If Romeo and Juliet grew old...

Visual aesthetics push forward extreme youth as the face of romance. Electric chemistry between junior citizens is a permanent cliché. Too many photogenic couples agonise over the state of their heart in the prettiest of frames. Love on the screen or on the page gives us protagonists with dimples and freshly shampooed hair. From princesses who were kissed awake by wandering princes in fairy tales to the new-age couple clashing on commitment issues in the just-released e-story, The U-Turn, by Vani Mahesh and Ravinder Singh, soul mates are always on the right side of thirty.

From the word go when boy meets girl, all possible conflicts between them are presented as eye candy. Lovebirds on a bench, on a beach, in a bar, in a bed… are all uniformly young, young, young! The more complicated area of older relationships freely shows up an ageist bias; it is presumed that after a certain age passion limps away holding a cane. Poised on that arc between middle age and old age, men and women are thought to have more weighty issues on the mind than catching someone’s eye.

Cinema and literature that successfully do away with the ‘wise’ mask of the gray-haired are such a relief from those that give us pondering and profound older folks who are composed of the right advice and thoughtful sayings. The truth is there is nothing calm and mature about love at any age; it is an inbuilt flaw in that feeling, that it heaves the breast and dials up the breathing.

Though Amour, the French film, follows an elderly couple unflinchingly down the togetherness path to a somewhat tragic end, there is 45 Years, about a twosome preparing to celebrate their 45^th wedding anniversary only to have the past tumble down on them, and The Good Liar, where the story starts with an online meeting between two septuagenarians. The sharpness the veteran actors bring to the roles jazz up these couplings. Intense emotions bubble up, with everyone concerned exploring various facets of loneliness. Heartbreak is not the realm of any one particular age group.

Love stories don’t just fly high on first meetings and sparkling banter, a lot of them thrive on nostalgia and on flashbacks, regrets and reunions. Curiosity about how things could have turned out is a human trait, birthdays no bar. Even Newland, who refused to meet his ex-flame Ellen at the end of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, did so because he still felt something. Love itself can be new or old, but lovers, when they have just fallen in love, are always young, eighteen till they die.

So, yes, Romeo’s face has wrinkled a bit and Juliet has bags under her eyes, but, oh, the depth they bring to the choppy waters of love. The next time you see an octogenarian couple animatedly talking, don’t just presume they are exchanging notes on old-age homes. Maybe they are arguing about where to go on their honeymoon.

Shinie Antony is a writer and editor based in Bangalore. Her books include The Girl Who Couldn't Love, Barefoot and Pregnant, Planet Polygamous, and the anthologies Why We Don’t Talk, An Unsuitable Woman, Boo. Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Asia Prize for her story A Dog’s Death in 2003, she is the co-founder of the Bangalore Literature Festival and director of the Bengaluru Poetry Festival.