Learning to Love Late in Life

Love is long - an emotion spanning people, pets, and places all across different paths of one's life. You may actively choose love or become grabbed by its gravitational pull. It may cocoon into nirvana and wrap oneself in euphoria, but with it may come pratfalls and glitches. 

To be either love’s instigator or recipient can be burdensome. Not everyone you love or who loves you will show their merit forever, as turbulence in friendships and romantic relationships await. Time is our ultimate puppeteer, inevitably stringing us through friendships that fade away. The paved path you and the other person have walked along may eventually crack or lead you into the abyss. 

Love of a sports team, i.e. fandom, poses some parallels to love of a person. Both relationships thrive on foundations of care, responsibility, and commitment, and it’s from those foundations which emotional peaks and valleys form. But a more esoteric parallel, something I’ve gauged from literature and conversation, is how both types of love, of team and person, are expected to form at a younger age. 

With sports, the majority of love stories - e.g. stories about becoming a fan -begin in childhood. This shouldn’t be too surprising considering sports provide an opportunity for a child to bond with his father and friends. Sports feeds this early need for acceptance, but it also feeds our evolving admiration for heroism and achievement. Sprinkle in early stages of learning to express emotion, and it’s easy to understand why loving a team originates in childhood or early adolescence rather than adulthood. 

Those developmental reasons might be why I sense a slight taboo, or a lowercase scarlet letter if you will, for those who discover a love for a new sports team as an adult. But there are also societal reasons why finding any love late in life receives a bad rap. 

A late in life love story doesn’t have the same zhuzh as a young love story. Falling in love in one’s youth or early 20s feels more fated, cosmic and therefore romanticized. When someone finds young love, the abundance of innocence and lack of responsibilities alludes to a more untainted love.

On the contrary, people much older - in their 40s, 50s, and 60s - approaching new friendships or romantic partners don’t receive the same ringing endorsement. They have built baggage and are now more seasoned in their intent. They might be looking for a caretaker, additional resources, or other rational, grounded motives. It also means that perhaps they’ve tried and failed at relationships - breakups, divorces, etc. - and finding love now provides more practical reasons than Greco-Roman agapic reasons. 

This unfortunate ostracization of older love is in part a construct of America’s ageist society - a society that markets to its youth and deprioritizes the needs of its elders. But aside from politics and capitalism, it also seems that aging in general lends itself more difficult to finding new love. It’s more difficult to build new friendships, finding additional time to harness responsibility for another’s well being. It’s also more difficult to find a romantic partner, seemingly at odds with the waning denominator of those still single, eligible, and both physically and emotionally available. 

Since love might be harder as you get older, it’s viewed by many as a more hopeless and therefore enviable endeavor. Why not just concentrate extra focus on current love in your life if looking for a new love is futile?

In the way sci-fi and fantasy are the obvious genres for simulating hypotheticals of life, sports is the portal through which I simulate my own life. Through sports, I experience domain-specific attitudes and tendencies of which I can learn from and utilize in the “real world”. 

As such, I learned to love late in life, not via a new partner, friend, or pet - rather a team. A new team posing as a respite from my lifelong marriages to New York’s B-list teams - the Mets, Jets, Knicks, and Islanders. 

This wasn’t a team that felt forced onto me. After all, when I was 22, my sister matriculated to the University of Michigan, of whose prestigious football program I was excited to become an active fan. But after rooting for them, something left me hanging. To use dating lingo, “I didn’t feel a spark”. Just because they’re hot, doesn’t mean there’s chemistry. 

But six years later at 28, an age I consider old to love a new team, I discovered English Premier League squad Tottenham Hotspur FC. Now that was love, baby! A love whose initial spark grew gradually…

The “romance” with Tottenham began on April 3, 2019. My friend Zach, an avid fan, took me to his regular Spurs (Tottenham’s nickname) bar for a match. We entered the bar, called Flannery’s and located nearby New York City’s Union Square, and I was immediately struck by the decor. From floor to ceiling, the bar was adorned in pennants, photos, and paraphernalia - all things Spurs. Several banners read the team’s song “Can’t Smile Without You”, their slogan “To Dare is To Do”, and their cheer “Come On You Spurs”. I had yearned for this type of sports viewing experience, one where the bar rhetorically screams Is there any better place to watch this team?! 

As Zach and I continued my way from the congested entrance into the ever-packed middle of the bar, I marveled at the crowd’s collective presence. Everyone was wearing the team’s jersey or scarf and all twenty monitors were turned to the Spurs channel. Not a single person was buried in their phone, concerning themselves with the scores of other games. Everyone was united with a singular focus. 

By the time the game began, and all eyes locked onto the televisions, I realized that having never watched a soccer match before, I didn’t know the rules. Putting that deficit in my back pocket, I was less enthralled with the on-pitch (on-field) action and more so with the crowd’s reaction. Like a blind person attentive to vivid sounds for direction, I gauged Tottenham’s progression through the unified groans and applause. 

