On Not Growing Out Of It

He tells me, usually late and usually sideways, that he thought he would have grown out of this by now. He is often in his forties or beyond. He says it as though he is confessing to something, and what he is confessing to is duration.

There is an idea underneath it that I want to take apart, because it does more damage than anything he actually does. The idea is that this is a phase, and that a phase which has lasted twenty years is therefore a failure of will. He has been quietly waiting to stop wanting it, the way you wait for a fever to break, and each year it does not break he adds to a private account of his own weakness.

What he calls a phase, I would call a shape. It is not the thing standing between him and the man he was supposed to become. It is one of the ways he has always been, and the only thing that changed over twenty years is how tired he got of arguing with it.

I notice that the men who have carried this longest are not the ones who are worst at ordinary life. They are frequently the opposite. They run things. They are relied upon by people who would be astonished by this conversation. The competence and the wanting are not in tension, and the exhausting part was never the wanting, it was the double life of pretending the wanting was temporary.

He asks, sometimes, whether it will fade. I do not know, and I will not comfort him with an answer I have not got. What I have watched is that it changes register rather than volume. The urgency of a younger man becomes something slower and more particular, and he wants less often and more precisely, and he is far better company for it.

There is no age at which this becomes unbecoming. There is only the question of whether he is living it honestly or apologising for it in the dark, and the apologising is the only part that has ever looked undignified to me.

So when he tells me he thought he would have grown out of it, I do not reassure him. I simply point out that he has spent two decades waiting to become someone else, and that the man he already is has been standing here the whole time, perfectly serviceable, asking to be allowed.