Men are at their most perfect atthe age of FIVE
Adoring. Loyal. Trusting. Vulnerable yet full of fun. JANE GORDON says the qualities she saw in her little boy — now a strapping 25 year old — made her conclude...
AT firsT it seemed impossible to believe that the man striding towards me across the station concourse was once the little boy who, to me, embodied all the most adorable and endearing qualities of the human male.
How could that enchanting fiveyearold in his blue school uniform — whose enthusiasm for life (and his mother) was irrepressible — have morphed into this ridiculously tall, infinitely cool, 25-year-old?
As rufus moved closer through the crowded concourse, it was difficult to identify any of the qualities that were so arresting in his childhood self.
Most apparent was the fact that he didn’t seem to have noticed me waiting to welcome him for a rare weekend home.
i was immediately transported back to a school playground in the late Nineties, and seeing his face literally light up at the sight of me as he galloped gleefully into my arms. Never have i felt so adored, so worshipped. Not before, not since. i was his absolute everything.
i could still conjure up the smell of him: skin, crayons, powder paint, ribena and BOY.
And i remembered, a little shamefully, how i’d wished at times that i could freeze my son at five years old, or at least stretch the age a little, to eke out every moment of pleasure from it. for this, in my opinion, is the age when the male of the human species peaks. Never are they more adorable.
Little girls are adorable, too, of course (i’ve had two of those, too). But not like boys. No one loves you like your son after his fifth birthday.
so convinced was i of this magic number that i coined a phrase for it: The fives. for, i grew to realise men who managed to retain the extraordinary charm they possessed as fiveyearolds were the ones to whom women would always be drawn.
Adult men who remain as enthusiastic, loyal, loving and daring as they had been in their first year at infant school were the ones that won women’s hearts even if sometimes that boyishness could be irritating (their inability, for instance, to ‘grow out’ of their obsession with football or fast cars or their love of playing the latest version of their childhood video games).
The fives were the rogues, the rascals, for whom a scratch of stubble on a chin or a grey fleck at the temple could never erase the boyish charm and unconditional adoration that had their mothers wrapped around their little fingers. T
his may sound strange, slightly perverse even, but this moment of clarity, this blinding realisation, occurred during rufus’s school outing to the Tower of London, exactly 20 years ago.
As one of the two or three mothers invited along to help make up the number of responsible adults, i found myself surrounded by some 50 five- year- old boys, almost all of whom were, well, totally and absolutely lovable.
i had, of course, been aware for some time of the wonderful allure of my own son. i had decided, a month or so after his fifth birthday, that he was utterly perfect. Quite apart from the fact that he was the only male who has ever told me that i am beautiful or that he wanted to marry me (and meant it), he had about him the qualities that i, and probably every other woman in the world, found most appealing in grown men.
He was loyal, he was affectionate, he was tenderly trusting and responsive. He had charm, absolute confidence in his masculinity, a deep love of women, a touching vulnerability and this extraordinary and disarming enthusiasm for life (i could go on).
But what i hadn’t realised, until that moment of truth at Traitor’s Gate, is that all fiveyearboys share these qualities. in fact, what i didn’t fully understand until i stood among those 50 boys in their bright blue uniforms was that this was as good as they were ever going to be.
By which i do not mean that it is a downhill slide from then on (although, sadly, for some it is). What i meant is that they’d created a benchmark for themselves that they, and their future partners, would spend the rest of their lives trying to reach again. Of course, there is nothing new about the concept of the man who remains a boy. for as long as i can remember i have heard women whingeing, usually in a tone of disgust or desperation, about the fact that men are little boys, that they never grow up. But those women who condemn the child in the man usually do so for the wrong reasons — mostly because he
won’t commit to them. They dwell too much on the negative side of the small boy in the grown man — irresponsibility, for instance, or an overdeveloped interest in toys and games (cars, gadgets, football, rugby and so on).
What they fail to acknowledge is the positive side of this phenomenon.
Because it is the adult males who continue to display that early enthusiasm, that sense of fun, that spirit of adventure, that vulnerability and that adoration of women who are the ones holding the real key to our hearts.
In fact, in rather the way that men sometimes categorise women as ‘Perfect Tens’ because of their obvious physical allure, I began to classify the men I find most fascinating and attractive as Fives.
Looking back, I now realise the first grown-up man I fell in love with as a small girl embodied all the qualities of a perfect Five. In fact, David Attenborough still does.
Every man I have ever been attracted to since, from my juvenile crush on Paul McCartney to my adult fixation with Trainspotting and Fargo star Ewan McGregor, has, I then realised, been a Five.
