My husband and I stayed up last night to watch “Chloe“, a movie.with Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson. The movie was pretty bad, with a big cheesiness quotient, but the premise was interesting. In a nutshell, a beautiful late-40ish doctor (Moore) suspects her handsome and flirtatious husband (Neeson) is having an affair. Her fear leads to a series of disastrous events and is, in the end, unfounded.
No, I haven’t changed the theme of the blog to moviereviews.com. There’s a point here. Despite the obvious moral of the story, the one that stood out for me was about women’s unwarranted fear that as they age they become undesirable.
I’m not naive. I know men are usually attracted to younger women. I felt this acutely just last week. I was at a huge retreat with hundreds of clients, and I was, while not among the oldest, certainly not among the youngest set of women. The upshot was that I felt I had to work that much harder to appear hip and, frankly, hot.
Then I began to wonder whether those we’re trying to attract — our husbands, potential mates, whomever — can sense and are repelled by our nervousness about growing old. And what a shame that would be because our fear may be more paranoia than reality! Case in point, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband still think she’s so gorgeous at age 92 that he wants to plastinate her body before she dies! (Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband wants to plastinate wife’s body) And as the Julianne Moore character learned, her husband may have been a flirt and work obsessed, but he never cheated on nor lost his attraction to her.
We’re all human, and I don’t believe that we’ll ever truly let go of our fear of aging. And I, for one, am not going to give up trying to keep myself looking as beautiful as possible (well, at least as much as my lazy ass will allow). But maybe if we let go of the worry a bit, we’ll not only be happier but MORE attractive as well.