Will you still love me when I'm 64?

JAKARTA (JP): The setting is a coffee shop in a Bandung hotel last Saturday night.

"So you have massage downstairs?" The inquirer's voice is male, older, foreign (perhaps southern European?), but the underlying intent crosses all borders and cultures.

Respondent, female, local, is polite, sweet but firm. Yes, he can get a rub down at the fitness center on the third floor.

Before she can move out of harm's way, would-be Casanova does away with the formalities and says what he really means, any inhibitions cast aside by the big glass of whisky he is guzzling.

"You know, I have to have a massage from a beautiful woman. I may be an old man in years, but I'm still a young man in body."

Nothing more is heard from the woman, but she may have been thinking, "Well, darling, why don't you just stay here and give me a history lesson on what it was like way back then, when we didn't have CD players and the web referred to things spiders made. It would help me understand my parents better."

Harsh, I know, because, deep down, all that drunken old man was trying to say was, "Look, I may be covered in age spots and most of my body parts have headed south, but there is still life in the old boy yet."

When we are young, in the bloom of youth and with the whole world at our feet, we don't think, or want to think, that older people have romantic feelings too. When you are 18, somebody aged 25 seems mature, 40-somethings are positively middle aged (they've really lived) and anyone over 50 is ancient and should be sitting in a rocking chair, hugging their grandkids, like the old smiling man on that insurance commercial.

We assume "that" part of their life is brought to a quiet close when they reach the age of 50, or else they could probably do themselves a life-threatening injury.

When we start to really experience life for ourselves -- meaning we are also getting old -- we realize that it is not true. After all, there is no unspoken voluntary age of retirement from the ranks of those who want to love and be loved, defined by when our hair starts turning gray and those 32-inch waist jeans we wore in college cannot get past our knees.

And it drives us to do strange things in the name of love, which most of the time means trying our darnedest to look "younger". Some of us dye our hair, take up fitness classes to fight the forces of gravity and, if we have the money in the bank, do a little "cosmetic enhancement". A colleague swears that men past the age of 40 suddenly discover the power of cologne when their physical charms start disappearing.

Ages which once upon a time seemed over the hill (better start looking into those retirement plans) suddenly do not seem too old after all. You turn 34, a marker for the descent into middle age. Well, Julia Roberts is 34 and she doesn't look half bad. Creeping up into the late 50s? Michael Douglas is in that ballpark, and look who he landed as a bride.

Some of us, like Michael, also look for younger partners, and in doing so we often change our perspective on the right and proper behavior of older people.

Years ago, there was a much-married admiral who went and married a quite beautiful TV actress young enough to be his daughter (if I'm not mistaken she was actually younger than some of his children).

She lived in an apartment across from where I worked in South Jakarta at the time, and then she went off to Australia and unceremoniously dumped the admiral for a younger man. At the time, my feelings were probably along the lines of "Well, what did he expect?" (let's just say he is no Ali Sadikin in the looks department). Now, a little older myself, there is a bit of pity mixed in with the feeling that he had it coming to him.

True love, as they say, comes down to sticking together through thick and thin, or, probably, as we get older, thin and then thick. It weathers all storms, creases out the wrinkles in our relationships and lives on despite the fact that we will one day, inevitably, no matter what we try to do to ourselves, come to look like a shadow of our former selves.

The meaning of it came to me during a call to my mother a couple of weeks ago. An inquiry about how my Dad is (he recently underwent radical prostate surgery) was met with a simple aside that he was in the bathroom. Learning to pee again.

On the other end of the line, I winced a little at the statement. But then they have been married for nearly 40 years and have gone through so much together, the good and the bad. Dealing with this, at their age, is no doubt just another step in their journey of growing old and loving together.

-- Bruce Emond