How on earth did I get from living in a loft apartment in trendy Hoxton (yes, I had the obligatory exposed brick wall and it was so gorgeous I used to spend hours just admiring it) to sharing student digs in a provincial town in the south of Spain? Why did I give up a glamorous job as the foreign correspondent of a national TV station, to share a bathroom with complete strangers (who leave the toilet seat up, grrrrr…)? The answer to these questions, as you may have guessed, is: for Love. L-U-R-V-E in a big way. In fact the love for a younger man. But it’s not quite as simple as that.
To explain my lifestyle upside down, shake it all around; value system thrown on its head and smashed with a sledgehammer – I have to go back even further and then it becomes an interconnected list of what ifs. If I hadn’t have taken a sabbatical I wouldn’t have gone to Southeast Asia to write a novel. If I hadn’t spent 6 months in Buddhist, serene Cambodia I would never have decided to move away from hectic London to live by the sea in Ibiza. If I hadn’t lived in Ibiza, I would never have met the people who inspired me to go to India. And if I had never gone to India, I wouldn’t have met this man – who I now love more than my single nights in with a tub of Häagen Dazs and back to back Sex and the City repeats on E4.
I’d even say that meeting him in India – a place so far away from our Western obsession with age and time – made it possible to fall in love like I did. He is after all an conventional choice and a grand 15 years younger than I. Don’t get me wrong, I have dated younger men before (what a shame toyboywarehouse wasn’t around when I was single!). In fact, once I passed the 33 mark, younger men began hitting on me much more frequently than the older men who didn’t phone back.
My love – let’s just call him J for the sake of convenience – is also, as coincidence of coincidences would have it (or let’s say my mischievous angel of fate having a right old ball): A Spaniard. So I travel all the way to India and what do I meet: A Spanish man who lives just across the water from where I have decided to plant my new roots. It did make matters easier in terms of ‘dating’ after our whirlwind, honeymoon 2 week romance in Goa was over. And as all relationships go, we had/have our fair share of obstacles along the sweet-smelling, pine clad Mediterranean way.
So yes, I did find love in the arms of a younger man and he is everything I ever wanted but dear daters, the grass isn’t always greener. In this regular column I will be sharing some of the problems and joys I found in this age disparate union – it does after all have its own set of rules (“But those ovaries can’t still be intact, get your filthy hands off my son” etc.).
By Claudia Spahr
For more information and an excerpt from her latest book go to:
http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk
