Last week I was invited to a lovely event to celebrate the launch of a new skincare brand, called And Begin. It’s bespoke formulations for middle-aged skin. You answer some questions online and then a few days later you receive a fantastic moisturiser and serum in one that’s tailored precisely to your skin’s needs. It’s a great concept, because it simplifies skincare and also because it is unapologetically targeting and celebrating middle-aged skin.
I can feel a small but definite shift, in that there are retailers and advertisers starting to actively seek out this lucrative demographic, rather than pretend it doesn’t exist while forever chasing the youth money.
It was a theme picked up in a panel chat on the evening hosted by Ateh Jewel, where my friends Lorraine Candy and Trish Halpin, of the great podcast Postcards from Midlife, talked about how energised they’re feeling in their 50s.
The whole event, teeming with women around my age (I’m 54 next month), has inspired this piece today. Listening to these women speak, it occurred to me how fearful and full of dread I used to be about this life stage. Here are some of the key things I’ve learned about what my 50s are like, versus what I thought they’d be like.
I thought I’d be married to the same man
Well, actually I am. In fact our 24th anniversary is next Monday. But we are not the same people we were when we wed in 2000. Sometimes I look at the photos of our wedding day and it doesn’t even feel like it is me and Ross.
A marriage requires many things to be happy and long. As well as love and patience and kindness and communication and compromise, I would say, above all, it requires respecting the space for each other to change along the way. To change and grow together. But I hadn’t given that a second of consideration when we said ‘I do’ when we were both 30. Of course you know that you’re promising to be together and grown old together, but I still had this idea of us simply looking different rather than being different.
I can’t give anyone advice for how to do this, because it’s different in every relationship. But there are many ways in which Ross and I are not the same people who met and fell in love in their 20s. He did not marry a menopausal woman who then chose the menopausal phase of her life to grapple with a steep new career learning curve. And we certainly were not living with a hormonal teenage girl back then either. Life will hurl all sorts of highs, lows, events and challenges at a relationship and they’ll all bend and stretch you. I think we’ve weathered our differing life stages because ultimately we feel happily tethered. We still very much enjoy each other’s company and I hope we always will. We agreed a long time ago that we’re in this together. Also I did tell him a few years ago that I’m not sure I could ever be arsed with the admin of divorce, so he’s stuck with me.
I thought I would look way worse than I do
Honestly, when you think of the onslaught of messages we all receive about the evils of ageing and how, the worst possible thing you can do is to look the age you are, of course we all spent our teens, 20s and 30s dreading the day - dawnbreak on our 40th birthday we assumed - when basically Gandalf would be staring at us from the mirror.
Body image gets a lot of air time in our culture but few people talk about our relationship with our faces. On the whole, I’ve struggled more with trying to like my face - with my 3rd grade classmates shouting ‘flyshit face’ at me on account of my freckles, it was shaky from the start - than my body shape and size.
I don’t know if age has just made me bored with still being paranoid about it, but I think actually, I’ve come to like my face. It’s not as tight and line-free as it was 20 years ago, but I’m so much more at peace with it now than then. I have never considered myself a pretty woman and so I truly believed I’d be a certified hag by the time I reached my 50s. Maybe it’s as my former colleague, former Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman has written a few times - I’m paraphrasing, but she basically says, it’s probably better to be average looking so that when you ‘lose your looks’ it’s more proportionate and tolerable. For truly beautiful people, it could feel like a much greater loss.
I spent years feeling apologetic about my face - to the point where, even when I started my #clothesmyhusbandhates posts on Instagram I would always crop my head out of the pictures. I don’t now suddenly think I’m a stone cold fox or anything. But I’ve just made peace with it. Then, about two years ago, a You magazine reader contacted me to say I should ‘get some better advice’ about my hair and make-up for my editor’s letter photo. It ignited in me a sort of exhausted defiance: by which I mean, I suddenly realised how sick and tired I was of feeling apologetic about my face and, now that I was in my 50s, maybe it was time to get over it and stop feeling like I owed anyone anything with regards to the one and only face I have. I used to be the girl who spent half an hour putting on make-up before dashing out to buy a loaf of bread. She sure wasted some time worrying about her face.
So if you are young and worried about ‘losing your looks’, I would bet money that in many ways, when you get here you will probably like them more.
I thought my feelings wouldn’t get hurt anymore
Crazy, right? But only an hour ago, I opened Instagram and saw some friends beaming from a party and I felt that familiar stab of hurt about not being invited. I thought that bruised feeling was a very schoolgirl-ish immaturity that would vanish with my youth. I really did think I simply needed to reach an age, a life stage, where I would simply have no more fucks to give. And I know I’m not the first middle-age woman to tell you there are many glorious things about which you will no longer give any of the fucks. I am more adventurous with everything from my career choices to my wardrobe because I’m not letting my speculations about ‘what others might think’ weigh me down quite so much. But I’m not exclusively unbothered by stuff either.
