A woman I know told me that when she was at a party recently, she met a college-aged guy who flirted with her a bit and when it came out that she was 32 (a most excellent age, by the way – it’s a power of 2), he was like, “Wow, I can’t believe you’re so old! That’s older than my mom…”
“What?” I said. “She must have been crazy young when she had him to be younger than you are!”
“Let me finish. He said ‘That’s older than my mom was when I was born.’” Apparently his mother had been 29 at that time.
It seriously took me a moment to process this statement because the idea of somebody being “older than somebody’s mom when she gave birth” does not strike me as a particularly weird or disturbing thing to provoke an excited, incredulous outburst of any kind. Especially given that women sometimes start having babies when they are teenagers, this is potentially setting the bar of old fogey-hood pretty low. The guy himself turned out to be about 23, which seems old enough to have a bit more maturity than this. And a bit more common sense, too. No woman who isn’t at a senior citizen singles mixer wants to hear “I can’t believe you’re so old!” She’s just not going to be thrilled with the compliment that she had up until that point been successfully passing as a woman in the bud of youth rather than an ancient, decrepit, one foot in the grave old-timer when she is still in the young adult 18-34 age bracket. There’s a reason Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate didn’t use this line on Mrs. Robinson. But maybe I’m just bitter because the kids at the grocery store don’t ID me when I buy booze anymore.
I’m very glad Robert hasn’t had this same freak out reaction to the idea of dating a woman who is older than his mom was when she gave birth to him since I had already passed that age when he and I met. And of course it would have been awkward for a 21 year old Robert in any case to have to limit his potential partners to high school girls.
Under what circumstances would you find the statement “I can’t believe you’re so old!” to be a compliment?
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2 comments:
Sal, I can't help but say the topic sounds very 'Sex and the City'. :) I'd say it could be a compliment coming from, well, yeah pretty much no one... there are just better ways of saying someone looks younger than they are. But that would definitely end the conversation pretty quickly, if that's what he was going for.
"...the idea of somebody being “older than somebody’s mom when she gave birth” does not strike me as a particularly weird or disturbing thing to provoke an excited, incredulous outburst of any kind." Normally I would agree, but just now I feel provoked into excitedly saying that this 23-year-old is older than my mom when she had me. AND my brother. Ha!
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