There is a magazine in my dermatologist's waiting room called something like Vibrant! — exclamation point included, because the publisher does not trust you to be excited on your own. On the cover is a woman who is allegedly 68 but whose neck disagrees. She is wearing a linen tunic, holding a green smoothie, and laughing at something nobody has said. The cover line: Feel Sexy at Any Age!
I sat with that magazine for forty minutes last Tuesday and I had thoughts.
The whole genre of writing aimed at women my age about our attractiveness is written, as far as I can tell, by 28-year-old copywriters who have decided we need cheering up about a problem we did not know we had. The tone is somewhere between a wellness retreat and a hostage video. Every model is wearing a chunky necklace from a brand that doesn't exist outside of editorials. And the message, sanded down, is always: You are not what you were, but with sufficient effort and the right under-eye cream, you can pretend.
Here's the thing. I am 72. I have been married to Frank Sinclair for 47 years. I have opinions, I have earned them, and I would like to lodge a formal complaint with the people who write about women like me.
The Audience Changed, Not the Subject
What the magazines never get right is that the question isn't whether women in their seventies feel attractive. It's to whom.
Frank has known me since I was 24. He saw me give birth to Tom in 1979 in a Wilmette hospital room with the kind of lighting that should be illegal. He has watched me ugly-cry at Terms of Endearment and he has watched me file my taxes. There is no version of me he hasn't seen. So when he looked at me across the kitchen one Tuesday in May, I was barefoot, holding a coffee cup, wearing a robe I've had since the Obama administration, and his face did the small thing it does, the one I still notice after all this time. I felt something I do not feel at the Walgreens checkout, and that's the point.
The Walgreens checkout is a stranger market. The man behind the counter is 23 and thinking about his shift change. Whatever I'm projecting there, I am projecting into a void. But the kitchen at 7:14 AM with the man who has loaded my dishwasher for almost five decades is a different transaction entirely. That is intimacy. And the magazines never write about intimacy, because intimacy doesn't sell serums.
What I'm trying to say is: my appeal didn't go anywhere. The audience for it narrowed. And the narrower it got, the better it worked, because Frank's opinion is the only one with any weight at this point, and Frank's opinion has not wavered.
My Friend Patsy, Who Is on Bumble
I need to be careful here, because not every woman my age is in a 47-year marriage to a man who finds her in the kitchen at 7:14 AM. My friend Patsy was widowed three years ago. She is 71, she lives in a townhouse two streets over, and she is, as of last spring, on three dating apps.
Patsy's situation is not my situation. She has to figure out, at 71, how to feel attractive as a transaction with strangers — how to write a profile, what photos to use, whether to mention that she has bunions or just lead with the cruise photos. She has come back from coffee with men who said "you look great for your age" and meant it as a compliment, and she has had to decide whether to slap them or thank them. (She thanked one, slapped none, regrets the thanking.)
I mention Patsy because the conversation tends to flatten into one woman with one situation, and there are several. The long marriage. The widow on the apps. The woman who never married and is perfectly content to feel attractive to herself in the mirror after a haircut. The divorcée who has been single since 1998 and finds the whole subject exhausting and would like to talk about something else.
What we have in common is that we have all stopped performing for the general public. The general public stopped looking. Or rather, the general public looked through us, which is a separate experience that women my age will recognize and that I am not going to pretend doesn't sting sometimes. But the upside of being looked through is that you finally get to dress for yourself. Patsy wears red lipstick to the grocery store because she likes red lipstick. Not for the produce manager. For Patsy.
The Dermatologist's Offer
Last year my dermatologist, who is perfectly nice and approximately the same age as my son Patrick, told me that with three procedures and a maintenance schedule, I could "look 60."
I sat there in the paper gown and I thought about it.
I did not think about it for very long. I thought: Why would I want to look 60? Sixty was a hard year. Frank's mother died in 2013. The grandchildren were small and exhausting. I was still working part-time at the tutoring center and I had not yet figured out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Sixty was not a good look on me, emotionally or any other way. Why would I pay $4,800 to revisit it?
I told her, politely, that I'd think about it, which is what women of my generation say when we mean absolutely not. She nodded and moved on to discussing my sunscreen.
Here's what nobody tells you about the procedures conversation. The question is never really do you want to look younger. The question is what are you trying to fix, and who told you it was broken. Most of the time the answer to the second question is a magazine called Vibrant! in a waiting room. And once you notice that, the spell breaks.
I don't fault women who get the procedures. Some of them love the results. My friend Marilyn had a little something done around her eyes and she's thrilled. But I'd rather spend the $4,800 on a week in Santa Fe with Frank, and I'd rather have my actual face when I get there.
