometimes I think you’re just a Jewish girl from Miami,” he confessed. I feared the same thing.
The putative goal of this world tour was marriage, but few people I knew actually wed. Those who did married badly. One man married a lesbian who left him almost immediately for her pretty Pilates coach. My friend Elaine was briefly married to a grumpy poet whom her friends called, from the outset, “Elaine’s first husband.” Another friend was so panicked about possibly ending up childless that she wed the younger man whom she’d long referred to as “the one before the one.”
I’d always envisioned a romantic chronology that resembled my mother’s: I’d have a few boyfriends, and then get married at twenty-seven. No one warned me that members of my generation might spend fifteen or even twenty years hopping between relationships. When age twenty-seven came and went, I interpreted this not as a demographic shift but a personal failure.
Hardly anyone I knew was coping well with the new pace of courtship. For a few months, I attended a weekly group therapy session in New York that consisted of stressed-out singletons griping about their love lives. At an after-work fiction-writing class, practically every student’s short story concerned twentysomethings on a date. “On to the next couple,” the teacher would say.
My own romantic life felt like a procession of sitcom episodes. There was the improv instructor who split every bill down to the penny, and the first-time novelist who broke up with me after I didn’t show enough enthusiasm for his book. Once, while waiting in a restaurant for my blind date to arrive, I gave my phone number to a man at the next table who was waiting for his date, too.
In the midst of all this, my parents flew to New York to break the news that they were divorcing. “What took you so long?” my brother and I replied, almost simultaneously.
I knew what an incompatible couple looked like, and I had no trouble replicating this. On an airplane, I met a handsome mergers-and-acquisitions specialist whose hands felt like sandpaper, and who kept nothing but bottled water in his refrigerator. It was clear we weren’t in love. In a moment of postcoital angst, I asked him why we were doing this. He gestured toward our naked bodies and said, “Because we’ll never look this good again.”
I’m not sure how I got any work done. I was flying around Latin America covering elections and financial crises. Meanwhile, I was in an almost perpetual state of romantic anguish, as I tried to extract myself from poorly chosen couplings, or as others extracted themselves from me.
But dating also had an addictive thrill. Each new person contained the possibility of both heartbreak and homeownership. And practically everyone I knew was ping-ponging between suitors, too: When one person had a terrible flaw—say, they were jealous—we’d find someone else who was the opposite in that one area and wasn’t jealous at all. But the new person would have a whole new flaw, so we’d ping to someone else with some new problem.
It was rare to get any concrete guidance on how to choose a partner. I ignored the aunt who warned me that a man “won’t buy the cow if he can get the milk for free.” (She was on her third husband at the time, and had given away a lot of milk.) My mother and I didn’t analyze my boyfriends, but she sent regular care packages of clothes from her store. I was relieved when someone told me that everyone has thirty potential soulmates in the world. Though when I repeated this to a single colleague, he said, “Yes, and I’m trying to sleep with all of them.”
Once, when I was wrestling with whether to break up with a Lebanese filmmaker, I asked an Indian journalist for advice. “There’s only one question: Do you believe in the man?” he said. (This sounds more profound in a Hindi accent.) In other words, if the filmmaker lost everything—his job, his status and all of his money—would I still have faith in him?
The answer was no. If the world rejected him, I’d agree with the world. Although the men I dated were mostly older (my sweet spot, for a decade, was thirty-four-year-olds), none of them had that magical grown-up essence I was seeking.
Then a romantic miracle happened. While I was covering Argentina’s debt crisis, a mutual friend introduced me to Simon at a bar. Simon was a British journalist who lived in Paris, and who was in Buenos Aires for a few days to write an article about soccer.
Within minutes of our meeting, Simon told me his theory that there are three kinds of people: strivers, slackers and fantasists. Strivers actually work. Slackers don’t ev
en pretend to work. And fantasists dream of greatness but don’t really do anything. On the spot, he diagnosed me, correctly, as a striver with fantasist tendencies.
