I’m Not Losing Value with Age Whatsoever

I value myself SO much more after 35 than I did when I was emotionally and financially insecure, plus chock full of untreated mental health issues in my twenties.

It’s been a few days and that nuclear take about women over 35 being totally hopeless with respect to getting married is still going wild. Shani Silver’s fantastic rebuttal to it got me thinking.

Let’s get this straight: according to the US Census Bureau, women are expected to make it to 81.7 years and life expectancy for both men and women is only increasing overall.

But there is this entire force in the media and a cottage industry based on telling women that literally more than half their lives are going to be worthless.

Excuse me, do I have a price tag on my ass I wasn’t aware of?

Because if I do, then I announce with zero apologies that my price has only gone up over time. Assigning “market value” to a human being is a fucking stupid concept as it is, but if we must? Well, my value’s gone up at the same pace as NYC rent. Don’t get pissy because you can’t afford it, so you want to yammer about how it’s not actually worth it.

I’m a bad bitch who can do your taxes and discuss our arcane tax laws from a leftist perspective, craft video game narratives, care for amphibians, spend hours talking about underground music and subculture, and all with a totally filthy sense of humor. And I’ve only grown in mystic Frog Slut powers with age. I can unabashedly work what I have instead of agonizing over how I imagined I’d be the subject of locker room talk. And when I was actually the subject of it? It wasn’t about my stigmatized height and weight, tattoos, or how I didn’t look like an early 2000s porn star while naked. Turned out most of those guys were just upset I could knock them out like Floyd Mayweather in far too little time.

Funny, turns out the root of most of these problems — perceived and actual — is patriarchy holding men to standards just as ridiculous as the ones enforced on women, and feeding into insecurities. Which…just hurt all of us.

And don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to discount the ways single men get shamed. It’s not all James Bond type portrayals in the media we consume, Bill Dauterieve is probably more common. Browse left Twitter and you’ll see countless jokes at the expense of 40-something men about how he’s wearing an outfit that “has major divorced dad trying to bone a younger woman now energy”.

But the 30-Something Single Women Shaming Industrial Complex is not only more hellbent on making us ascribe to it, it has more institutional support. It strictly wants us to either fall into their stereotyped version of a single woman, settle for someone so we’re not alone, or spend scads of money on things like Botox, butt lifts, $500/month skincare regimens, and mindfulness workshops while we simultaneously get shamed for spending money on things that help us exist more comfortably in our skin and headspaces.

And I don’t put stock in this whole “losing value with age” thing.

We’re not Lip Service vinyl corsets from 2001 that got gummy and dull as the years went by, the wires conformed to our curves then decided to just go flaccid, doomed to peeling and shredding if we put them in the washing machine on the delicate cycle.

Age brings experience, wisdom, and not caring about the petty things. It’s realizing just HOW many clueless meatbags you are surrounded by, and that the people in your life who gave you hell like your parents, teachers, bosses, nosy Karens next door, or whatever were really just hung up on all the wrong things in life.

You’re more comfortable in your own meatsack. You decide how to present it to the world and how fluid you are with that. You can be set in your ways with this, or decide that life is short and it’s time to try something new, something riskier you wouldn’t have done when you were younger.

With age, you discover what you are and aren’t okay with both in bed and in life. What you would constitute as settling versus compromise. What you are willing to try, and what you do not want to entertain whatsoever.

That, dear froggy sluts, speaks to me of far higher value than being 25, clueless, insecure, broke, and being unsure what’s actually worth the risk with both jobs and men.

People also live their lives at different paces, and for many of us, we just weren’t ready to lock it down while we were supposedly “young and hot”. I was pressured to just settle down with the first guy who was halfway nice to me because I wouldn’t do any better. Something that frequently goes unsaid is that settling also isn’t about just settling for a person who’s not the right one, it’s about the type of relationship too! I settled for something that was barely even a functioning relationship, with an emotionally unavailable guy who wasn’t even worth agonizing over.

And these “barely a relationship” situations, also dubbed “situationships”, are so much more common today. It’s indicative of both Millennials and Zoomers exploring more options than our parents thought they had on the positive side of things, while the negative side portrays an utterly broken dating culture. While many people are discovering that monogamous and committed relationship isn’t for them, the flipside is that people — namely cishet women — who DO want that get short shrift.