What I Spend Money On Instead
Which is not to say I have given up. Giving up is a different thing. Giving up looks like wearing the same fleece for nine days. I have not given up. I have refined.
My current refinements, for the record:
One tube of Charlotte Tilbury Pillow Talk lipstick, which costs $36 and is the only lipstick I own that doesn't bleed into the lines around my mouth. (Yes, those lines. They are there. We're not pretending.) I bought it after watching a YouTube video by a woman who claimed it was universally flattering, which is the kind of phrase I would normally mock, but in this one case it turned out to be true.
A pair of trousers from Eileen Fisher that fit. I know this is funny — Eileen Fisher is the punchline of every joke about women my age dressing like wealthy ghosts — but the trousers fit, they don't cut me anywhere, and when I put them on I look like a woman who has decided things. I'll take it.
A haircut every six weeks from Maria at Desert Glow that costs more than I would like to admit and is worth every penny. Maria knows my hair. Maria knows my face. Maria does not try to talk me out of the gray, which I stopped fighting in 2018 and have never regretted. Frank told me he liked the gray. Frank has never, in 47 years, lied about my appearance. He is too tired.
Good sheets. Egyptian cotton, 500 thread count, ordered during a sale. Feeling good in your own skin at 72 includes the question of whether you wake up rested, and you do not wake up rested on the wrong sheets. The magazines will not tell you this. I am telling you.
The Parts I've Made Peace With
For the sake of full disclosure, here is what I have stopped fighting.
The skin on the back of my hands, which now does that thing where it stays in a little tent if you pinch it. I read once that it's called "tenting" and I wish I hadn't. Sometimes when I am bored I pinch my hand and watch the skin stay up for a beat too long, and then I think about my mother Dorothy, who had the same hands, and I think well, here we are, Mom, and I move on.
The area under my upper arms, which has its own opinions when I wave goodbye. Sleeveless dresses are a discussion I have stopped having with myself. Three-quarter sleeves exist. Three-quarter sleeves are fine. Three-quarter sleeves do not weigh in on the goodbye.
The softer middle. I had three children. The middle never went all the way back even when I was 35. At 72 it is a permanent installation, and after some negotiation we have reached an agreement. I will not starve it into submission, and it will not embarrass me at the pool.
The gray. Already covered. The gray won. The gray was always going to win.
The specific way my face looks when I am tired, which is more tired than it used to look, which means I have to be careful about when I schedule lunches with my book club because Diane notices everything.
Here's the thing nobody warns you about. Peace with your body at 72 is not the same as loving your body. It is more like the way you feel about a house you've lived in for forty years. You know which floorboards creak. You know which window leaks in February. You are not going to renovate. You are going to live there until the end, and you've decided it's a good house.
What Actually Changes (and What Doesn't)
Sex after menopause, since we are being honest, does not stop. It changes. It involves more communication, more lubrication, more patience, and a willingness on both sides to be slightly amused at the logistics. I am not going to say more than that because Frank reads my articles and there are limits. But I will say that the women my age who don't talk about this should, and the magazines should let them, and they don't.
What doesn't change: the way you feel when someone who loves you says you look nice and you can tell they mean it. The way it feels to put on a piece of clothing that fits. The particular satisfaction of laughing so hard at something with your husband or your best friend that you have to sit down. The pleasure of a home you've made your own — your books, your lamp, your couch in exactly the right place.
Those are the things. The serums are not the things. The Charlotte Tilbury lipstick is a nice thing, but it is not the thing.
What I Would Tell the Copywriter
If the 28-year-old at Vibrant! called me up and asked me what to put on the next cover, I would say this. Stop telling women in their seventies that they can still be attractive, as though it's a surprise, as though we needed your reassurance. We didn't. We're fine.
Tell them instead that the work shifts inward. Tell them that the audience narrows and the narrowing is a gift. Tell them that the lipstick is real and the procedures are optional and the man you've been married to for 47 years is the only review that matters. Tell them that the body changes and you make peace with it, the way you make peace with a long marriage or a stubborn lawn. Tell them that the women who look the best at 72 are the women who stopped trying to look 60.
And then, for the love of God, drop the exclamation point.
Frank is calling from the patio. He wants to know if I want a glass of wine before dinner. I'm going to put on the trousers that fit and the lipstick that doesn't bleed and join him outside, where the desert light at 6 PM does something to your face that no serum can match, and where the only person looking at me is the one whose opinion I have been collecting since 1978.
That'll do.
