But this same défaut is also one of his qualités, she says. As a dreamer, “I think he brings a lot of fantasy, especially in our sons’ lives.” He loves comic books and animated films, and watches them with the boys. “I would think that if they were only brought up by me, it would be boring,” Delphine says. “The fact that we’re very different is a good thing for our kids.”
And crucially, in the French telling, you don’t fall in love with someone just for his good points, or for his closeness to an imagined ideal. You love him for his unique mix of qualités and défauts—which aren’t actually separate anyway, and which together form his caractère, his character. In other words, you fall for his specific combination of traits. And his flaws are an integral part of the whole.
Of course, the French can also be inflexible about what they’ll accept about people. They have brutal codes for beauty. Obese people sometimes can’t even find jobs. And there are some rigid ideas about the best way to do things. Practically the entire country sits down for lunch at one p.m. An American hosting a dinner party in Paris said that when she once tried laying out all the food at once, picnic style, her French guests organized the meal into courses anyway, waiting to eat the cheese and salad last.
And yet, the French can be surprisingly broad-minded. They tend to assume that anyone is lovable, even if he’s highly imperfect, because he’s uniquely himself. (In France, “even the most ‘horrible’ people—criminals, assassins and the like—can have friends,” Raymonde Carroll writes.) It isn’t just your partner whom you expect to have a mixture of qualités and défauts—it’s everyone.
In other words, when my friend Claire told me that her husband didn’t have any flaws, she didn’t mean that there was nothing irritating about him. She meant that she sees the flip side of every défaut, to the point where they’re just part of the package she loves—and so they’re not really flaws at all.
* * *
—
I decide to try this with Simon, too. Maybe it’s the key to being married in your forties. Currently, I love him for his qualités, but his défauts drive me nuts. I know, broadly, that on the plus side he’s quite smart and intuitive. I also know that he can’t operate a can opener, he’s never voluntarily thrown away a newspaper and when anything goes wrong he thinks it’s going to last forever.
But have I paid attention, specifically, intimately and meticulously, to what he’s really like? Have I tried to study him, looking at him over and over, until I see more and more? Not really. I’ve floated above the surface of him, alternately viewing him as a larger-than-life intellectual, and a peevish, incompetent child.
I’ve also never considered that his positive and negative traits might be related, or that I could love him not despite his flaws, but because of them. Why not give this a try, and see what happens? Perhaps this small adjustment would make a big difference?
I begin studying Simon and listening carefully when he speaks. If a man tells you what he wants on the first date, maybe Simon will still be telling me this fourteen years later.
I quickly see that practically all his défauts are paired with his qualités. Sure, our house is permanently cluttered with books and newspapers, but that’s because he loves to read and write. This isn’t an earth-shattering realization, but reconceptualizing it makes it easier to tolerate the piles of paper on our dining room table.
When I accidentally wake him up early one morning, he assumes I’ll do this every morning for the rest of his life (I think of this as his “slippery-slope” mode). But the same mode means that, as a columnist, he can look at present circumstances and extrapolate about the future.
All aspects of his personality seem to travel in pairs. True, he can’t do basic practical tasks. (Once, when he couldn’t strike a match, I had to light the candles on my own birthday cake, then run back to the table so he could carry it to me.) But in the time that most of us spent learning to blow up balloons and pack grocery bags correctly (he puts the strawberries on the bottom), Simon was reading. When I ask him about the Bosnian War, he gives me a lucid explanation of the entire conflict—on the spot.
I’m not sure Simon has personal-growth needs. Our book-filled apartment looks a lot like his childhood home, and he has practically the same values and politics as his parents. In baby pictures he has almost exactly the same face as he does now.
Nor is he on a voyage of self-discovery. Whenever I mention psychotherapy, he quotes a British novel in which a mother refuses to let her son describe his dreams: “There is only one thing more deadly boring than listening to other people’s dreams, and that is listening to other people’s problems,” she says.
But it turns out that Simon does have needs. Once I listen to him more carefully, I finally realize that he’s been saying more or less the same thing to me for fourteen years: I want to work. It’s practically his mantra. He says it with varying degrees of frustration and anger. He doesn’t need me to participate in his work, he just needs me to get out of the way or to look after the kids for a while. Thankfully, I’ve never forced him to listen to my dreams. But I’ve kept him so busy fulfilling my personal-growth needs, I haven’t left much space for him.
Since he’s a writer, I go online and read some of his columns. It turns out that basic information about my husband’s psyche is on the internet. In an article for a men’s magazine, he describes his counterfactual weekend: “You awake again at noon, coiled together with Scarlett Johansson. Eventually you take her out for a long brunch with newspapers. You idly wonder what to do that afternoon . . . Around Sunday lunchtime, just as Scarlett is saying goodbye, your phone trills. It is Salma Hayek.” Simon loves our life and our family. But unlike me, at every moment he sees its opportunity cost. In his forties, he’s trying to accept what he has.
