Live Your Life Be Free!

I have been thinking lately about aging and beauty. Yes, both men and women obsess about youth and beauty… and always have… but it is amazing how by chance beauty happens to be and how being young and beautiful doesn’t make sense. 

I am in my 30s now, and still get some attention. In fact, I was out on a date recently and some unknown drunk guy actually gave the guy I was with a high five. My date was pretty surprised by that, but to me, it was just the skirt, the heels and the guy was probably doing all kinds of crazy stuff that night – complimentary but no big deal. I’m just an average girl, made above average by dressing up for an evening out. And that night I definitely preferred to be with my kind and thoughtful date who liked me for me than the guy who was giving me the street attention.

So, I don’t have too many insecurities in that area… but still, in my 30s, I have noticed my guy friends’ and colleagues’ fascination with girls in their teens and early 20s and I have a strange nostalgia about that period in my life being over. 

Thinking back to my own experiences at 13-15, I was not at all pretty. Braces, zits, not much form to my body… nothing special whatsoever (so I thought at the time). I remember relying on sense of humor and conversation to make up for it, and even when my friends and I used to cross the Ontario/Quebec border at the too-young-age of 15 to go to the Hull bars, it was always my friends who were getting hit on while they treated me as though I was invisible.

Then suddenly somewhere between 15-16, everything happened at once and I became visible. The braces were gone, I got a new hair style, my zits cleared up I started to get some shape… and suddenly, everywhere I went there were guys whistling at me, wanting to talk to me and watching me. It was bizarre. I started to wear miniskirts (at times they looked like belts) and minishorts – increasing the phenomena. I knew I didn’t really ‘deserve’ to have this attention, it wasn’t an achievement like high marks in school… but it was interesting. I had no idea about the effect I was having on much older men. It was more of a fun thing for attention from guys my own age.

Things kept escalating. When I was about 20, there was one random marriage proposal from an older man I hardly knew and another guy in his late-20s who lived in his car for a few weeks hoping I would join him on a 6-week holiday. I also remember a guy in a BMW who used to follow me around the winter streets of Ottawa asking me to join him for a ride and dinner (which was tempting – you would understand if you have ever been in Ottawa in January).  The whole thing was so strange, and it didn’t really make sense.   

I was in some sort of center of attention, but I felt I didn’t deserve it. It was a very confusing part of my life – I had no idea what I was doing with myself, and I was not confident. I had difficulty in expressing myself verbally, so people would think I was unintelligent due to that and other stereotypes about young women, and it would frustrate me that people were not taking me seriously. I was also frustrated by being poor all the time, and for a long period I could only afford to make pea soup and rice for my dinners… but knew I could choose to go on a date and dine at one of the nicest restaurants in town. And yeah, sometimes I did choose to go out instead of stay in. 

So – back then I longed to be older… to be able to express myself and have my ideas heard, to have financial independence, to have my own car and place and to make some sort of impact. Little did I know that once I attained those things I would long to be younger again… and feel strangely nostalgic for that attention that didn’t make sense.

But loving youth is not something unique to our culture or new. I guess this is the truth about youth and beauty -  men continually long for younger women, older women long to be the younger women again, and younger women don’t really know what the heck is going on… until they get older.