Around thirty minutes into the game, I was somewhat startled when the crowd chanted “Yid Army ''. Yid Army? Yid, like the slur? Zach taught me that because Tottenham plays in a historically Jewish region of London, Spurs fans affectionately call themselves Yid Army. I thought about the significance of this continuation of the Yid - a word that has been and still is considered a slur in most contexts. The words in-group usage evokes purpose and congruence. Indeed, Tottenham are the “Jewish team”. 

As halftime rolled around, I was already attracted to the diehard fanbase, the ensemble of the bar, and unification of both people and space. But as an added bonus, I was witnessing a team historically supported by Jews. What more needed to be said to hook me into Tottenham? Well, actually one more thing.

Zach said, “Before you choose Tottenham, you should know that while, unlike you’re other teams, they will win a bunch of win games, they will still disappoint.” As if crowned by the Hogwarts sorting hat, I couldn’t shake my fate to root for yet another underdog. I was officially a Tottenham fan.  

The game ended with Tottenham a winner. The patrons celebrated, victory songs blasted, and I got the full joyous experience. Overwhelmed by the morning’s hulabaloo, I wasn’t aware until after the game that I had just watched Tottenham’s first game at their new stadium (the behemoth Tottenham Hotspur Stadium that has since hosted several NFL games). Indeed the new era of Tottenham football - see, no more calling it soccer - was symbolic of a new era in my fandom. 

Despite some momentum from the game, my investment for Tottenham didn’t launch right away. Although there were a few weeks remaining in their season, I didn’t watch any additional games. Like a romantic interest for whom I had interest but wasn’t in the correct headspace to invest, I still knew they were around. 

Perhaps I felt unworthy of Tottenham, because I didn’t understand their world. I’m not referring to not knowing their history or current players - the bits of information you learn over time during courtship; I didn’t understand their sport. Without knowing the rules of football, including basics like offsides, I felt like an imposter. Who was I to be a fan of something whose basis of being I knew little about!

So I first learned about the sport itself - the on-pitch rules, strategies and formations. Then I expanded my knowledge of the sport by learning about the off-field implications of football’s political and spiritual nature.

I embraced how different a spectacle it was to other sports. It had a great flow, bereft of commercials and overtime. I loved how attuned attending fans are to the action. There are no vendors roaming the aisles during play and there are separate sections devoted to opposing supporters - integrating collective moments of euphoria and deflation.

Goal scoring is low, even lower than hockey, and it’s not infrequent that games will end 0-0. But the mindful, focused attitude of awaiting a great moment or the rare goal, makes the fan celebrations that much more heavenly.

Everything I highlighted above was in support of my sports fandom love languages - unity, camaraderie, focus, and presence. 

Learning to love football made me love Tottenham even more. But it was during this process, in which I learned about this new more mature type of love - one that I didn’t get from any of my earlier teams or, for that matter, any people I had dated in the past.

The mature love caters itself not just from first impressions and projections you make from the world with which you’re familiar. Mature love requires learning about a new world, the world of the beloved. You appreciate who they are among their upbringing, their family, their friends, but also by what “game” they play - e.g. their values, their purpose, life’s mission.

Knowing Tottenham is to know their sport, but there would become so much more to learn - their league, their history, and their fans. If I didn’t pursue this knowledge, then the spark would have only lasted as long as superficiality’s shelf life. 

Loving late in life can carry baggage of past failed opportunities or “not having met the right person.” Trust me, you’ve met the right person or multiple right people, but you may not have understood their game or your own. What you or they stood for may have been a deterrent or ultimately never addressed. 

Loving my teams at a young age provided a variety of benefits, such as bonding with family and appreciating emotion; Yet being a youthful fan didn’t require a more sophisticated barrier to entry. It's the later loves in life - both of teams and friends & lovers - for which the bonds require a heightened appreciation of “ knowing what they’re about.”

I view late love in life with more reflection, more purposefulness, and more humility. I used to jump right into getting excited about a new crush, but I’ve learned that type of attachment is more damaging than rewarding. I never expected to see parallels of my heartthrob foibles through experiencing a new favorite team, but becoming passionate about something new allows me to correct those previous mistakes with people moving forward. 

After my short hiatus from Tottenham, I’ve either watched in full or caught highlights of every Spurs game since Fall . My courtship, as well as the honeymoon, is over. Now the committed, mature love evolves in constant desire to embrace and accept the team’s legacy in English, European, and world football. I continue to experience their essence - through good times and tough times, elation and frustration. 

My affection for Tottenham is separate from that of my other teams, because learning to love Tottenham was learning to love late in life. Loving someone or something where you’re “past your prime” comes with a wisdom of both past mistakes and desire for continuous discovery. But from my love of Spurs at 28 - relatively old to love a new sports team - I learned an important truth: Just as I was once unaware Tottenham Hotspur FC existed, so too am I currently unaware of another love that exists as well.