It worries me that we never discuss any of this. In the American model, couples prize transparency and think that people in healthy unions shouldn’t keep secrets. But I notice that in France, couples assume that a bit of distance and mystery energizes a relationship. A French girlfriend tells me that she doesn’t tell her husband some things that happen to her at work, so she can surprise him with those stories when they’re with friends.
I practice this technique, too. When I accompany one of my sons on a school trip, a girl in his class explains to me, apropos of nothing, that her parents divorced, and that her mother—who’s named Élodie—remarried a woman who’s named Élodie, too. “So I now have two moms, and they’re both named Élodie,” she says.
It’s the kind of story I would normally have told Simon right away, or at least before ten p.m. Instead, I save it, and tell the story when we’re at dinner with friends a week later. Simon isn’t overly impressed with the tale of two Élodies. It doesn’t cloak me in an aura of mystery. But at least I have a story that he hasn’t heard before.
And at the end of the day, I think he likes our story. As puzzle pieces go, we’re not bad at all.
You know you’re in a fortysomething relationship when . . .
You lie about your spouse’s age.
Your how-we-met story feels like a fable.
You used to only like some of your wedding pictures. Now you like all of them, because you look so young.
It’s been many years since you were invited to a wedding.
At least five people who attended your wedding are dead.
You’ve realized that “soul mate” isn’t a preexisting condition. It’s an earned title. They’re made over time.
CONCLUSION
how to be a femme libre
THERE’S THIS NOTION, in France, of the femme libre—the “free woman.” Once I notice this term, I begin to see it everywhere.
“When was the first time you felt libre?” a French women’s magazine asks a different celebrity each week. A thirty-nine-year-old actress tells Le Monde that she now plays more
complex characters, not just the pretty blonde, and “I feel more libre, less like I’m limping. I’m no longer trafficking in who I am.”
There are some young femmes libres, but most are around forty or older. In her sixties, the British actress Jane Birkin is “a femme libre who has always claimed her independence, her outspokenness,” an editorial in L’Express Styles explains. At seventy, Catherine Deneuve is “capable of everything and more libre than ever, the actress continues to surprise,” says French Vanity Fair.
Men in France can be libre, too, and they’re praised for being free thinkers. But homme libre doesn’t have the same cultural resonance. It’s mostly used to describe men who have just left prison.
But I count dozens of French books—many of them autobiographies and biographies—with femme libre in their titles. When a certain type of woman dies in France—often a writer, political activist or beloved performer—it’s practically a given that newspapers will proclaim “the death of a femme libre.”
Despite the term’s ubiquity in France, there’s little discussion of what femme libre means. I gather that its origins are political. An 1832 French pamphlet titled “La Femme Libre” made the risqué claim that wives should not take orders from their husbands. By the time Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, the term had broadened to describe a woman with rigorous opinions on matters of the day. She isn’t frivolous. “A free woman is exactly the opposite of a light woman,” de Beauvoir wrote.
Today’s free woman doesn’t have to be political. She’s closer to a free spirit, though without the new-age connotations. In a common French narrative, a woman’s twenties and thirties are the period when she does what’s expected. But by her forties, she becomes increasingly “free” by doing what truly suits her.
The sixtysomething newscaster Claire Chazal says her love life—including a relationship with a much younger man—is an expression of liberté. “It’s the desire to be autonomous and to do what I want, perhaps even with a certain egotism.”
There’s an Anglo-American version of becoming more free as you age, but it’s different. It’s more extreme. The free-spirited older Anglo woman might claim to abandon the social codes entirely, and say she doesn’t care what anyone thinks. In the beloved British poem “Warning” by Jenny Joseph, a woman says that once she’s old, she’ll binge on sausages, spit, plop down anywhere when she’s tired and, famously, wear purple.
This might be liberating, but it hardly sounds like something to look forward to. It’s as if the world has decided you’re irrelevant, so you thumb your nose and just wear purple.
The French femme libre is a mix of freedom and conventions. She can make unpopular choices and think for herself, but she doesn’t abandon all the social codes or let herself go. (French women described as libre are often quite elegant, though they don’t have to be.) The freedom of a femme libre is mostly on the inside. She knows her own mind with great precision, and she has cleverly organized her life to match her needs. She feels that she still has a place in the wider world, and she doesn’t wear purple.
And while the “free” time of life gets mentioned in the English-speaking world, it isn’t venerated the way it is in France. It doesn’t have its own name or come with as many role models. When the French economist Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, his wife—the well-known journalist Anne Sinclair—defended herself for staying with him.
