I’ve never lied about my age.
So far, I’ve not had to and even my own doctor believed me to be 5 years younger than my true age. How long this will last, I don’t know, but I am beginning to wonder whether it would be better to mix with people 5-10 years older than myself, so that I’m always the youngest in the crowd. On the other hand, associating with younger folk does help to keep the mind and attitude alive and fresh, but that means I look “past it” by comparison.
It’s a conundrum.
A Sunday Mail reader has this to say on the subject:
“I believe we would all be a lot happier if we never had to discuss age at all. After all, unless for professional or health reasons, the only reason people want to know is so that they can put one into a little box along with a scope of stereotypical idea´s about how one should dress, behave etc. It is a shame it should be so but until people stop discriminating against people entirely because of their age I will continue to refuse to reveal my age or if pressed for an answer, to state what I think is appropriate for the circumstances. I would go further and suggest that if one was allowed to behave as if one were younger one would actually stay younger for longer. Look at the number of people who stop doing things.”
Why do women lie about their age?
Just look at the captions accompanying the photographs of Madonna and Sharon Stone at the Cannes Film Festival last week.
How about rich, happy, successful, beautiful? No.
The captions inevitably read: ‘Combined age: 99.’ No such captioning, of course, accompanied pictures of Harrison Ford or Clint Eastwood.
Ridiculing a woman about her age is the last acceptable bastion of discrimination.
And although not everyone has gone to the ridiculous lengths I have to cover up my precise vintage (and, oh dear God, it has been an exhausting exercise in which I have had to be ever vigilant; the stress has been ageing in itself), I don’t have one single girlfriend who does not race, every two weeks, to the hairdresser to have her grey roots retouched.
I don’t know one woman over 40 who does not dread the advent of age spots, or freakily elongated ear lobes, even more than she dreads a protracted death in a nursing home. [more, via Sundaymail.co.uk]