People have consistently underestimated my age almost my entire life – sometimes by a decade or more. It has been the proverbial “blessing and a curse.” On one hand, people have consistently underestimated my maturity and my experience. On the other hand? While it frustrated me as a younger person, it has a definite appeal to the vanity now that I am not so young anymore.

And vanity was an animal that crept up behind me and pounced on me in my vulnerability as I passed the somewhat indefinable point where I could credibly be called “young.”

I never based my self-worth on my appearance. My grandmother was a catalogue model – tall and elegant with more than a passing resemblance to Lucille Ball in her youth. I… was not. Boyish, chubby, and awkward until well past puberty, I shot up in height and lost a good two stone over one summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school. My younger brother was the “pretty one” in the family. I was the “smart one”. Never picked first for the dance and in the shadow of my far-more-attractive best friend, I was an approachable target for boys just as nerdy as I was. I actively distrusted anyone who complemented my appearance and I focused on using my nerdiness to my greatest advantage and excelling at all the predictably nerdy pursuits. If I was going to succeed, it wasn’t going to be due to my looks. I actually lived with nothing more than a hand mirror for years. I actively avoided trying on clothes in the harsh lighting of a department store and I avoided my own reflection in windows and glass doors. The “me” I saw in my head never matched the “me” I saw in the reflection and rather than resolving the discordance, I ignored it.

I recently had to move my aging mother and stepfather into a nursing home on a rather abrupt and unexpected time scale. In the mad rush to empty their home for sale, my brother and I spent one evening coming through the boxes of old family pictures. I was truly, hand-over-heart, astonished at the willowy, pale, and yes, beautiful, girl staring back at me with ice blue eyes and a very world-weary expression. I never, ever remembered that girl. I spent decades in willful ignorance of my own appearance and filled a lifetime with unnecessary angst and insecurity. I still can’t sort out the mixed emotions, the feeling of a lifetime wasted in the body shame of long-sleeved, shapeless clothing when I should have worn the damned bikini.

We are a society that demands physical perfection, particularly for women. No matter how much we fight it, it permeates our psyche. Even when we know it’s wrong and it’s trivial, we still get shocked when we run into a woman whom we haven’t seen in a long time and she has “let herself go”. The great, horrible irony of my life is that all of my youth I spent steadfastly ignoring my external self in favor of my internal self – and now that I am living the benefit of that dedication, those years of unrealized youthful prettiness are far behind.

The 40’s may be the new 30’s and the 50’s may be the new 40’s, but the idea of a woman over 50 still being a sexual and desirable being is still one that is a subject of ridicule in our society. While a man in his 50’s wouldn’t think twice about making an overture to a woman in her thirties, if the situation is reversed, the woman is characterized as delusional and desperate. Men with much younger girlfriends are envied. Men with much older girlfriends must have some version of “mommy syndrome” – like some sort of bizarre maternal fetish is the only conceivable thing that a young man could covet in an older woman. He couldn’t possible see her has beautiful or sexually desirable unless he were somehow broken. And the woman is ridiculous for not accepting her place in society as the venerable crone. We are expected to go to almost stupid lengths to retain our youth – but we should never, ever have the audacity to actually USE that effort on anyone but someone comfortably older than we are.

Well, fuck that shit.

There is a considerable age gap between my husband and I. I mean, were aren’t talking about a generational gap here, but it’s more than a few years. People love to point out that he doesn’t look younger than me. In some sort of weird way the fact that he doesn’t look obviously younger is supposed to make it more acceptable that I married a younger man. Well, I’ve got news for you, society. If (heaven forbid) something happened to my husband, in the unlikely event that I actually decided to go out and find a replacement, it would also be a younger man. Because in my experience, 90% of the men my age don’t have my interests and can’t keep up with my intense need for mental stimulation. They don’t like women who push their boundaries or move them out of their comfort zone. Come to think of it, most men a decade younger than me don’t keep up either, but a girl can dream.

An older friend once told me that the great tragedy of aging is that you only age on the outside. The person you see in the mirror becomes farther and farther away from the person that is trapped inside that transient body. Well, at least I have had practice at that.