Demi Moore
Striptease__1996
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle__2003
44 years old in 2006THE SWEET SPOT
by Adam Sachs
[GQ - Aug.09]
Somewhere between puberty and Cialis is that perfect moment in a single man’s life when he can date the broadest age group, when he can sleep with 23-year-olds—and their mothers—without being called a creep. He just has to know the rules
“ARE YOU DYIN' ON ME, old man?” the girl says with a sweet, cruel smile.
I am not dyin’. I am coughing.
Trying to muffle another, I spit out a hacking hee-hawish sound:
KARGHHA-HAAA! The laugh-cough is an unconvincing piece of theater, like someone trying to brightly yodel their way through a bout of diarrhea. “Don’t die, old man,” she purrs soothingly, “not right now.…”
Yes, please, not now. Not while she is, unaccountably, here in my bed, making jokes at my expense. She’s lovely. Naked. Twenty-two. She could read to me from Mein Kampf or throw pebbles at my head and I would still consider this an excellent morning to be alive. It occurs to me that I have lived a full 1.5 decades’ more mornings than she has. When she was born, I already had a driver’s license and beginner’s beard. Now I’m a 38-year-old, newly unmarried, formerly baby-tracked bachelor whose friends have summer homes and pictures of pink-cheeked toddlers posted in their Facebook profiles.
How did our paths cross here? The answer is a hitherto uncharted territory in the life of a man, the Sweet Spot, when suddenly you find yourself free to date anyone from recent college graduates to near re-tirees. It begins sometime after your thirty-fifth birthday, though the precise moment is impossible to identify. Suddenly, the pool of available women you can feasibly sleep with expands to include everyone—and her mother. If you are a female born sometime between the launch of Sputnik 1 and the release of Evil Dead II, we could conceivably be getting a drink later.
The Sweet Spot isn’t about love or even happiness. It’s just an observation of fact: For a presumably brief but glorious spell, the man in his late thirties can date more women of more fascinating types and circumstances than at any other time in his life. The discovery is like waking one day to read in the science section of the Times about the existence of a new planet made of salted caramel with rivers of flowing bourbon. For once, good news about getting older! In fact, it’s a fucking miracle.
Young women write their names on napkins in bars, talk earnestly to you about Proust until 6 a.m., and demonstrate Cirque du Soleil–ish tricks with their legs. (At 22 everyone’s a contortionist.) Older women look at you like you’re a warm appetizing pretzel that they probably shouldn’t indulge in but what the hell. Then there are the women your own age. They’re the most suitable and almost always the most fraught. They kill you with their eyes, tell you flat out they’ve smelled your type before, even when they’re sliding next to you into the homeward-bound taxi.
A while ago, two women visited my apartment on successive nights. They sat in the same chair. They ate the same ragù I’d made and frozen for these impromptu dinners. The redhead stayed over. The blond did not. The redhead was talkative, never slept. The blond was skeptical but amused. The blond had a kid about the same age as the redhead. The fact that these two would find their way into my life at all still seems to me slightly surreal, part of the dizzying luck of the Sweet Spot.
A friend of mine is 42, a long-term bachelor who loves the company of women but who flees at the first hint of domesticity. (He’s been at this longer than I have.) I asked him where he saw the age range of the Sweet Spot. “I’ve been with women in their fifties, and as long as I find them attractive, age absolutely doesn’t matter,” he says. “Bodywise, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I appreciated them younger, but not too young. Below 23 or so seems dangerous. I mean, ‘Dude, I just fucked a teenager!’—that is not a high five I want to be on either side of. And I’ve found that if you’re just looking for a fuck buddy, the older-wiser gals are so much better in bed.”
The paradox of the Sweet Spot is that so much of your success depends on your being manifestly Mr. Wrong. Take the 22-year-old who heard the death rattle in my cough. She’s smart, new to the city, on her way up in the world. I am peculiar and old, seasoned with my own special blend of baggage, bruises, and bloat. Not, obviously, boyfriend material. She doesn’t have to think very hard before she jumps in bed with me, because she doesn’t take me that seriously. There’s no need for the standards she’d apply to more suitable mates: Is this person reliable? (I’m not.) Can I picture a future with this guy? (You can’t.) What will my friends think? (They’ll laugh.)
