Couples · Manhattan, New York
We are the oldest people in every room we walk into
Pinned as oldest_in_the_room
- Wants
- one or two people of any age who want to know two more
- Rope so far
- Between us, forty years, and a strong sense of having been here before.
- Around
- Manhattan, New York
We are fifty eight and sixty one and at every gathering we have been to in the last five years we have been the oldest people present by a decade. That is fine. It is occasionally very funny. It also means we are treated as a kind of exhibit, and the number of times we have been asked how long we have been doing this, in a tone usually reserved for a monument, has begun to wear.
Together twenty two years, Manhattan, rope for most of them. He ties, I get tied, and neither of us has ever had the faintest interest in changing that.
What we would like is friendship rather than deference. People we could have dinner with. We are not offering wisdom, we do not want to be anybody's mentors, and we have very little patience for being told what things used to be like, including by each other.
We would also say, since it seems relevant, that the practice at our age is not a diminished version of the practice at thirty. It is a different thing with different pleasures in it and rather more talking.
Not looking for a third. Not looking to be adopted by a group as its elders. And not looking for anybody who wants a comparison between now and the past, which is the conversation we are most often offered and least want.