“You have almost every opportunity,” says Barbara Becker Holstein, a psychologist with a private practice in Long Branch, N.J. “You’re young enough to be famous or start an organic farm and still have the muscle tone to work eight hours a day. You’re old enough to have wisdom but young enough that your parents are still alive so you have a generational experience. If you’re tired, you can ask the young man on the bus to get out of his seat for you. Or you can date the young man. The more I think about it, the more appealing it is.”
Holstein says all of the recent medical – and cosmetic — developments have also helped to give 50 a facelift.
“I really think 50 is the new 30 to 35,” she says. “For a woman, you can stay stylish and fit and maybe get your hair dyed or just do a little [cosmetic] tune-up and feel, ‘Wow, this is great.’ In terms of childbearing, you can basically say forget it or if you want a baby at 50 or 53, you can get your hormones juiced up and go for it.”
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I neither want my parents to still be alive nor to start an organic farm, even one that supposedly requires only “eight hours of work a day” instead of the far more likely 16+.
And I sure as hell don’t want to ride the goddam bus.
You may wish to date the young man, but the young man doesn’t really want to date you.
