Tonight, all by myself, I engaged in a solemn ritual that was probably long overdue. After about 50 years of service, some of it fruitful, most of it futile, I decided to put my libido away, once and for all.
No, no, I hear you say, don’t give up quite so soon. There’s always another bus coming around the corner, more than one fish in the sea and so on.
But I know when I’m licked (figuratively speaking only, of course), and so I have placed my libido, symbolized by a single blue pill, in a small but elegant mahogany box, sealed with a rubber band. Then, teetering on a step stool, I slipped the box onto the top shelf of the hall closet, right behind the Christmas wrap and the three urns containing the ashes of my dead dogs.
There it now rests, along with any lingering hopes I might have had for one last hurrah.
What, you may ask, prompted this decision? A good question, but one to which there is no simple answer. It wasn’t any one thing, but more like a slowly mounting cascade.
Was it the dating-site mixer at the Mexican restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, where the one woman even close to my own age strode up to me, sloshing margarita in hand, with the opening line — asked not as a question, mind you, but a declaration — “So … you’re retired”?
Was it the afternoon when, out with a much younger woman, I got winded on a street corner, and, while struggling to catch my breath, had to feign interest in the window display of a vacuum cleaner store? (“Well, will you look at that? Some of them no longer need a canister!”)
Was it the night when, despite my atrial fibrillation, I went for broke and surreptitiously swallowed a half-dose of generic Viagra?
Thirty minutes later, when it should have kicked in, my face was flushed, my sinuses were congested and the only thing rising was my blood pressure.
“Are you OK?” Alice asked.
Even in the candlelight of her bedroom, I guess the glow from my cheeks (just two, not four) was apparent.
“Sure,” I mumbled, “Why … do you … ask?”
“Sit up. I’m getting you a glass of water.”
The water was followed by a trip to the kitchen, where, wrapped in the quilt, I slumped into a chair while she hastily prepared a bowl of vegetable soup.
“I think you need to eat something,” she said, slapping the bowl onto a place mat, and she was right.
I don’t know why, but I was suddenly ravenous and wolfed down a dozen saltines and two chocolate chip cookies just to chase the taste of my humiliation.
But it isn’t merely a question of age; all my life, my libido and I have had a fractious relationship.
When I was 5 years old, I could never decide who I loved more: blond Laurie or brunet Libby. It all depended on what Laurie wore to kindergarten that day or whether Libby was sporting a ponytail, which slayed me every time.
Even then, I worried that mine was a fickle nature.
Once I started dating, my mother said that a boy who loved his mother would seek out someone like her.
Now, I did love my mom — really — but short and round was just not my type.
For years, it was WASPy, long-legged girls, with a tennis racket over one shoulder and a touch-me-not attitude. I eventually married a blond, doe-eyed beauty, a former member of the homecoming queen’s court at UCLA, who was out of my league but liked my jokes.
Jokes have been my mainstay.
For some time now, however, the joke has been on me. Divorced for 14 years, I’ve been out on the hustings, both on the street and, at my younger brother’s behest, online. “You live alone, you work alone, so unless you plan to date your cleaning lady, you have to put yourself back out there,” he said.
So I had joined a couple of sites, met a motley crew of the good, the bad and the unmedicated (and even found one decent relationship), but kept up my searches in the wild.
During the pandemic, on my afternoon walk along the Santa Monica bluffs, I did actually meet another ex-New Yorker, who formed a welcome little pod with me that saw us both through that dark age. On New Year’s Eve, Amanda and I celebrated with nobody else, but watched the live feed from Times Square, while eating microwaved burritos in bed.
I mean, it’s not that I don’t see the wedding announcements in the paper that trumpet late-in-life unions. They’re meant to be heartwarming, I know — “Look at these two, who met in the nursing home when their wheelchairs collided coming out of the bingo game!” — but they just make me sadder. Worse yet are the ads in places like the AARP magazine where older folks embrace under headlines proclaiming: “The best sex we’ve ever had!”
Can that possibly be true? Were you never 18? If you’re truly having better sex in your 70s than you were in the ’70s, you have my condolences.
Plainly, I am shallow; one more reason for retiring my libido. Yes, I am happy to report that I do have some very happy memories of sex, from a time when my own momentary reflection in a mirror did not cause me to duck and cover, when I could join someone in bed without first making sure, in case I had to get up for any reason, that I had a camouflaging bathrobe within easy reach. No, these days there are too many things — from bleak expectations to “iron-poor blood” (only people in my presumed dating pool will even remember those ubiquitous Geritol ads) — that puncture my libido before it can even get inflated.
And though I have been a night owl for most of my life, I’m often in bed by 9:30 p.m., and the most sensual moment of the day is pulling up the new quilt, with the TV remote and a copy of the New Yorker on the nightstand, for a couple of hours of relaxed, if solitary, entertainment.
It’s a mature perspective, or so I tell myself, and I’m not entirely unhappy about it. But I can’t say I’m exactly pleased either.
The loss of the erotic drive, which made so much of my life exciting and unexpected, can leave me feeling a bit adrift. It feels as if my diet has gone from bountiful to bland, my prospects from mysterious to mundane.
Turns out, when I got up on that step stool to stash my libido box in the closet, I was putting away not only my past, but to some extent my future — that was the harder part — and now I’m just not sure what to replace it with.
Please, God, let it not be pickleball.
The author is a writer of historical fiction (though this essay is, sadly, true), living in Santa Monica. His most recent novel is “The Haunting of H.G. Wells.”
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
