What They're Actually Saying When They Talk About Expiry Dates

There is a kind of accounting that happens around women and age.

It isn’t always said out loud. It rarely needs to be. It lives in the subtext of certain conversations, in the small recalibration when a woman’s age comes up somewhere a man’s never would. It lives in the compliments: still beautiful, still sharp, still relevant. The still does all the work.

And it lives in an arithmetic some people run almost automatically when they look at a woman: where she falls on a scale she never agreed to be measured by.

Nobody has to say it directly. The framework communicates itself. A conversation shifts when certain numbers come up. A kind of interest flickers, and adjusts.

But the version that does the most damage isn’t the one other people carry. That one is easy to see, and easy to name.

It’s the one that moves in.

When a framework is present enough in the world around you, it gets inside. You absorb it the way you absorb other things you never chose: certain fears, certain reflexes, a way of walking into a room already checking whether you measure up. The idea that women have a peak. That desirability has a date stamped on it. That every year takes a little off the price. No woman invents that for herself. But hear it often enough and some part of you starts using it, before you’ve even decided whether it applies.

That’s how you end up apologizing for your age. Rounding it down. Describing yourself by what you still are, instead of simply by what you are. Shrinking slightly, before anyone has asked you to.

The turn, when it comes, is rarely a decision. It’s a moment of noticing. You catch yourself running the numbers on your own life, and for the first time you hear whose voice is doing the counting. It isn’t yours. It never was.

Seeing it doesn’t make it disappear overnight. But you can’t quite unsee it either.

What grows in its place is slower. A life built, piece by piece, that is actually yours. An understanding that only comes from living through things: from loss, from having things fall apart and working out, from the inside, how to put yourself back together. That understanding isn’t a consolation prize for getting older. It’s what lets you stay present in a hard conversation instead of defending yourself. Notice a pattern before it has finished playing out. Say what you need without apologizing for needing it.

Not everyone will value that. Anyone who measures a woman by a date isn’t really looking for a person. They’re looking for a surface, and a surface was never going to hold much.

The women I know who carry themselves with the most ease aren’t the ones who escaped the framework. They’re the ones who stopped consulting it. Not out of defiance, because defiance still keeps the framework as a reference point. More the way you stop checking a map once you know the territory. The map was never accurate anyway. It was drawn by people with an interest in how the territory was described.

I’m forty now. The arithmetic still runs, all around me.

The difference is that I can hear it now, and I know it was never mine.

This is KC — from Love & Life. 💜