by Santa Montefiore, guest blogger

I have just turned 40, thus stepping tentatively into the ‘Me Decade’.  That might sound a bit odd; after all, 40 is a scary number.  It brings to mind lined faces, mutton dressed as lamb, and the final lap before 50 catapults us through the finish line.  However, after looking around my contemporaries, I’ve decided to label the 40s the Me Decade.  In our teens we pleased our parents; in our twenties we were too unsure to please anyone; in our thirties we pleased our husbands and children; now we’re pleasing ourselves.  It’s our time.  We are at the height of our powers.  We know who we are.  We are confident in voicing our opinions.  We are sure about what clothes suit us, having swapped fashion for style, and by now we have got the hair right.   Think Princess Diana the year she died; she had never looked better.

Along with this newfound confidence, 40 also brings a sense of urgency, a need to feel attractive as a woman and experience all that being attractive brings with it, before we hand the baton off to our daughters. I don’t define myself by what men think of me, but it has crossed my mind that one man might say to another: “I sat next to a hot forty year old last night.” Is he going to say: “I sat next to a hot 50 year old”? He might, but am I going to be that 50-year-old?  What will time do to me in the next ten years?  So, we have just a little more time to be whistled at in the street; in fact, a few of my friends have already lamented the lack of admiration, even from lusty builders on scaffolding twenty feet up!  We have to work at looking good.  We make regular trips to the gym and appointments at the hair salon and beautician, and many have succumbed to botox and fillers.  We’re holding back the superficial evidence of time, but gone is our youth and our sense of immortality. We are sliding into the second half (if we are lucky to live that long), and we are aware, as never before, of how precious our lives are.

Most of us by now are settled into marriages, happy or unhappy, and the children are big enough to be at full-time school.  Husbands are busy at work. Wives are juggling office and home and finding it increasingly stressful to ‘have it all’.  A husband’s admiration is rarely felt and often not expressed at all.  That doesn’t mean marriages are void of love, just that sometimes love is so familiar it is overlooked.  We all take each other for granted; that’s human nature.  But the electric frisson of sexual excitement felt in the early years of courtship and marriage is gone, never to be rekindled, because it was lit by novelty.  Husbands and wives simply know each other too well.

Step into the picture a handsome, flirtatious man who looks at you as if you’re the most beautiful woman in the room and listens, enraptured, to everything you have to say.  A man who laughs at your jokes and makes you feel young again, and sexy.  A man who can touch your hand and send a delicious tremor through your entire body.  Each of us has hidden corners of personality that never see the light. I don’t know how courageous I would be in war, for example. That corner remains dark, and the corner that once felt young, mischievous and flirty hasn’t seen the light for so long even the memory’s grown cold.  What woman wouldn’t bask in the light illuminating that abandoned recess once again?

But is it possible to enjoy the light without getting too close to the sun?  These days, with modern technology, it’s very easy to indulge in email and text flirtations, and there’s nothing inherently wrong in that.  Admiration makes a woman feel good about herself, and surely, in her forties, it’s fair to indulge in a little selfish fun?  It’s only wrong if it’s allowed to go too far.  We’ve all seen it happen. I wonder whether there’s a moment, before it gets out of hand, when a woman is able to recognise the danger and walk away?  When she is able to appreciate that the attraction is simply a reflection of her need for validation.   Surely, before she’s in too deep, she can glimpse the wreckage of broken lives in her future and make the decision to do the right thing?

As an author I write about this subject all the time, and I receive many emails and letters from readers telling me their stories. It seems there is a point where a woman can be sensible and walk away, but rather like the cookie on the kitchen table, more often a woman is unable to resist it.  I suppose there’s always a chance no one will find out, and then there’s the delusion that it is a game she can quit at any time - a moment of fun before time robs her of her allure.

The Me Decade is a dangerous decade for a woman, a minefield of temptation, made more treacherous by her sense of transience and her increasingly fragile ego.  Of course, our limitations are imposed upon us as much by our mindset as by nature.  There are women in their 50s and 60s who look and feel fantastic and probably inspire a whole chorus of whistles every time they walk past a building site, but one wonders: will I be lucky enough to be numbered among them?

I think happy people are those who accept themselves the way they are. They don’t crave what they can’t have, or regret what they have lost. They live in the moment and enjoy it for what it is, and they derive pleasure from the joy they give to others.  Given the choice, I’d rather be one of them…but as a writer I am compelled to ask myself the question, what if?

Buy: The Perfect Happiness: A Novel

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Categories:

Guest Blogger, M-O

Tags:

40s, botox, contemporaries, finish line, immortality, me decade, mutton dressed as lamb, newfound confidence, Princess Diana, Santa Montefiore, sense of urgency, superficial evidence