Unrequited love can be its own reward

I have enjoyed an unspoken love of more than 30 years duration, a passion that ripples with many kinds of desire. This man is a similar age to me. For the purposes of this piece, I’ll call him P.

Desire is so … desirable. How bland and static life would be without it. And there’s so much to recommend it. It comes in a great many varieties — no chance of boredom — and it’s so portable: where I go, so, too, my desires.

But the feature that most appeals to me is that desires can remain private. Most desires are created by the mind, and there they can stay — no need to subject them to reality to enjoy their pleasures and enlightenment. This is a very good thing, because when they are exposed, it can be a disturbing, even distressing experience.

There was a teacher I admired during my high school years, admired and adored; I shaped my behaviour to win her approval, I owned beliefs because I knew they were hers; this teacher inspired a clutch of desires and was, in turn, enhanced by them.

 

A couple of years ago, while artist-in-residence at an organisation of which my former teacher was a member, she and I attended the same lunch function. Decades had passed, yet I felt all the tremors of youth when I caught sight of her.

Emboldened by my position as artist-in-residence, I found the courage to greet this woman who had exerted such an influence in my adolescence. I approached her table and stood by her chair; she looked vaguely at me. I said my name: there was no recognition. I fumbled a few more facts and when there was still no recognition, I mentioned the name of my best friend at school, and immediately her face lit up: an exceptional girl, my former teacher said, one who would go far.

My friend was remembered, but I had been forgotten; worse, it was if I had never existed. There were flyers throughout the building displaying my photo, my name, a brief biography, and still I was a total stranger to this woman who had meant so much to me during those impressionable years. All those private desires that had channelled me through high school, desires that attached to ambition, to ideas, to music, desires that had remained polished and private throughout my adolescence and beyond, and she did not know me.

I wish I’d not seen her. Desire, imagined desire, untainted by reality is never disappointed.

In my latest novel, The Buried Life, there is a romance between a 43-year-old man, Adrian, and a 57-year-old woman, Laura. Adrian is not at all bothered by the age difference, it is Laura who worries.

Andrea Goldsmith is often inspired by unrequited love.

She’s self-conscious about her ageing body, the newly-acquired flab on her abdomen and thighs, the beginnings of crepe in the underside of her arms, but it is mostly desire itself that is on her mind, and in this instance it is the intensity of her sexual desire for Adrian.

Her 30-year-old self, even her 40-year-old self would have said that anyone approaching 60 would be beyond such feelings. Perhaps one never was, perhaps at that very moment there were nonagenarians rolling around in an erotic frenzy at their aged-care facility.

And perhaps there are, but I doubt it. Though I would like to think that rampant desires — artistic, sporting, intellectual, epicurean — are filling the minds of the aged-care residents. As the body ages, it becomes irritating, intrusive, burdensome, but, in the absence of cognitive decline, the imagination, that crucible of desire, goes from strength to strength. This is one of the great benefits of advancing age.

Imagined desire, there’s little to equal it and, aside from reality, nothing to stop it. Imagined desire is bold, curious, energetic. And imagined desire — private desire — can also be very productive.

I have enjoyed an unspoken love of more than 30 years duration, a passion that ripples with many kinds of desire. This man is a similar age to me, I’ll call him P (not his initial, but with that whispered plosive, /P/ is my favourite letter). P was beautiful, brainy and bookish when first I met him, and so he remains. We meet very occasionally, always with eager anticipation and always with outward decorum. But even though it has never been acknowledged, I am sure that P harbours a secret passion for me, too.

On my side, it has been a satisfying love. I’ve orchestrated long and complex conversations with him; no idea, no book, no topic is beyond us. P has fired up sexual desires both for me and for my characters. I can spend time with P when I look a mess, when I’m grumpy at the end of a tiring day, when I’ve gained weight. And P, himself, has no downside, no qualities to spoil his perfection. He may be less bookish and brainy than my desires require him to be, but it doesn’t matter. If he scatters his clothes across the floor, I don’t see it. If he has a sour odour in the mornings, I don’t smell it. If he complains about this relative or that colleague, I don’t hear it. Any faults, and I expect he has a few, are outside the realm of my P.

I can imagine every embrace with P, every sexual act (including those I’ve never tried but wish I had), and I can make use of these, have made use of them in the books I have written. Indeed, for most of my nine novels any satisfying and sexy relationship has been fuelled by P.

And it doesn’t stop at sexual desire. I have crafted conversations with him while taking solitary walks or while idling at my desk — rigorous, referenced, and ranging over a variety of topics. These conversations can occur almost daily if I am trying to get to the nub of a particularly knotty conundrum.

Reality would not simply spoil this, it would stop it altogether.

In the early drafts of The Buried Life, I made Laura’s desire for Adrian unrequited. But an unrequited love like mine, so satisfying in real life, produced narrative tedium in the novel. And besides, at 57, and caught within a long marriage, Laura deserved some good sex and stimulating conversation.

But for me, I would always choose my long, intense, unrequited and unacknowledged love with its bottomless well of desires. Wholly satisfying and forever untainted, it remains ageless and reliable.