Love Your Age: Overcoming the Socialized Pressure to Look Young

I look at my seventy-year-old friend and suddenly see the face she wore decades ago. She was beautiful.

Was beautiful.

Is beautiful.

Damnit.

Now I’m angry at myself, angry at the haze of conditioning about women, age and beauty, the filter that determines how I see her. Angry that, no matter how much I don’t want to, I am conditioned to deem the imagined youthful version of her more “beautiful” than the here and now version of her.  

Angry that this same unwanted preference plays out every time I look at my own aging face in the mirror.

Inside my fury, something unexpected happens.

It’s as though someone has given me a hallucinogenic or a pair of VR googles. There, before me, is something I’ve never seen in an older face. Not in the thousands of aging faces I’ve gazed upon, including my own.

I think it might be freedom.

The Pressure to Look Young

I only know how to be afraid of aging, as though it’s a cliff from which I will someday plummet.

Words associated with women and aging: sagging, wilted, withered, drooped, faded, dry, dried-up, unsexy, dispassionate, shriveled.

Time for a rebrand.

My kids like to use those age filters and laugh their heads off at me looking ninety. I laugh too, try to play it off as a fun game, try to hide my panic.

I used to scan the old photos on the mantels of various grandparents, feeling unsettled by the ghosts of their blazing youth. My eyes would move between the photo and the octogenarian in front of me, wondering what happens to the person inside when the outside changes so dramatically.

I once heard a woman speak about the first time she “lost” her face in the mirror.

I’ve heard many old people say they still feel 30 on the inside and are shocked by their elderly bodies.

I have a friend in her 60s – a vibrant, charismatic woman – who says the only part that’s hard about getting older is that she feels invisible. “No one looks at me anymore,” she says.

Here’s the cultural dichotomy about age:

Young is beautiful. Young is relevant. Young is sexy. But not too young. Too young is insignificant, immature and can’t possibly know what it wants.  

There is an idealized sweet spot for women, a Goldilocks “just right” age window - old enough to be taken seriously but young enough to be “beautiful.” It is, at the most, a 10-year window.

In a life that might be 80-90 years long, women get a 10-year window of cultural acceptance. (Good luck ladies! Enjoy it while you can! And maybe tone your ass, sculpt your eyebrows and lose 10 pounds so you can maximize your time!)

When our time is “up” we have two choices: work to stay in the window or roam into the no-man’s-land of female aging where all the shriveling, drying and withering happens.

So how do we overcome the socialized pressure to look young?

We desperately need a third choice.

America’s Obsession with Staying Young

I see a women’s neck skin start to crepe and think how sad. (“The neck is the first to go!”)

We are told aging is bad, something to avoid at all costs. As if it’s a character flaw, proof we don’t care enough to prevent it from happening.

Buy this! Douse yourself with that! Serums! Elixirs! Pudding-thick cream! Rub it, scrub it, smooth it. Don’t smile! Don’t frown! FIGHT IT.

Seriously, who made aging the villain? Isn’t biology kind of a weird enemy to have? It’s always going to win.

But maybe the nemesis is irrelevant with so much money on the line. In 2021, the global anti-aging market was valued at 62 billion dollars. It’s expected to reach 93 billion by 2027 (Statistica, 2024).  

What a set-up this is for women. We feel unattractive, unworthy or irrelevant when we cannot hold onto something that, by definition and design, is impermanent. Society is idiotic about these things. We don’t need to be, too.

We are made to age. It has been happening since the second we were born. I refuse to feel badly about something I was made for.

Breaking the Age Obsession

Still. I could really use some role models.

Our culture doesn’t give us many role models for joyful aging. Images of thriving, vibrant, sexually active women in their 50s, 60s and above are rarely found in mainstream media.

It leaves me, nearing the end of my 40s, shouting to the world, “Tell me it’s okay to age!”

Instead, I see medical aesthetics practices cropping up as frequently as weed dispensaries. Botox! Fillers! Lasers! Microneedling! Choose from our expensive menu of futile postponement.

Why are women supposed to look younger than they are? Isn’t aging the point of living day after day, year after year? Isn’t it a celebration of a continued life?

Why are we trading the expressiveness of our faces for some borrowed time in the contrived window society made for us?

We’ll feel good if we look good, is the mantra. But that’s only true because we feel good when we align with socialized expectations. Which doesn’t make us whole or worthy but merely compliant and accepted.

We feel good by being who we are.

We cannot single handedly shift socialized beauty standards. But every woman who dares to see her unique beauty, to own her age, to take up space and love herself as she is, is part of this sea change.

If we want to navigate a path that doesn’t chuck us off the menopause cliff, we are going to have to do it ourselves.

The Freedom of Allowing Ourselves to Age

Okay, back to my friend and the freedom-ish thing I saw.

I wasn’t on drugs, and I was looking with my regular eyes. Except maybe not the eye part. Because this thing keeps happening to my eyes as I decondition myself.

My filter is changing and, with it, my perspective. The more I call out my conditioning, the more I can see behind it.

What I saw in my friend’s face wasn’t what I had been taught. It was something much, much more real.

And I knew it was because instead living in my mind, the knowing was alive in my body.

The sadness and loss of what had been evaporated and I saw the exquisite beauty of what was occurring right now.

Her skin had loosened not in defeat but in ease. There was no need to hold on so tight. No need to keep it all together. No need to work so hard.

There was more room between her cells, and this wasn’t a failure but a triumph. Something bestowed to those who had earned it. A new space from which her light could shine through.

Suddenly smooth skin seemed banal and unoriginal. Her skin was marked and etched, designed by life itself, unique to her journey - her hurts, her triumphs, her relentless, unapologetic transformation. It is a one-of-a-kind work of art.

There was nothing lost here, only gained.

Watching her face with a newfound reverence, I felt my own skin sigh as it eased away from my bones, finally able to relax. Finally allowed to just be.

And for the first time, I let it. What a relief.

Why would I ever feel badly that my mouth is bracketed by parentheses because of too much smiling?

My life lives on my face. As does my pain, my anger, my joy, my worry, my bravery, my delight. As does the lost sleep nursing babies, worrying about middle-schoolers or waking early for solitude. Skin kissed by those I love, warmed by sun, cleaned by wind. Millions and millions of emotions and expressions have shaped the face I wear today.

And if I’m lucky many millions more will shape my future face. I am real and raw and alive. Scars, wrinkles, lines, eye bags – it’s all proof that I have lived.

I like to wear make-up sometimes. I also like to go out without it, to let myself look exactly as I do and to be seen as that.

My daughter said to me the other day, “You look tired, Mom.” (People often say this to me when I don’t wear make-up.)

I replied, “No, honey. I’m just aging. The skin around my eyes looks different.” And this felt like a neutral truth, not something to be ashamed of.

I’d love for society to banish ageism but I’m not waiting around for that.

Liberation is not waiting for someone else to free us of our bonds.

Liberation is giving ourselves permission to choose how we think and what we believe.  

Liberation is letting ourselves see and own the sacredness of ourselves at each stage of our lives.

Liberation is deciding our bodies – our skin, weight, appearance and worth – are no longer for sale.

After all, what is more beautiful than something in its true form?