It helped that he was handsome and had a winning London accent. And there was the great relief that he was a bookish writer, too. (In later years he will be overjoyed with the leather-bound journals that I give him for many birthdays.) But the clincher was that, already in his early thirties, Simon had developed a plausible—or at least amusing—theory of humanity. He was the living equivalent of the Preppy Handbook; someone who constantly classified everything.
I soon learned why. His parents were anthropologists who raised him in six different countries. Everywhere they lived, they analyzed the natives and themselves. Before meeting his father, an esteemed professor, I asked Simon for advice. “It will be fine,” he said. “Just don’t use the word ‘culture.’”
Simon’s family was different from mine. Their house contained several thousand books, including many written by family members, friends and colleagues. They discussed their own history, going back many generations.
They knew world history, too, and brought it up often. When Simon’s father was shocked by a question I asked him, he replied, “But it was in the third century,” certain that this would clarify the answer.
Facts orbited constantly around Simon’s childhood home, and every subject was open to discussion. Dinners with his family included long analyses of the news, everyone’s current work, and the foibles of various relatives. There were elaborate conversations about social class, including their own.
Bad news was mentioned often. People spoke even if they didn’t have anything nice to say. While I’d been tagging along after my mother in ladies’ sportswear, Simon had been learning how to name what was happening in front of him.
All this early training had turned him into a kind of human decoder. He could spot someone’s motivations, and explicate their good and bad qualities, as clearly as I could detect the brand of shoes and handbag they were wearing.
Being with Simon was like having a personal Rosetta Stone who could translate every perplexing interaction. When we emerged from a dinner, I’d ask for his take on what everyone present had been signaling and saying. He had plausible answers to all my vexing questions: Why were the neighbors so mean to us? Why was the US still fighting in Iraq? I wanted to know what he thought about everything.
One day, at a hotel, we caught sight of ourselves in a mirror. There was light streaming in from a window. In the foreground, some leftover room service sat like still life on a table. “We look like we’re in a Vermeer painting,” he said. I’d spent fifteen years waiting for a man to say something like that to me. I imagined it’s what Barney Frank would have said.
I didn’t need to see all possible men. Finally, my answer to “Do you believe in the man?” was yes.
It took me awhile to understand why Simon liked me back. He’d been ping-ponging between paramours, too. And I got lucky. He’d discovered that a previous girlfriend, who was getting her doctorate in English literature, didn’t know who Joseph Stalin was. (“Mao either,” he adds, when I remind him of this years later.)
I wasn’t perfect, but I knew the name of every major twentieth-century dictator. When I was sacked from my newspaper, amid mass layoffs, I moved to Paris and became a freelance journalist. Soon afterward, Simon proposed.
He and I were lying in bed one night when I turned to him with a confession.
“I’m with you because you’re a grown-up,” I said, afraid this will shock him.
“I know,” he replied. Then he turned around and fell asleep.
You know you’re in your forties when . . .
Your crush on Jesse Eisenberg feels inappropriate.
You’re aware of mansplaining while it’s happening.
Any man without a paunch seems skinny.
You drink coffee before going out to dinner.
You’ve outgrown “adult acne.”
3
how to turn forty
SIMON AND I MARRIED IN our midthirties, so we’re in a hurry to procreate. Within a few years, we have a daughter and then twin boys. (We’re the DITT generation: double income, toddler twins.)
I’ve acquired some trappings of adulthood. I’m now a married homeowner who does laundry for a family of five. I have my own in-house wise man, and I’m a de facto authority figure to my kids. I’ve found my family. But I still don’t feel like a grown-up, in part because I haven’t found my tribe.
Just as I had trouble screening romantic partners, I’ve had trouble screening friends. Since childhood, I’ve regularly found myself as the sidekick of beautiful, self-obsessed women. One of them arrived at my wedding wearing a white dress.
