How I Met Your Mother: Episode 5: Paralyzed

See Episode 4: A Look on Lookout Mountain

January 2026

My dear daughter,

In May of 2023, your mother moved in with me. She didn’t feel challenged in her job, in New Jersey, and we didn’t see any point in living so far apart when we knew we wanted to spend our time together and she’d be a lot closer to her family in DC. She would expand her coaching and mentoring of women. She built herself a website, at LeahVermont.com, and took on clients.

In Washington DC, whose summer competes with its winter for least pleasant time of year, the relief that arrives with September and October makes them my favorite months. I remember sitting in my apartment one day in September, with the light coming through floor-to-ceiling windows to illuminate an autumn-themed straw basket she had just bought, in which she’d placed, at the front of all the other books and magazines, Ordinary Magic. It touched me.

And I thought: A few more months and it’s December. A year since we’d met. And in a few more months it would be March, a year since we started going steady. She had told me long before that a year should be enough time to know. In a few weeks, we would go to Europe, including to Germany, where she’d meet my mother’s last two surviving relatives, and then to Braunwald, Switzerland, the magical mountainside village I’d been fortunate to know and return to since I was a toddler.

Braunwald would have been the ideal setting to propose. 

 

Nope. I didn’t feel anywhere close to committing to the path your mother represented. I felt impossibly far away from the decision to marry, let alone to have a child, a family, both alien to my imagination. And I couldn’t imagine how I would get to a place of wanting to ask her to marry me without being unsure and afraid when I asked it.

I could not act. I was paralyzed. Not just by the usual fears any man has of marriage, or the yawning gap in age, but the fear of becoming a father late in life. The fear of not showing up for a child, as my father figures had not shown up for me. Was I really father material? And what if I got sick? Probably influenced by my own searing experience with my mother’s decline and death from cancer, I was thinking of the endgame for me, for us, and the burden on Leah if I suffered a long and painful illness.

I thought of the decades of loss or longing she could suffer after I left her. I remembered my dying mother’s concern about leaving me alone. “I’m worried about you,” she had said, the day I’d raced to her house after her decision to start hospice, “with your abandonment issues.” Now I finally understood the pain she felt. I already knew I would want your mother to love again. But was it really fair to her? Could she possibly know what she was signing up for?

There were times when I felt an anticipatory shame when I imagined being visibly much older than my wife, let alone my child. If I now sported the silver fox/mature man look at all, I had only a few more years to pull it off, and then I’d just look old. Trapped by my own ageism, I worried that I would increasingly look ridiculous alongside my wife. I wondered, will it some day seem easier to just hide out at home and not venture out in public? I thought of the drunk college kid at karaoke in Boulder, years earlier, who’d sneered, “Okay, Dad” until his friends dragged him away, tossing out apologies as they went.

I knew that for the rest of our lives together the same lazy assumptions I had always made would follow us around like a mangy dog. Mostly, I thought, the assumptions would be about what sad things the age gap must say about us, but perhaps I am naive about race, because it just seems unlikely, doesn’t it, that someone will stop my wife in a supermarket someday and demand to see both her ID and your birth certificate. That happened to a woman Leah recently read about, who was more African in appearance than her biracial baby. Most likely, assumptions about age difference and race will come as a boxed set, as people compliment me on what a loving nanny my granddaughter has. I wasn’t just older than your mother. I was also older than the great majority of men are when they have children. Was I ready to stand out like an arthritic thumb? 

These were, in some ways, the superficial fears. The obvious, tangible, easy-to-bring-to-mind fears, my conscious explanations for my resistance. Perhaps a more fundamental resistance was about my simply not being able to believe in my good fortune, that good things happened to me, or came easily and without work and pain. Perhaps I couldn’t believe I could be happy, and in a perverse way I may have been afraid of being happy, of having a family of my own. Since I was a boy, being part of a family had seemed a dream so impossible, it had submerged itself below conscious thought and desire. If it was a dream, it was not a dream I knew I had.

I knew I didn’t have forever. She had plans that made time of the essence. She had made clear, in her Bumble profile and on our first date, that she wanted to have children. I could see it was non-negotiable, and even as I struggled, for another year, to commit to her, I never had any desire to negotiate away her life’s calling. I would not try to talk her out of it, or worse, drag my feet and put her off until I’d wasted years of her life, in the classic man’s hope she’d become so invested in us that she quietly swallowed her dreams.

***

Early in our relationship I read the main reason age-gap relationships fail is social disapproval, a measure of the sheer weight that disapproval can bring. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine the contempt or at least discomfort and doubt people might feel. I was capable of it myself, when I looked upon couples with large age gaps and knew nothing of their situation. Leah and I both see couples in the media, strangers, and we’re skeptical. “See, now I don’t know,” she will say, when I show her a couple whose story I’ve run into online. “I’m still always a little bit suspicious there’s something going on there.” So am I. There could be something wrong there, surely something wrong with him, and probably with her too. He needs to dominate. He has a Peter Pan complex. He’s emotionally or intellectually stunted. He hasn’t grown beyond a teenager’s idea of what makes a woman sexually attractive. He just doesn’t grasp how relationships work.

And what about the woman? She has daddy issues, whatever that means (nearly every woman I’ve met, and man, too, of all ages, has struggled with both parents) or is after money, or fame. She’s probably insecure, damaged, economically disadvantaged. The woman is judged more than the man, I think, if only because there are those who celebrate and envy the older man.

I’m sure there are men who get to enjoy the thought that others are impressed by or envy men who score beautiful young women. There are men in my position — the comedian Bill Maher is one, who admits his dating choices aren’t what you might call “age appropriate” and says to us, Fuck you. None of your business — who can just focus on the positive and enjoy the journey. I have probably never been that man. The idea that I could be seen as having all the more “rizz” (as the kids say now, for charisma) or “pull” (in Aussie-speak) occurred to me only intermittently and unconvincingly. Would people see my beautiful young wife and assume I was more famous than I was, or had more money than I did? I couldn’t care about that.

In a clean, direct version of this story, I am what I am, which is a man like most men who’s not sure he’s done everything he wants to do and can’t believe he’s the age he is, and he meets a beautiful young woman. He says, “I am enchanted with her, I just want to take her in my arms,” and his legitimate concerns about her age are eventually overcome by his observation of her sheer singularity, and then, in the process of realizing he loves her, he is forced to ask if he’s ready to become something that was always buried and by now felt lost, a father, and, just to crank up the difficulty level, he commits to become a father at an age sufficiently advanced that everyone can think of a problem with it, and does, but he stands up and says I live my life by my lights and I have wrestled with these risks and this decision and I think the benefits to we three people who matter outweigh the drawbacks. 

There are men who could pull that off. Lucky bastards! 

Men who could just let good things happen to them, without disbelieving, down in their very nervous system, good things can happen, without looking for, inviting in, breathing out reasons why not, reasons there must be a problem, it’s too good to be true, you can’t possibly just let go and let yourself be happy, happiness is hard to feel, nothing can be easy, are you sure you deserve this? 

I’m not that guy. I will overthink things and put a subtle series of negative frames on them and suck all the joy out of them.

But now what? I would sometimes think, in moments of defiance, imagining myself responding to imaginary critics, or perhaps myself. 

I should just throw her back?

 

Next up: How I Met Your Mother: Episode 6: A Breakup Email