I respect myself so much more at my age. I can vocalize my needs and wants now and be unafraid to, and do the chewing out if I’m told I’m needy for simply having needs.

The way we talk about age in this society is also completely whack.

Women of course get held to impossible standards, but look at how fast the narrative even shifted on Millennials in general. We were well into our thirties and the media still discussed us like we were college students getting our first jobs and figuring out what to do with our lives. Overnight, we became “geriatric”.

Get some age-diverse friends, I BEG YOU. My friends over 50 chuckle about how my current age is so young, and that I still have so much ahead of me. Life isn’t suddenly over after 35. All those things you see about those “30 Under 30” lists are mostly kids who had rich parents who didn’t abuse them, or some TV executive happened to see a viral tweet of theirs and turned it into a studio job.

In fact, I feel like I’m just getting STARTED. I should feel that way, given how my entire generation was told to wait and wait for things our entire twenties but now we’re suddenly too old to chase our dreams and act on our desires? Screw that with a rusty sewer pipe and no lube.

In a dating app context, perhaps some are too quick to write people off when we see that number on a screen. Since I refuse to use them, because it just sounds like an utterly miserable churn where you’re trying to force a connection where there isn’t any? I’m just speaking from an outsider’s perspective here. There’s much that can sound great about meeting someone this way — on paper. You just put your preferences out there and see what flies.

But people aren’t static, lives change, appearances change, even your own life plans and desires can change.

And if you don’t communicate these things, this totally cold and miserable approach to finding a partner won’t make it any better. I’m adamantly childfree and knew someone who also was. He spent five years with a woman he met from an app who wanted kids, and she left him when she realized he wouldn’t give her the marriage and kids she wanted. Two years later, he married the next woman he met from an app and wound up having kids with her. I still don’t know if this was out of genuine desire, social pressure, or simply never bothering to say “By the way, I don’t want kids!” It’s partly why I wear this status on my sleeve.

But when you’re just staring at someone’s age on a profile, it’s all too easy to write them off — especially if we want to think about men who chase younger women, and use it as this doom and gloom proclamation.

Because when you meet people through other online means or in real life without ever having any previous digital contact? IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY.

Attraction can’t be quantified. It’s purely a mind over matter thing. I’m supposedly everything those apps and data-fetishizing thinkpieces say are totally doomed. But I’ve been approached both online and offline with no regard as to what my actual age is. Even if being young-looking is an advantage, I’ve yet to have my age send a guy packing when I reveal it.

Sometimes these dalliances ensue in a date or two, sex, or digital courtship that doesn’t go anywhere. Still far more enjoyable than swiping like my life depends on it. Whether I do the approaching or they do, often there was a reason it didn’t progress even if he was a perfectly lovely person (sometimes he’s revealed NOT to be one).

But at my age, with the emotional and financial security I enjoy? I don’t feel pressured to make something meant to be short-lived into a commitment.

I’m unafraid to vocalize that I’d like a guy to raise some toads and lizards with and have an actual life together, but I also don’t want that with just anyone just so I can have someone to take with me to take to the Game Awards and go meet my parents. I have to see if we actually have fun together and if the lives we built will merge. I mean, my industry is pretty accepting of things, most of my family is dead, and my friends are geographically dispersed so I’m not trying to impress anyone here. If anything, as a single entrepreneur in a country with a convoluted tax system and no universal health coverage, I’d probably have more logistical difficulties with marriage. But that’s an essay for another time, and a bridge I will cross when and if I get there with the right man.

It’s because I value myself more with age that I can still desire a toad daddy, but also laugh at the dumbasses who think I should pair off with someone I have zero chemistry with or settle for another soul-deadeningly awful arrangement like the one I used to have. Why? So I can fill out a Bed Bath & Beyond wedding registry? I’m already setting one up just for me for when I move in 8 months!

If some guy takes one look at me and decides he doesn’t value any of that? I’m in a totally different market with no fucks to give. Just because my peers and I supposedly don’t have value in their market simply on account of age doesn’t mean we don’t have value period. I’ll still have men who are nothing like him at all who approach me or welcome my advances.

Even if my sex life is suddenly like Infrastructure Week, I also got so many other things happening and maybe these guys are just miffed that women can make them the side quest and no longer the endgame. And that’s just fabulous.