‘You’re probably just having a midlife crisis,’ says Scarlett Johansson to Bill Murray in Lost in Translation (2003). ‘Did you buy a Porsche yet?’ Murray was 52 when he played the fading actor having an intense yet chaste emotional affair with a woman half his age. My husband turns 50 this month and, apart from expressing a wish to go to the National Gallery and stand in front of ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ (the ageing, obsolete warship being towed away for scrap, etc, etc), is managing not to be too boring about it.
Yes, he’s buying a new car, but it certainly isn’t a Porsche. It’s an electric BMW iX3 (‘soulless’ and ‘functional’, according to Tanya Gold of this parish) because we need a more reliable family car than my knackered old Discovery.
The cost of living being what it is, divorce, like school fees and skiing holidays, is now for the super-rich
The classic midlife crisis used to be the preserve of men and usually involved the purchase of a ludicrous car and trading in their wife for a younger model, often a secretary. But when did you last hear of a chap taking leave of his senses in such a clichéd way? There have been a couple of divorces in our wider friendship groups, but they happened years ago, before children, because the pair just weren’t compatible.
Today we have the ‘walkaway wife’; the woman who hits her forties and decides she’s had enough. But I don’t know any myself. The cost of living being what it is, divorce, like school fees and skiing holidays, is now for the super-rich.
Most of my girlfriends, like me, got married in their thirties and continued having babies into their forties. When you’ve been dragged off the dance floor by your flatmates in Fabric at 7 a.m. as many times as I have, there’s absolutely no urge to relive your misspent youth. Besides, my back is screaming at the thought of being upright for that long. (My back hurts most of the time, but then, a few crashing falls from horses are the price you pay for a lifetime of getting your kicks galloping across country.) I know that I’m technically ‘middle-aged’, in that I’m probably past the mid-point of my life. But ‘middle-aged’ – or ‘midlife’ as it seems to be called now – bears no relation to that of my parents’ generation.
For boomers, the scrap heap for women was 40, slightly older for men. I’ve been horrified, on rereading a lot of Jilly Cooper since her death, at what was considered ‘old’ in the 1980s. Declan O’Hara of Rivals – whom I’d thought of as a silver fox when I first read it in my teens – is only about 42.
But they did things differently then. My mother had me at 27 and the youngest of my three siblings at 34. I got married at 34. You’d have had to bundle me away from Fabric in a straitjacket to make me do it any earlier.
Having children later keeps you younger, I think. Thanks to my six-year-old daughter, I’ve had to learn a lot of Dua Lipa dance routines and I know plenty about KPop Demon Hunters.
We look a helluva lot younger, too. John Thaw and Dennis Waterman were 32 and 26 respectively when The Sweeney aired in 1975. Look at the state of them! They resemble the senior staff of an inner-city comp that’s just had a damning Ofsted report. Today you’ll find men of my husband’s vintage caning it at CrossFit while their wives do Pilates and weight-bearing exercises. We all know the benefits of drinking water and SPF 30 moisturiser. Women don’t hack off their hair when they reach a certain age or do a home-dye job – both horribly ageing. Instead, we’ll sit in the hairdresser’s chair for three hours on our laptops while any tiresome grey hairs are covered by a skilful balayage.
Nora Ephron, in the brilliant title essay of her 2006 collection I Feel Bad About My Neck, wrote: ‘Sometimes I go out to lunch with my girlfriends… and we’re all wearing scarves, like Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond.’ Not any more – there’s neck Botox for that. With low lighting and the judicious application of Charlotte Tilbury make-up, an awful lot of women well into their forties can pass for about 38.
And if you’re perimenopausal (ghastly term: I prefer ‘cougar puberty’), then you can get a private prescription for HRT. But it’s to be used with caution, as it has the remarkable effect of making husbands less annoying. Don’t be like the friend who found herself, aged 46, sobbing and chain-smoking outside a branch of Superdrug, psyching herself up to go in and buy a pregnancy test.
‘I haven’t got time for a midlife crisis,’ sighs my husband, when I tell him I’m writing this piece. And I’m fairly confident I’m not going to be replaced with a younger model: he works in fintech, after all, which is great if you’re into neurodivergent men, less good for hot female co-workers.
My (very minor) midlife crisis involves going to the Maria Tash counter at Liberty when I’m in town and having an earlobe pierced with another expensive diamond chip. I’m also flirting with the idea of a tiny tattoo. Age, as the R&B singer Aaliyah once sang, ain’t nothing but a number. Yes, she was 15 at the time and illegally married to the 27-year-old seriously bad hat R Kelly, but please don’t spoil my narrative. Because I’m just getting started.
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