A friend in her 20s and I had dinner the other day. At 30 years younger than me, she is facing a raft of challenges that arrive at her age: about identity, the pressure of expectation and all the weight of ‘who do I want to be?’
There’s the upheaval of forging a place in the world while scraping a living, the awful, endless slog of getting life’s show on the road.
Then she sighed: ‘I’m sorry. This must sound pathetic given how much women of your age have to contend with.’
Staggered, I replied: ‘Are you kidding? I wouldn’t be 23 again for the world. Being a young woman is hideous.’
She eyed me with incredulity. This was not what she expected.
Hannah Betts, 53, says she wouldn’t be 23 again for the world and that being a young woman is ‘hideous’
The beauty expert, pictured in her 20s, believes this, her 50s, is ‘my best decade yet’
Middle age is meant to be heinous: the beginning of the end, especially for women. Society tells us that our 50s are a car crash of losses: loss of looks, loss of power and loss of mind. After 50, we’re finished, spent, staggering downhill in inevitable decline.
But, I told her in no uncertain terms, I would rather be 53 than 23. This is my best decade yet. Make no mistake: I’m not saying 50 is the new 20. I’m saying 50 is nothing remotely like 20 — that’s what makes it so fantastic.
A woman’s 20s are a time of striving, with the pressure to work out what you want from life, to ‘go places’ — with the added burden of people trying to have sex with you, or to crush you, forever craving your attention and getting in your way.
That’s my experience, and my friend’s woes suggest that despite MeToo and the unstoppable tide of fifth-wave feminism, too little has changed.
I was a mess at her age: poor, put upon, clueless in the face of so many epic choices.
I should have felt the world was my oyster. Instead, I was in the wrong job, paid a pittance as a lowly Oxford academic. Even when I found my path in journalism, aged 28, I flitted between flat after London flat, trapped in rootless, rental uncertainty. Working like a Trojan, day and night, was the only solace I knew.
As to the youthful allure that is supposed to be the peak of a woman’s existence, I never knew what to do with it.
It was confusing to be thought attractive when I didn’t feel it; at worst, threatening. I was followed, stalked frequently by men I knew and complete strangers.
Relationships brought their own problems. I still have nightmares about deciding between two 28-year-old chaps, both (had I but realised) quite wrong for me in terms of character, beliefs and what they demanded of me.
I became naively embroiled with men who were bullying, nasty pieces of work. Schooled on novels, I was young enough to think ‘romantic’ when men declared love at first sight, rather than the right response of ‘maniac’. That’s how I ended up dating a chap who threatened to kill us both when I ended it.
At this stage of her life, Hannah feels she has her ‘coordinates — I know what my life is’
Quitting my first big relationship aged 28, I had no idea how to operate single. I knew I never wanted marriage, yet so many men appeared to expect it, and assumed I must crave motherhood; concepts that felt as alien as they were anachronistic.
Compare this with the joyous ease of meeting my current partner ten years ago, both of us comfortable with who we are. I adore him, and he me, which isn’t just luck. We put in the work.
Now at 53, I have my coordinates — I know what my life is. Mood-wise, after a lifetime of depression, I’m as close to happy as I’ve ever been, benefiting from half a century’s self-knowledge.
I finally have a mortgage, having slogged for a deposit until the age of 47. We have a beautiful little flat with a stunning garden. In our dog, Pimlico, I have the blue whippet I always dreamt of. My friends are incredible, my job interesting, my health good.
I’m old and ugly enough not to suffer self-consciousness, nor am I forever people-pleasing. I’ve learned how to say ‘no’.
Honestly, it’s utterly glorious. This is the secret nobody lets on: for women, particularly, things get better — brilliantly better — with every passing year.
Many men feel they lose status in midlife, aware they haven’t achieved all they hoped in the workplace, less able to attract women, and to perform when they do. They buy sports cars to assuage midlife angst, while we get a life that is better than ever.
This is why patriarchal society relies on the myth of the crumbling, disempowered, fundamentally barking middle-aged woman — an attempt to diminish us just when we’re reaching our prime.
Although not dismissing the work of today’s menopause campaigners, there’s a sense in which their taboo-busting has played into the societal phobia of womanhood where fertility is no longer the defining feature.
It has become all too easy to co-opt their labours into the cultural stereotype of the blighted crone. When, in fact, there’s a reason we refer to menopause as ‘The Change’ and not ‘The End’.
Hannah’s friends also admit they prefer moored middle-age to 20s turmoil
I’m not saying that midlife doesn’t bring challenges. Any idea that one might rest on one’s laurels career-wise remains laughable. Instead, one is compelled to work harder than ever, only with slumping stamina.
Still, I can stand up for myself, take less s***. I know what I’m prepared to do, or not.
Obviously, not every 50-year-old existence is blissful. There are those who are ill, facing onerous responsibility or crushing financial straits. Being child-free, I’m not having to deal with troubled teenagers; and, with my parents dead for almost a decade, no longer handling nursing while working full-time.
Still, even friends in these situations admit they prefer moored middle-age to 20s turmoil. It’s not that we think our lives are great, but that they’re recognisably ours.
Yet however emotionally, professionally and financially successful we are by our 50s, we are still told nothing will make up for our loss of youthful beauty.
This could never make me feel bereft, just relieved.
I can’t begin to explain how liberating it is to have less male attention, when so much of it meant them endangering you, not listening, or being an obstacle.
I no longer face lies about my sex life created to undermine me at work, or jealous rivals claiming I’d flirted my way into jobs.
I once challenged a colleague as to why he’d gone about alleging we’d slept together and he shrugged: ‘I thought it would prove career-enhancing.’
Older women, meanwhile, no longer get to tell me that I must be stupid because of the way I look.
There’s nothing more satisfying than trading youth’s glancing glamour for actual adult power — as a human, as a parent, or as some professional colossus who headbutted through the glass ceiling, then made earrings out of its shards.
At the same time, I genuinely prefer my appearance now, despite its loss of beguiling bloom. My face was like a cloud — amorphous, unformed — now it has edge, character.
Don’t let society sell you the lie that ridding yourself of passing prettiness is life’s great tragedy — it’s a joy.
First off, it’s a fantastic way to distinguish between the sheep and the goats: the men and women attracted to you now are superior in every way to those idiots who were beguiled by youth’s fleeting lustre.
So here’s what I said to my young friend: ‘Sweetheart, this is the secret that nobody tells you. All the things that make you uneasy now — your job, your sexuality, your friends, your ability to earn money, your family, your thigh size — all this won’t be solved by the passing of 30 years, but it will, eventually, have just about fallen into place.
‘Life will become more straightforward. And you’ll be smarter merely from being more experienced. Smarter and less easily bruised.
‘It’s not just going to be OK; it’s going to get ever better. By my age, you’ll have got somewhere, finally, yet there will still be everything left to play for.’
A version of this article first appeared on: hannahbetts.substack.com