Along the way, in my work and in my private life, all the men who have really appealed to me have been Fives. And I realise now, although, of o course, I have from time to time complained about it, that I even married m a Five.
My new theory the on men caught on among my fe female friends. We began to use the w word as shorthand for men who interest int us.
OF CoursE, not all F Fives are perfect. Because, after all, even the most adorable fiveyear-olds year-olds ha have faults. They can be egocentric, competitive, boastful and obstinate. obstinat
They can also be irritatingly obsessional about the things that interest the them — the difference between a pterodactyl and a tyrannosaur tyrannosaurus, for instance.
Those thi things, translated into adult life (if they are not balanced with the other, o more obvious small-boy charms), ch can turn them into dysfunctional Fives — such as Ewan McGregor, who has recently ditched his wife for a younger woman.
It would be wrong to confuse Fives with men who refuse to grow up: the Peter Pan syndrome personified by Peter stringfellow; or the awful cult of ‘Laddishness’, symbolised by Gazza (and look where that ended up).
Those are men whose development was probably arrested at the most repellent moment of a boy’s life, 15 say, rather than at its most attractive at five.
A perfect Five is probably quite unconscious of the qualities he possesses. He’s never vain, he’s rarely maliciously deceitful (fiveyear-olds only ever tell you lies they think you want to hear).
The Five theory finally explains what has, in the area of a woman’s attraction to a man, previously seemed inexplicable.
He can be fat or thin, beautiful or plain: the definition can even be applied to men who might be almost grotesquely ugly.
once you accept that a man is a Five, you understand why he is attractive — and it has nothing to do with his looks. The Five theory offers us an explanation of why, for example, a man who looks like robbie Coltrane can still move the heart of beautiful women.
or why someone as, frankly, elderly as robert redford can still feature in a list of the world’s most desirable men.
The theory also exposes where so many women go wrong. They should not be searching — as they are led to believe in the fairy tales that they are told in their formative years — for tall, dark and handsome princes. They should be looking for the really enchanting men in this world: the Fives.
I count myself as extremely lucky that there have been very few times in his journey from the five-yearold boy, to the man he is now, when my son has been anything other than, well, my boy.
There were difficult times — something I deeply regret — when his father and I parted when he was nine and divorced when he was 11. But later, despite the occasional upsets that occurred when I found something disturbing in his sock drawer — a copy of the lads mag ‘Nuts’ or tell-tale packets of Golden Virginia tobacco — his adolescence was relatively trouble-free.
As laid-back then as he seems to be now there were, too, a few moments of anxiety when he grew into long school trousers and developed a ‘ multi- tasking’ approach to GCsE revising.
This involved listening to his iPod through headphones while simultaneously instant messaging his friends on his laptop and ‘studying’ an open text-book).
But he got through that, and into a good university and ultimately onto what looks to be a promising future in what is possibly the ultimate career for an eternal Five — he works in production at Talksport radio.
Along the way there have been girls, and girls and girls (another passion of a confirmed Five) but his devotion to his four-year- old niece suggests that some time soon he will meet ‘The Girl’ and become a devoted father.
True, these days he occasionally finds me more irritating than I ever found him, even at the height of his eight-year-old obsession with Pokemon, but that is probably understandable. Like many other mothers of grown-up boys I am reluctant to let go — still checking his updates on social media (and occasionally posting an embarrassing comment) and sending him messages saying things like ‘Is all oK? Love you x’ if I haven’t heard from him for longer than two days.
Ironically, just the other day he replied to one of these messages with the rather terse response ‘Ma, I AM 25 NoT FIVE.’.
YET as he strode through the concourse, I found myself, once again looking for the Five in my 25-year-old. Where was he? For a start, I couldn’t see his eyes beneath his ray-Bans (it was an unusually sunny day) and in place of his old blazer he was wearing what is the uniform, or maybe the modern-day armour, of the millennial male — a huge down-lined Patagonia puffer jacket, jeans and a pair of Nike Air Max trainers.
In the time it took him to make his way to where I was standing, holding tight to the lead of our over- excited 18-month- old dog, I found myself feeling slightly deflated, wondering if anything of that little boy still lurked inside this 6ft 4in man.
But in an instant, as he pulled up his sunglasses and caught sight of me he transformed back to my perfect five-year- old. He didn’t, of course, throw himself into my arms looking up at me adoringly shouting ‘Mummy, Mummy’ in the way he once did. But the love still burned brightly in those eyes as he caught me in a brief, but affectionate and protective hug. He smelled of soap, aftershave, warm wool and MAN. ‘Hi Ma,’ he muttered.
He was back — he never really went away; rufus will always be five to me.