Leave women alone

No one wants your unsolicited dating advice, and anyway, you're wrong

Permission to Grieve, an essay I published here last month, is undoubtedly the most vulnerable thing I’ve written this year. A raw and candid exploration of my feelings about turning 41, it resonated strongly with so many of you. And isn’t that why we consume art in the first place: to see a piece of ourselves reflected in another? To feel understood? To know, if even just briefly, that we aren’t alone?

And while I certainly did leave my heart on that page, there’s one thing I didn’t write: I am so tired of people speculating as to why I’m still single at my age.

I am so tired of people—usually men—telling me that it’s because:

I’m too intimidating
I’m too picky
I’m too confident
I’m too muscular
Am I on the apps?
Am I trying hard enough?
Maybe I should try harder (but not too hard just let it happen!!)
And maybe I should consider lowering my standards?

I am so tired of my mom telling me to be natural but maybe I should wear more makeup? Be approachable but don’t look desperate. And how can I expect anyone to talk to me if I’m reading a book at the bar?

I am so tired of this entire conversation and all of the ways it triggers my deepest, despairing, unspoken fears. Am I too old? Is it too late? Am I going to die alone? Doesn’t everyone?

Our society simply does not grant women the benefit of aging gracefully, or really aging at all, and my god is this an exhausting thing to navigate. It’s hard enough to process the implications of our own mortality—to mourn the loss of our youth on our own terms—without being constantly reminded that our eggs are rapidly becoming unviable and our desirability along with it.

I’ll never forget the time my dad casually told me why he won’t date women his age: because women over 40 are expired. I was 39 at the time.

How about y’all just leave women alone? Let us live. Let us thrive. Let us ripen and expand with the passing of time.

Stop suggesting how we might change ourselves and compromise our values in order to attract a partner. Stop insisting that we shrink and censor ourselves to fit some arbitrary mold. Stop giving us unsolicited advice about dating. Stop pushing the narrative that 40 is old and women over 40 lack appeal. Just stop. We didn’t ask for your opinion, we don’t need your input, and anyway—you’re wrong.

I’m in my prime and you can’t tell me otherwise. I’m sexier and wiser and more powerful at 41 than I was at 31. I’m more resilient, more spiritually conscious, more emotionally mature. I’m more in tune with my sexuality, more attuned to my body, more aligned with my desires. I know who I am and what I want and I won’t accept anything less than I deserve.

Women over 40 are sensational. You couldn’t pay me to go back to my 30s, let alone my 20s. The woman I am now is transcendent.

Maybe the real reason society is hellbent on discarding women in their 40s—especially the single ones—is they’re afraid of us. We’re past the point of caring about these standards, insusceptible to these lies. We’re fully engaged in our own worthiness, in possession of our own divinity. You can’t control us or diminish us. You have no power over us, and as far as the patriarchy is concerned, that just won’t do.

Hell, they should be scared.

A society built on oppressing women should fear the woman who cannot be contained. Who cannot be convinced to trade in her worth. The woman who has lived in her body long enough to own it. The woman whose value cannot be defined, whose force cannot be tamed.

Leave us alone. Let us be luminous. Let us know peace.

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