Just a Number?

Yesterday at church, a little kid told me he was 4.1 years old. He asked me how old I was and I told him I was 27.75. 

Regretfully, I only have 3 months left of this age. Aaaaand it's causing me major stress.  

Last year when I was 26, I watched the TV show Younger about all these 26-year old working professionals, and I felt hip and relevant because their age was my age and we were all cute and fun and wrinkle-free and kind of the same. 

Now I'm 27 and watching My Best Friend's Wedding and realizing that in this movie, Julia Roberts is also supposed to be 27. When her character was in college, she made a pact with Dermot Mulroney that when they were 28, if they weren't married, they would marry each other. Similar boat, here. I, too, have always been in love with my best guy friend who also doesn't want to be with me, but I have yet to attempt to break up any weddings, so maybe that's a point in my book? 

What I'm getting at is that after I age past 27, I'm already feeling like I'll be able to relate less to pop culture because such a significantly higher portion of people will be younger than me, little baby youths, frolicking about in their early 20's. 

But also, 27 has probably been the most interesting and boldest year of my life, one of doing the most traveling on my own, trying the most new things, and making some of the biggest changes. I'm already sad to leave this age behind. 

At the beginning of a new birthday year, you feel like time is inconsequential and irrelevant--you have so much of it at your expense and you'll be this new age for such a long time, there's no sense worrying about it right then. But inevitably, as you start nearing the end of that year, in a kind of Faustian way you realize that the time will pass regardless, and fretting about getting older is like paddling against the current. 

Maybe age is also bothering me because I just rewatched Hello, My Name is Doris recently and I was thinking about the implausibility of the storyline. The movie revolves around Sally Field’s character being interested in a younger coworker, Max Greenfield, and is a kind of coming of age film for an older woman. I relate to that movie on a spiritual level because not only is being single a major part of my life and foreseeable future, but also misconstruing innocuous social interactions as flirting is and always has been my brand. 

But the whole movie, I felt this twisty sense anxiety, almost akin to guilt, because the dramatic irony to which I, as a viewer, was privy was that a young, hot man would not be interested in an woman twice his age. (During filming, Max was 35 to Sally’s 70 years old.) The idea of a younger man coupled with a much older woman (I'm talking an age gap of +10 years) feels so taboo in our culture that it legitimately made me uncomfortable to watch at times. 

Wait, what is it you see confidently striding in to interrupt this conversation? 

Oh right, the pervasive double standard that makes it much more permissible for older men to date younger women. 

For your interested little eyeballs: 

WOMEN OLDER THAN THEIR HUSBANDS

Hugh Jackman’s wife: 13 years

Geena Davis: 15 years

Mary Tyler Moore: 18 years 

Demi Morre: 20 years (when she was married to Ashton Kutcher)

Carol Burnett: 23 years

Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s wife: 24 years

MEN OLDER THAN THEIR WIVES

Matthew McConaughey: 14 years

Tom Cruise: 16 years

George Clooney: 17 years

David Schwimmer: 19 years

David Cross: 19 years

Jason Statham: 20 years

Kevin Costner: 22 years

Harrison Ford: 22 years

Bruce Willis: 23 years

John Stamos: 23 years

Michael Douglas: 25 years

Alec Baldwin: 26 years

Celine Dion’s husband: 26 years

You get the picture. I realize that the sample size I’m pulling from is biased racially and socio-economically to the Hollywood elite, and while yes, of course it's possible to find instances where a woman is much older than her partner, the trend seems to be that men marry significantly younger women much more often than women marry significantly younger men. 

(I also realize that I’ve reported stats for twice as many men here as women, but I found abundant cases of prominent well-known Hollywood actors currently alive and currently married to younger women that considerably outnumbered the information I could find for older women marrying younger men, hence the inclusion of the late Mary Tyler Moore to beef up my list.) 

I warrant that this trend is closely related to our society’s tendency to quickly label women as looking “old” and discard them when they are no longer sexy enough for our judgmental consuming gaze, while male celebrities are often singled out for looking more handsome, refined, and distinguished as they age. 

Just today I saw a post on Twitter comparing these photos of Matthew McConaughey alongside the caption “aged like wine” or something equally as inane. While I would have much stronger antagonistic feelings about a similar meme portraying a female celebrity because of how such images propagate the objectification of women, we don’t see the same kind of appreciation given to women’s aging bodies first of all, but aging women in general.

  

Someone else who was more culturally sensitive tweeted:

Thus the implication seems to be that women are less desirable as they age. 

And maybe that’s where this anxiety is stemming from, in part. 

I’ve gotten this far in my life feeling perpetually unwanted and undateable, as if being single is some cruel and unusual punishment I have specifically been called to bear. I fear that, as restricted as my dating pool already is, its size will continue to diminish in negative correlation to my age each year I grow older. Believe me, it’s not lost on me that in my church culture, upon turning 31, you transition out of being a “young single adult” and are abruptly lumped with the “single adults.”

But I think the biggest part of this anxiety tsunami is about losing touch with my youth. No longer being a young adult and just being a (sigh) regular adult. 

Someone who has insurance and buys her own plane tickets and has the "we have food at home talk" with herself when feeling tempted to eat out too much. Someone who squeegees the shower to prevent mildew and is proud of her cloth napkins. 

Maybe all of this is silly. Maybe age is arbitrary and I’m just struggling with this innate and intense need to categorize and classify. And just because both Emma Watson and Dev Patel are only days older than me, I don't need to feel like my life accomplishments are any less noteworthy simply because I've never been in any Oscar-winning or Harry Potter movies. 

I really like this quote from the movie The Guardian (whose two male leads have both been in marriages of substantial age differences): 

Ben: When the heck did we get old?

Maggie: Hell, I've always been old, Ben. You know what though? I don't mind. I mean, if my muscles ache, it's because I've used 'em. It's hard for me to walk up them steps now. It's 'cuz I walked up 'em every night to lay next to a man who loved me. I got a few wrinkles here and there, but I've laid under thousands of skies with sunny days. I look and feel this way, well, 'cuz I drank and I smoked. I lived and I loved, danced, sang, sweat, and screwed my way through a pretty damn good life if you ask me. Getting old ain't bad, Ben. Getting old, that's earned.