Beauty Before Age

As I've matured, my appreciation for an older man has grown proportionally. But I've always been aware that some men, like fine wine, get better with age.

In my early twenties I had a crush on news anchor Tom Brokaw (stop laughing), who at the time was probably in his late-forties, truly a gent of the world if ever there was one. I would watch the NBC Nightly News just to see my man give it up, hoping that maybe he'd be on location where he always lost the charcoal suits in favor of button downs with the sleeves rolled up to reveal incredibly sexy arms for a guy who sat in a televisions studio all day.

My passion for George Clooney didn't begin until well after his beginnings as a long haired motorcycle riding handyman on The Facts of Life. It took a Caesar haircut and the deepening of those sexy creases at the corners of his eyes to get some serious attention from me. I'd like to say I was a Clooney fan before the rest of the world woke up and smelled the sex appeal because I watched him on Sisters (where he played Detective James Falconer, *swoon*) but alas, my infatuation grew side by side with the legions of Doug Ross groupies.

Sean Connery, Patrick Stewart, Ed Harris. All gentlemen who have fifteen to twenty years on me but still the power to turn my head or at least bring me into the movie theater.

And as I've aged, the age of the perfect hero has increased for me as well. While there's still something about a young stud in the flush of his perfect twenties, I can now understand the appeal of a man who's long outgrown those all-night kegger days and understands the appeal of clothes retrieved from a hanger rather than the floor. Of course this makes sense. In my high school days, I went for the seniors. College brought on the pursuit of graduates and my early twenties a thing for men in their older twenties. When I construct the perfect man these days, he's always over thirty and usually heading for forty.

This weekend, an acquaintance, flush with excitement over the new man in her life, bent my ear for quite a while telling me all about her new love. She's a divorcee who clearly misses the companionship assured when you have a life time mate because I know she's been looking for a special someone for a long time now. As she was describing her new beau, she could barely contain her giddiness. I was so happy for her and listened with genuine interest as she went on and on about their budding relationship. I even went so far as to mask my heebie-jeebies when she got into that TMI zone regarding the "intimate" side of their new love.

Then, she told me that her boyfriend has a pacemaker.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly.

Can I tell you how hard it was to supress that shudder? Dating a man with a pacemaker? Having - gulp - sex with a man with a pacemaker? A pacemaker??

On our way home, I was telling my husband how in a million years I could never imagine getting turned on by a man who has a pacemaker unless it was him, of course, since that will never change. I can't imagine being turned on by anyone that old. (And before I get lectures, I know that some people who have pacemakers are not old, per se. In this instance, the guy is just plain old, so go with it.)

I think I have a built-in ceiling for age attractiveness. There does come a point where a man (and a woman), no matter how sexy in their youth, middle-age, and early twilight years, becomes no longer sexy. Or at least, I can no longer see them in such a way that makes me think "hot" so much as "Geritol".

And bless my friend's heart for her happiness, but the idea of something happening to my husband that would force me out into the world of singles with the goal of meeting a man who is simply not that old totally freaks. me. out.

But hey, I could be wrong. Who knows. I might be the ninety plus broad at the nursing home chasing all those studly eighty-year-old hunks around the Parchese table.