Simon is astonished by some friends of mine who pass through Paris. A New Yorker stays in our basement for several weeks, only coming upstairs to criticize my posture, disparage my writing and boast about his wealth. As a parting gift, he presents us with several wooden clothespins.
A high school classmate insists on staying with us weeks after the twins are born. He barely acknowledges the babies, except to complain about the “incessant noise.” Another man, whom I’d met while traveling, arrives for the weekend with his new girlfriend. He immediately borrows our washing machine, hangs up their wet clothes around the apartment, then announces that they’ll return in a few days, when the clothes are dry. (I’m noticing that my friendships have a laundry theme.)
Simon doesn’t get it. I’m clean, friendly and reasonably nice. Why would I invite these people into our lives? Of everyone I could choose to befriend, why them? Must friendships cause such pain? Unlike me, Simon has many thoughtful, devoted, long-term friends. They comprised most of our wedding guests. And none of the women wore white.
I’m drawn to larger-than-life people who require lots of attention. The upside of narcissists is that they don’t seem to suffer from self-doubt. They’re fake grown-ups; they have little wisdom but lots of certainty. And they instinctively spot my own cocktail of awe, insecurity and tolerance for bad behavior.
When I point out to Simon that his friends aren’t as unpredictably thrilling as mine are, he says it’s important to surround yourself with people who are kind, funny, trustworthy and smart. He urges me to study people before I befriend them, and to back off if they’re missing any of these qualities. (“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship,” the Roman philosopher Seneca said two thousand years ago.)
But I’m not focused on analyzing other people; I’m worried about myself. Others seem three-dimensional and solid to me, with enduring qualities like insight and wit. I worry that, beneath my good-natured topsoil, I might not have any fixed qualities at all. I’m surprised when facial-recognition software can identify pictures of me.
Perhaps because of this, I don’t trust my friendships to last. It’s as if I’m onstage playing the role of affable individual, and I’ve appointed my new friend as audience and chief critic. This means I can bomb at any moment. What if my next line of dialogue doesn’t hold her attention? Have I banked enough amusing remarks to relax into my natural state and be boring for a bit? The other person might like me for now, but what if she changes her mind?
I start off warmly with new friends and genuinely like them. But staying in character is exhausting. To hide my inner flimsiness, I grow increasingly secretive and distant. Soon I won’t reveal trivial details about my life, like the subject of an article I’m writing, or the date that I’m leaving on vacation.
The only friends who aren’t bothered by this are the ones who are very focused on themselves. They don’t care, or even notice, that I don’t reveal much about myself. When I read online that one symptom of narcissism is the feeling that your life is a cover for your emptiness, I worry that I might be one, too.
“You’
re self-absorbed, but you’re not a narcissist,” Simon reassures me.
As we all approach the forties, I notice that some of my more self-obsessed friends are getting worse. Qualities that were adorable at twenty, and worrisome at thirty, now seem dangerous at forty. Youthful quirks are hardening into adult pathologies.
My circumstances have changed, too. It’s one thing to expose myself to difficult people. It’s quite another to expose my marriage and my children to them. I don’t even need to break up with most of my “friends.” As soon as I stop letting them monologue about their lives or camp out in my basement, they stop calling.
Once I’ve cleared out the narcissists, there are very few people left. And I’m okay with that. The mere fact that I like someone now feels like proof that there’s something dangerously wrong with them.
I replace my dysfunctional friendships with people who are more than acquaintances but less than close friends. Most are expatriates, too, and happy to mix with almost anyone who speaks English and can pay their share of the dinner check. I can satisfy my need to occasionally socialize without putting myself at anyone’s mercy.
But as my fortieth birthday approaches, this starts to seem pathetic. Surely being a grown-up isn’t about having cordial relations with nice people who barely know me. And my kids are getting older and starting to notice more. How can I model what healthy relationships look like if I have so few of them?
There Are No Grown-ups Page 3
