Romance Challenge: Much Older Protagonist

"Read a romance novel with a protagonist much older than you are."

    Well... I'm in my mid-50s, so "much older" means the heroine has to be at least 70 years old, and I wasn't sure how many romance novels exist where that is the case.

    Fortunately, some friends recommended a novella by an author I've read before, and liked: Mrs. Martin's Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan.

    I liked the book very much. It’s a historical romance that takes place in Victorian England, and the main characters are 73 and 69. The older of the two is quite wealthy, and her nephew and legal heir is a really awful person. He is a leach, living off the promise of inheriting his aunt’s fortune (and given that she is 73, it shouldn’t be far off), refusing to pay his debts (he hasn’t paid his rent in two years, having forged his aunt’s signature on the lease). He even hires prostitutes on the promise of paying them when his aunt dies. Bertrice and Violetta make it their mission to torment him. Madcap adventures ensue.

    The story touches on the loss of friends (when one reaches her 70s, she will absolutely have outlived a few loved ones), the lack of power women had at the time, and the fact that being falsely declared incompetent was a real risk. It even touches on NotAllMen (see footnote below), Victorian-style, which was fun. The dialog was wonderful, and there were many beautifully described, funny moments.

    The book displays more misandry than I typically prefer -- I like the main male character to be a good man, not a villain.  Aside from the Terrible Nephew (that's what they called him), all the other men in the book were extremely minor supporting characters, so that made it feel a little unbalanced. On the other hand, the story was really just about Bertrice, Violetta, and the Terrible Nephew.

    I really liked this septuagenarian romance, though it makes me wonder how common lesbian relationships were in Victorian times. I assume they happened, but they must have been pretty dangerous at least until 1967 when Britain partially decriminalized homosexuality. Anyway, a love story is a love story and this one was quite wonderful.  I really wanted the main characters to continue on their adventures together.

I also really adored how the author reframed the reader's image of elderly women's bodies from the typical wrinkled and withered to:

"Skin that was dusted with age spots and veined like the finest marble."

"Breasts that time had given a graceful sway."

"Every act of gravity and time made beauty in nature—except when it happened to human women. Not any longer. Ravines carved in her forehead by time made a striking landscape."

    Given that my own body has existed for 55 years, these descriptions made me feel appreciated, even admired in a way that most romance novels don't (or haven't in a long time).

    The book got me thinking, though, about romance between elderly folks. It's usually handled on TV as something of a joke - the shows Parks and Recreation (episode 5.4 "Sex Education") and New Amsterdam (episode 4.21 "Castles Made of Sand") have both dealt with outbreaks of STDs among elderly populations in nursing homes, and the humor is in no small part based on ridicule and disgust.   For some reason, people think old people doing the dirty is HI-LAR-IOUS and that their bodies are - to put it far more kindly than they did - unsexy.

    I prefer to think of elderly bodies as scarred by time.  Sexual desire doesn't go away just because someone accrues a few extra decades.  Neither does our need for friendship, intimacy, cuddling, companionship, and love.  

    Now that I think about it, movies and TV typically have two modes for love among the elderly - either long-time partners who are about to be parted by death (tragedy) or elderly folks bed-hopping (comedy).  

    With the former, it's usually (I think?) about the husband losing the wife, which is evidently more compelling, more heartbreaking, than the other way around, possibly because women outlive their husbands far more regularly than the opposite and is somehow less interesting because of that? For the record, I disagree with this sentiment.  I was lucky enough to marry my best friend, and chances are that I will outlive him, and well, that feels pretty damn tragic to me.

    And with the latter, well, the stories range from condescending ("Aren't these old folks so cute for acting like young people?") to outright jerky (characters pretend to vomit at the idea of sex between the elderly).  A particularly egregious example is from the 1971 movie Harold and Maude:

    To be fair, the scene, which bothers me in isolation, is much funnier in context, and I appreciate the subtext quite a bit.

    I'd really love it if there were more stories that fall in between the two, episodes more like 4.15 "The Benefactor Factor" in The Big Bang Theory, where Leonard sleeps with an elderly wealthy university donor.  Yes, there's some humor at her expense, but it manages to subvert the ridicule in a way that I like, and touches on her loneliness (she is also delightfully snarky toward most of the main characters), and the fact that both participants had a pretty good time in the process.

* While it is absolutely true that not all men are assholes like Bertrice's nephew, either in the book or in real life, the NotAllMen argument is nearly always an obtuse diversion that hands men an out, a reason not to try to change the system.  Even good men (of which there are fortunately plenty in this world) still benefit from a system that favors them, and unless they are actively attempting to put an equitable system in place, they are part of the problem.  I don't exactly fault them - it's awfully easy for anyone, including me, to look away, to go along to get along.  Also - while things are MUCH better than they were in 1867 when the novella takes place, women today still only make 84% of what men do.