So it turns out that being ‘older and wiser’ is no protection from betrayals, rejections or plain meanness. The only takeaway from that I can offer? Being affected by such things speaks to a sensitive and empathic humanity, that I wouldn’t want to lose anyway. And there are plenty of people who will want people like that at their party.
I thought I would be physically weaker
But I am so much fitter and stronger than I was as a young woman. Back then, I didn’t have the body confidence to work on my strength. I’ve written about it before so I won’t wang on here. But once I stopped thinking that exercising was all for the goal of achieving a certain look, and started viewing it as an investment in my mental health, I got so much more exhilaration from doing it. I schedule exercise with the same diligence as any meeting. Spinning and weight training are my constants, but I also love Pilates and walking as much as I possibly can. These days, my physical fitness sometimes surprises people because I am a woman of a certain age. ‘This one’s the dark horse here!’ said one of the trainers about me at The Body Camp in Spain last year - an exercise holiday I’d have been far too timid to enjoy when I was young. I enjoy defying expectations of what a woman in her 50s can do and I plan to keep doing that for as long as my body will let me.
I thought I would not have celebrity crushes
Who knew that that would kick in again? It’s ridiculous at my age, but is it because I am my age? Is it a desperate attempt to reclaim a youthful feeling? Am I a gross old perv? I don’t know. But hey, it passes the time and I will maintain a respectful and highly legal distance.
I thought I would know exactly how to help my daughter with absolutely everything
Of course I’d have loved my newborn baby fiercely had she been a boy. But I can’t lie I was secretly relieved to have a girl: I reasoned that parenting would come all the more naturally to me in mothering a girl. I mean, I’ve been a teenage girl, right? I know how those things tick. But it hadn’t occurred to me back then, at 35 years old, that her world would be so alien to me. But as I’ve written about before, her experiences of the world could not be more different than mine at her age, and I have no idea why I didn’t realise that that would be the case. I can be here to listen, give her my takes on anything she faces, absolutely. But everything - dating, career progression, education, politics, you name it - is a wholly different game than it was in my teens. She teaches me way more about the world than the other way around. Although she recently told me, exasperatedly, that she is giving up on trying to teach me how to use Tik Tok.
I’ve learned to ask for what I want
I used to work with a woman who badly wanted a promotion. We shared the same boss and she would often come to me for a pep talk and ask me, regularly, what our boss was thinking of her and why he hadn’t noticed her excellent work and rewarded her with the promotion. I couldn’t pretend to know what he was thinking. I agreed with her that she deserved it. It seemed obvious to me that she should simply ask him for that step up. It took her about eight months to summon the courage but when she did, she got what she wanted.
I’ve realised lately that I’ve been good at pointing out to others that they should ask for what they want, but I’ve been crap at it for myself. Until recent times. Asking for exactly what you want is no guarantee that you will get it. But not asking almost certainly guarantees you won’t. It’s not an exclusively female condition but I think we are more inclined to believe that our good work will get noticed and rewarded all on its own. Younger me was regularly embittered about the absence of pay rises or promotions. She never put her hand up for them though either.
I thought I would be put out to pasture
And well, maybe there’s still time for that, but I’m finding currently that being older brings with it its own powers. I would not have been approached to run a cancer charity at the age of 28. And I would not have built any financial security at that age to enable me to move towards a more flexible hybrid career. It’s because of my age that Lorraine viewers want to know how I would style a puffa jacket (any way you bloody well want if you’re asking). And it’s the years that are behind me that have helped me cultivate relationships that build me up - personally and professionally - every day.
As a younger woman, I was gripped with the anxiety so many of us are: The feeling that we have to achieve a lot - maybe everything - before we’re ‘too old’. Before it’s ‘too late’. We’re repeatedly told that older women are invisible. We watched, with no small amount of stress and jealousy, people being lauded in magazine features called things like ‘30 powerful people under 30’. I think somewhere, deep down, we all swallow a narrative that if it’s not achieved by your 30s - be it a relationship, a family, an established career, whatever you want - then it won’t ever be achieved. I wish I could have convinced myself at that age to just CTFO. Because now I can see that doors can continue to open well beyond those youthful years. Yes, I’m probably at a point now where there is more life behind me than in front of me. But, while I am able, I will approach it with curiosity and optimism and energy. Who knows what experiences my 64 year-old self will be able to put to good use in the future? Not me - yet. But I no longer believe that I’ll be no use to anyone.
Wherever you are on this spectrum - closer to my age or in the throes of your youth - I would love to know your thoughts on this!
I will be 80 next month, Jo and I agree with everything you've said. Physical limitations of old age take some getting used to. No matter what, I'm not as limber, fast, and strong as I used to be. But that lovely word wisdom makes up for so much. Just keep being curious with an outer focused view. Oh, and learn new things. Life stays worth living.
Big hugs.
You are 💯 wrong about not having a pretty face, you nutter. But I forgive you because you also used the excellent phrase “wanging on”.