Thursday, March 2, 2006

The Age Game

I guess because it's such a rarity, but I had to read the article twice just to make sure I hadn't read the age wrong the first time I hit upon it. The rarity to which I refer is when a man marries a much older woman, and the article I'm talking about is the one I came across a couple of weeks ago regarding the divorce of The English Patient star, Ralph Fiennes, age 43, and his 62-year-old wife, actress Francesca Annis.

There's just someting mentally jarring about picturing a guy like Ralph Fiennes, international move hunk, married to a woman in her 60's. Don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting that older woman aren't sexy, alluring and all that good stuff, but, let's face it, how often do you see a hot looking guy walking down the street in romantic holding hands mode with someone clearly old enough to be his mother? Right, not all that often, if indeed ever.

We all know that the reverse of this is quite common: The Donald & Melania, Michael Douglas & Catherine Zeta Jones, Anna Nicole Smith & her 89-year-old husband (oops, sorry about that, folks, he died), etc. Then again, we live in an era when age can seemingly be postponed if you have enough money to take advantage of all of the myriad surgical options for retaining one's youth, everything from Botox injections every three months to lipsuction if you gain so much as a quarter inch worth of cellulitic fat desposited on your inner thighs.

It truly is weird, especially for us guys, when we look at a really attractive woman--who we would swear is no more than in her mid 30's--only to find out that the object of our longing is a 68-year-old retiree visiting the grandkids from Florida, this vision of cosmetically enhanced loveliness brought to us courtesy of good old Dr. 90210.