2024-01-06 22:26:02
My friend Annette was with my best friend at the time 50 years ago and later married him. I met this friend in Switzerland and over several stops we ended up in the city where I still live today. We lived together in a shared apartment and he wrote part of my thesis for me because he is a very good author. We were both so-called 68ers and lived according to the motto “If you sleep with the same person twice, you’re already part of the establishment.” We never knew exactly who was actually with whom.
I soon bought a house in the new city and was always happy to offer its large rooms for conferences or seminars from the left-wing spectrum. One day my friend was visiting with a group of women, most of whom had just started studying. One of them was his girlfriend Annette, and instead of him she went to bed with me that evening. Back then there were car-free Sundays because of the oil crisis, almost exactly 50 years ago. She never came home because of a day like that. She just stayed with me over the weekend.
My boyfriend then hit on my girlfriend at the time, Ute, and I think he did it successfully. But at some point we turned it around again. Ute had the rounder breasts, Annette the pointier ones. For me she was always “the girl with the pointy breasts” because she actually seemed very girly, young and delicate to me. She was also about 13 years younger than me. We were men that we rightly no longer like to see today, where people would say it was totally sexist. We had big mouths, and when we drove somewhere we always asked ourselves: “Do we have enough sex supplies?” That’s how stupid we were back then.
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This whole relationship mess that existed back then
Annette and I were “together” for a few weeks back then, so we met every now and then and went to bed together. But because of all the relationship chaos that existed at the time, we eventually lost sight of each other. I had just started working as a teacher at a school. She started studying and later worked as a social scientist. She was totally committed, looked critically at society from the left and acted. I remember that I also experienced her as “feminist-shrill” at the time, so I thought it could also be uncomfortable with her.
At the memorial service she had hung up many pictures of her late husband and my old friend, including pictures from her younger years with long hair that reminded me of our wild times. I met Annette outside on the way to the cemetery chapel and recognized her straight away. We didn’t talk much, but we decided to keep in touch this time and not waste it again.
We really lost touch with each other so completely over the years that at some point I no longer knew where she even lived. It wasn’t until I received the death notice of my best friend from back then a few years ago that I remembered all this time. At some point I had hardly seen or heard from him either. He lived in seclusion with Annette, an intense relationship. They developed a passion for cooking and wrote or edited cookbooks together. They only drank wine – instead of beer, as was actually the case.
It only took us a few words to realize that we still understand each other. That’s exactly what’s so difficult about a new love in old age: telling your whole life again, including the other person, until you’re halfway to the level where you can see the other person’s life. We practically didn’t have these problems at all. Even though I didn’t know the exact details of her life, it still seemed familiar to me, as if a lot of things had happened in parallel.
Christina S. Zhu for Berliner Zeitung at the weekend
She was also able to talk to me completely freely about her late husband, whom I still remember as a good friend. Nothing has happened that would make me see myself as his competitor. I’m happy to hear something about his life from her and we’ll also go to the cemetery together to see his grave. For the first year we weren’t in the house where they lived together, but at some point we were lying in her old bed, I was sitting in the armchair he always sat in, and sometimes I even wore parts of his old one Clothes that fit me. Annette didn’t tell his family for the first few years that she was now dating me, but their mutual circle of friends was informed straight away and welcomed me very openly.
Strangely enough, this never felt strange to me, and Annette also seemed to soon accept me as the one to fill the gap in her life. Sometimes she calls when I’m not with her and tells me she misses me. And I sometimes say to her: How great would it be if my old friend was here again and we could have a threesome together, have fun together. She actually believes that he wouldn’t have wanted that because they had been in an exclusive relationship for a long time.
I wasn’t actually looking
The great thing about meeting Annette was and is that I wasn’t actually looking. I was completely satisfied with my life, with my changing relationships. And things wouldn’t go well with us if she wanted me to completely take over the role of her late husband and move in with her. But she doesn’t want that at all, she’ll soon even be moving back into a housing project. I’m now in my early 80s, she’s in her late 60s, and we’ve decided not to interfere with each other’s lives. However, we already feel like we are in a relationship, as a couple. We recently celebrated our two-year reunion day.
Sexually she is still very lively and active. Surprisingly, after all these years, she still thinks I’m great, even physically, although of course I think: I looked better – I’m grateful if someone even touches me anymore. I also think that she still has those girlish features that attracted me. Because of the complete familiarity that I feel with her, I am often satisfied with tenderness; sex is not the main focus at the moment. For example, I gave her this Advent calendar that has a new sex toy in it every day.
Interestingly, another friend recently told me that after decades she had met an old friend whose wife had died. They both immediately found each other again and are now together in a way. Maybe this constellation is not so rare after all. It makes sense to me: I’ve never made a point of drawing a hard line in any of my love affairs. I would have preferred to keep them all – or at least keep in touch. Of course, sometimes life drives you apart: you have a family, children, and you move away. But basically I don’t understand how you can be intimate with a person for a while and then at some point no longer have any interest in what actually becomes of them.
With Annette, after all these decades, we still fit together. Politically we are also exactly on the same level. We read the same articles and have similar reactions to them. We have both slept naked all our lives and have never owned a bathrobe. I like her expressions of life, what she does. I could watch her ride the bike in front of me all day, when she gets scared and prefers to get off. If someone asks me what love is, I can say: If I voluntarily give my thin board, which I like to use for breakfast, to Annette, then that must be love. I’m stubborn about some things, but I’m happy to give up everything to her without feeling like it’s a loss.
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