For the 22-to-28 set, I am the Novelty Fuck. What someone like me brings to the deal is an apartment without roommates, and what passes for experience—the kind of little life things (wine-list familiarity, better shoes, less-awkward oral sex) that accrue to someone during those extra 1.5 decades the way sea barnacles attach themselves to a rusty old pier. Maybe most important, the man in the Sweet Spot comes with the unspoken promise that he will not linger. When she’s ready for less novelty, he’s gone, no hard feelings.
For the older woman, he’s another kind of escape, a harmless indulgence, and wrong in a whole different way. For husband material or even a steady date, she’ll look to someone older and more stable—someone with a track record of an orderly life. There’s a woman who comes to see me now and then. She is divorced and lives in the suburbs with her young son. With girls in their twenties, there are endless nights out and 4 a.m. booty calls. By contrast, the divorcée calls the week before. In her large Goyard overnight bag she brings rib-eye steaks marinating in Ziploc bags, a bottle of red, something expensive to wear to bed. After dinner we sit around and talk about travel and divorce. Never once do we mention seeing each other in circumstances other than these infrequent house calls. “I remember this,” she says, looking around my small apartment. “I remember your life.” For her I am the Vacation Fuck, a reminder of a time without so many adult responsibilities and a little fun with someone who isn’t offering or expecting anything more.
A newish friend of mine—let’s call him the Very Smart Man—I met in Buenos Aires. The VSM had sold some businesses and moved to Argentina to start some new ones and figure out what life is supposed to be about. Along the way, he learned how much more interesting he’d become with age. “When I was 25, I had no clue what I wanted,” he says. “So the girls who knew they wanted a family and kids weren’t interested in me. And the girls who wanted something nontraditional were fucking drummers and getting lower-back tattoos. But at 39, I am fucking fascinating.”
In the interest of research, I called another young lady I’d had some fleeting involvement with last year. Nothing much happened, but I’d always liked her and respected the way that she looked at me like I was a total idiot. She wasn’t shy about addressing our fourteen-year age gap. “First of all, I never thought you were stupid,” she says kindly. “But you were surely full of shit.” She agreed that “with an older guy, you forgo the normal screening you might apply to a prospect for a long relationship. Dating someone older is like dating a flight attendant—not someone you’d commit to, but they’re fun to be around.”
The scary, alluring thing about women my age is that we’re not necessarily wrong for each other. And so the suitability calculus is always applied: Am I a good bet? Am I fixable? The honest answer: Who knows?
What we all realize, though, is that the baby clock is real, and so these relationships tend to get intense fast. The road forks two ways: marriage or tears. If you were committed to living out the Sweet Spot for as long as it lasted, the kindest, most honest thing to do would be to avoid any marriage-minded woman in this middle demographic. But compatibility is hard to ignore. I asked a 37-year-old I dated how it looked from her end. “I think I like people or I don’t,” she said. “The unfair part is I now have to make quicker decisions about whether someone is capable of being serious with me. The stakes have changed even though I don’t feel like I have.”
My own fear is that, spoiled by choice, I’ll just keep chasing the fun until it isn’t fun anymore, until I’ve become so adept at charming my way into and out of emotional entanglements that where I end up is nowhere. The Sweet Spot is sweet precisely because it can’t last forever. There is a line between Happy-Go-Lucky and Oily Perma-Bachelor, our own ticking countdown to cheesiness and desperation. Maybe the line isn’t a particular age but a vestigial hope that there’s someone out there we can truly connect with. “The fear,” says a friend of mine who is eternally unsatisfied but tirelessly optimistic, “is that while we’re busy pursuing this porn life, the real thing is love and making a family, and that’s all passing us by.” Writes the VSM from Buenos Aires: “I do sometimes worry that I’m not going to have a chair when the music stops. But part of me thinks: Keep it up for as long as possible and hope to die young.” I’m pretty sure he’s not joking.
ADAM SACHS wrote about how to survive a long night of drinking in the April issue.