“I’m neither a saint nor a victim, I’m a femme libre,” she told French Elle. “I feel free in my judgments, in my actions, and I make decisions about my life in complete independence.” She was also free to change her mind; the couple later divorced. A 2015 biography was called Anne Sinclair: Une Femme Libre.
It’s as if there’s a whole other stage of adult development that women aspire to here. And they’re celebrated for achieving it. When I hear a young singer interviewed on French radio one morning, and the presenter asks, “How would you like people to describe you?” I can practically predict what she says next: “I don’t know, I suppose as a femme libre.” Becoming libre is France’s feminine ideal.
There’s something very grown-up about the “free woman.” She has gravitas and a sense of purpose. She can make things matter. And yet, she doesn’t take herself too seriously. She’s at ease in her own body, and she knows how to experience pleasure.
It’s not a bad thing to aim for, even if you’re not French.
* * *
—
I’m not a femme libre yet (I’d like to think I’m still too young), but I’ve made some advances. I don’t mind being called “madame” anymore. I’ve gotten used to it. When I showed up for a work breakfast recently, I was the oldest person by a decade. But instead of wallowing in self-consciousness, I reminded myself to be “comfortable in my own age” and to own it.
I’m still an American inside. I can’t imagine myself changing out of my garter belt in a parked car before going home to my husband, like that French grandmother in her sixties. But that’s in part because I don’t have a car, and because my husband would never notice my stockings. I also struggle to imagine sixty. But I am determined to be free in one key sense: I’ll decide for myself how I want to age. And part of that, I hope, means accepting that the body I’m in is mine.
In my forties, I have come to see myself more clearly. I now accept that I have a spoon brain that needs time to dig into things. The CIA still hasn’t tried to recruit me.
But I’ve become the first kind of shopper in all parts of my life (except, perhaps, for actual shopping, where I remain the queen of returns). Now, when I encounter a person, a place or a job that I like, I’m satisfied and I stick with it.
Like many of my peers, I’ve stopped wishing I was someone else, with a different set of skills or a different type of upbringing. So I was raised in retail? So my parents didn’t discuss politics and philosophy at dinner? So what? I’ve learned to extract lessons from what I was given, and to appreciate my family’s stability, specificity and warmth. Like the Brazilian editor told me: Respect the work. Keep changing it. Grow with it. That’s maturity.
I’ve come to see that people raised by professors have problems, too. (“It was one endless conversation about socialism,” a daughter of academics told me about her childhood.) Simon recently admitted that at his dinner table growing up, there were long discussions about history and ideas, but also constant arguments about who had done what to whom inside the family.
Schopenhauer was right that “the first forty years provide the text.” In midlife, we have a critical mass of data and some distance. We can look hard at our lives and see more and more in them. But this same scrutiny reveals how much we have in common with other people. We can share a mood, and a meal, much more easily. And that makes it more fun.
I’ve realized that, like me, hardly anyone figures out a decade when they’re still in it. There’s always going to be a lag. But having now traversed most of the forties, I think I know what it means to be a grown-up:
It’s to be yourself with other people.
It’s to keep them at the distance you choose.
It’s to care for others.
It’s to love them for their flaws.
It’s to be good at something.
It’s to transmit what you value and know.
It’s to be honest.
It’s to be awed.
It’s to grasp what’s happening and name it.
It’s to know your blind spots.
It’s to be a little bit wise.
It’s to merge your aspirational and actual selves.
It’s to find your tribe.
It’s to decide for yourself what matters.
It’s to stop thinking that grown-ups are coming to explain everything and rescue you.
It’s to wing it.
It’s to step u
p to the plate.
There are stages of becoming a grown-up. First, you definitely aren’t one. Then you pretend to be one. Then you’re sure that there are no grown-ups; that they’re mythological and don’t really exist. And then finally, maybe one day in your forties, you just are one.
This doesn’t feel anything like you’d imagined. It’s not all-knowing, omnipotent and large. It’s humble, solid and small. But at long last, it feels like you. And you think, just then, that this is the best age of all.
You know you’re in your late forties when . . .
No one even feigns surprise when you reveal that you have three kids.
You have attended several fiftieth birthday parties.
Friends have begun to mention where they would like to retire.
You’ve started to imagine where you’ll live when your kids move out.
You no longer consider fifty to be old.
A feeling of well-being has crept up on you.
Small decisions can still be paralyzing.
You have stretches of feeling like an insecure twentysomething again.
You feel a certain clicking past of the years, like stars rushing past in a space odyssey film.
You can’t fully account for the past decade.
It still feels like it’s your “day.”
You realize that, very soon, you will consider the forties to be young.
There Are No Grown-ups Page 20
