Prime Time - Jane Fonda [72]
Individuation and Androgenization
Suzanna and I are examples of women who, later in life, have come to embody two things that allowed us to open to the potential for love and sensuality, elements that tend to be more evident in older women of our generation: individuation and androgenization, which I will explain in a second, but I know, I know! They don’t sound very romantic! Nevertheless, possessing them makes romance deeper than ever. For some, this comes naturally … and earlier. For us, as for many others, it took work and desire and time. Let me explain.
The psychologist Carl Jung used the term “individuation,” which is very different from individualism in that it allows one to maintain healthy boundaries—to not lose oneself—while being in an emotionally and physically intimate relationship. Suzanna’s healthy boundaries have allowed her to know that she needs to live alone, have time to herself, and avoid getting caught up in her partner’s “stuff.” Like Suzanna, I found standing on my own two feet more than iffy in my earlier years, when I lacked confidence and an independent identity. I could become what a man wanted me to be, what I thought was required so as to be lovable. I’m probably the only person in the world who thought Woody Allen’s movie Zelig must have been based on a true story. The title character, who literally becomes whomever he is talking to, seemed perfectly plausible to old “I’ll be whatever you want me to be” me. Talk about poor boundaries! But real intimacy, however, requires self-revelation, and that’s problematic if you’re not sure what the “self” is or are scared that your revealed self will be discovered as a fraud and rejected. We speak of falling in love. Maybe that was the problem. Suzanna and I fell because we weren’t standing on our own two feet. Individuation, on the other hand, means you “own” yourself, you are a free-standing, self-validated adult, as opposed to entwined and needy, and this tends to happen to women in their fifties and beyond, enabling them, in their intimate relationships, to “stay in connection without being consumed by the other person,” as Dr. David Schnarch puts it.1 The psychologist Terrence Real says, “There is no aphrodisiac stronger than authentic connection.”2
Carl Jung also believed that with individuation, people’s maleness and femaleness come into balance. Dr. Jane Loevinger and many other psychologists today agree that the potential to let go of rigid sex roles for both men and women in the last third of life represents the peak of maturity and points the way to achieving individuation, autonomy and “communion.”3 Betty Friedan’s research on aging showed her that “couples facing age with lowest morale and least sense of intimacy are those where the husband still defines himself as family chief and provider, and where the woman still sees her identity only as a housewife/mother.”4
The social gerontologist and anthropologist David Gutmann has written, “Whereas adult males start from a grounding in Active Mastery and move toward Passive Mastery, women are first grounded in Passive Mastery, characterized by dependence on and even deference to the husband, but surge in later life toward Active Mastery.… Across cultures, and with age, they seem to become more authoritative, more effective, and less willing to trade submission for security.”5 Scientists I interviewed at the Stanford Center on Longevity say there is no empirical scientific evidence to prove that this recalibration of gender roles is the norm, as Gutmann and others claim. But it seems natural that the hormonal changes associated with aging, along with the man’s retirement, would lead to a leveling out of gender differences. And it makes sense that the balancing out of what previously were narrow, socially