Josephine was six years older than Napoleon. Brigitte Macron is 24 years older than Emmanuel. Modern medicine, in extending our life spans and improving our long-term health, has made lasting love across large age differences possible.
That has been a blessing for people like me and my wife, who is 20 years older than I. We will soon have been together for 40 years.
I met her when I was just 20.
Our chance meeting took place on a cold spring day in Boston at the Tufts University library. On my way to the study space, I passed a large table covered with books. One volume caught my eye, a book on Armenian architecture.
I didn’t know anything about Armenian architecture, but I was planning a bicycle trip from Turkey to Israel and was reading everything I could about the areas I would be passing through, including Turkish Armenia.
Curious, I sat down and began leafing through the books. Before long, I was startled by a cough. When I looked up, a woman was standing there, staring at me.
“Those are my books, you know,” she said, clearly annoyed.
I stood up. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Armenian architecture is beautiful. I’m going to Ani in a few months. Now I know what to look out for.”
“Ani?” she said. “How? Why?”
“I’m cycling from Istanbul to Jerusalem this summer with some friends,” I said. “We’re planning a detour through eastern Turkey before continuing to Syria.”
“Sounds like quite the adventure,” she said. “I’m from Israel.”
“I’m from Taiwan,” I said. “Nice to meet you. You’re the first Israeli I’ve ever met!”
And that was how I met my future wife.
Beyond our age difference, we were so different in so many ways that love was the last thing on my mind when we met. I was only in my second year of college. She was married with two children and working on her master’s degree in art history. But she was excited that I was traveling to her part of the world. And I was excited to meet someone from it. That was all we had in common, I thought.
But we started talking, and we haven’t stopped talking since. Our romantic timeline, though, was exceedingly slow. It took time before our relationship deepened into something more.
After I returned from my bicycle trip, I left for a year of study in Paris. By the time I came back to the United States, Margalit had returned to Israel with her family. It was not until seven years after we first met, after her divorce, that I was sure she was the one. The great inescapable love of my life!
Even then, distance defined us. I moved to London so we could be closer, but she did not move in with me until her youngest daughter became a teenager. And it took another 10 years before we finally married.
In Plato’s “Symposium,” Aristophanes recounts the myth that humans were once whole beings — round, with four arms, four legs, and two faces. Zeus, fearing their power, split them in two, condemning each half to wander the earth in search of its counterpart.
For Aristophanes, love is our longing for our missing half. Can our missing halves be 20 years older than we are? Mine is — and loving her has meant learning to time travel.
My wife had lived a full life before I was even born.
Her Russian grandfather was born in 1865, the year that Lincoln was shot. She still remembers visiting him as a child at his timber mill in Chattanooga, Tenn., and loving the smell of sawdust.
Her parents had escaped the concentration camps by crossing the Pyrenees on foot into Spain and then making their way to New York where she was born and raised until her family moved to Israel when she was 10.
She remembers life in Israel without a telephone or a television, fierce summer heat without air conditioning, grocery stores offering only two types of cheese and two types of bread. Poor but free. She relishes the memory of roaming the streets unsupervised and unafraid, playing games with apricot pits on still-unpaved roads.
When she tells the stories of her life — joys and losses that belonged to another era — the decades between us dissolve. I listen, enthralled. And in those moments, I understand that time travel is not a fantasy. It is memories shared, held and honored.
Margalit was 40 when I met her, a beautiful woman who turned heads in the streets. But more than anything, I was captivated by the expressiveness of her face, the transparency of her features. It was as if their very regularity and smallness could not withstand the onslaught of every thought flitting through her mind.
The fine lines at the corner of her eyes didn’t bother me. On the contrary, it seemed to me that they expressed every subtle mood which so often escape the nets of other faces. It was as though every line was the imprint of a latent feeling, etched on her skin by frequent rekindling over time.
Her wrinkles were and still are a testimony of her passion, the map of her emotional range. I love them like I love the rugged bark of old Roman pines — enduring, alive.
I have been at peace with our age difference from the moment I fell in love. But it took our friends and family much longer to arrive at the same place. For my family, my relationship with Margalit was outright transgressive.
My parents worried about my future. They also worried about what it might say about them in a conservative Taiwanese society where conformity often masquerades as virtue.
It took years for that tension to ease. In Taiwan, I became a kind of black sheep, and my family bore the social consequences.
A turning point came, oddly enough, when Emmanuel Macron was elected to the highest office in France. That day, my family received congratulatory calls from their friends. Macron helped turn what once seemed unspeakable into something merely unconventional — and in doing so, made it easier for my family to accept the most important decision of my life.
The only regret I have about my decision is the toll it took on my family. But my family was not alone in their opposition.
My college friends thought I had gone weird.
“Don’t you have an aesthetic problem with someone so much older?” one classmate asked, without irony.
Strangers stared when we held hands in public. Some assumed I was Margalit’s adopted son. Others were more direct.
“Are you a gigolo?” a curious man once asked me.
“No,” I said, stung to the core. “She’s my girlfriend.”
“Oh,” he said, offering a knowing smile.
I have always considered myself lucky not only to have met the love of my life, but to have met her as early in life as I did.
The fact that she had lived a life before I was even born gave me a head start in life. After we married, I became a stepfather to her two children, and ultimately, a step-grandfather to her grandchildren. I never felt compelled to have children of my own.
Having a partner who had already learned many of life’s lessons gave me a sense of direction early on. I worked hard, built a successful career as an economist and was able to retire just after I turned 50.
But there is a price for everything. Finally, after nearly 40 years together, the age difference is beginning to have an impact on our relationship. Her mind is still young, but her body can’t keep up. She’s more tired than I am. She is less energetic than she used to be. Sixty-ish still feels young. Eighty-ish does not.
I am counting on modern medicine to help Margalit stay healthy so that she can go on enjoying life with me. But I won’t deny that love is also selfish.
I want to keep her alive for as long as I can because I can’t imagine my life without her. If this means that I must walk more slowly, talk more loudly and spend more time in doctors’ offices, so be it.
But even if our time is lopsided and our future is shorter than we would have liked, I wouldn’t trade the journey for anything. They say time is a thief, but I feel like I am the thief. Every moment with Margalit feels like stolen time, and our love has been my greatest heist.
David Woo lives in the foothills of Jerusalem with his wife, Margalit Shinar. Their debut novel, “Merry-Go-Round Broke Down,” will be published in March.
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