MENOPAUSE : ON BEING YOUNG … OR NOT

‘The worst thing about facing up to age is going into shops and seeing things like leather jackets and jeans by designers like Armani, Versace and Venluri and knowing now that I can afford them I am too old to wear them. True fashion is for guys in their twenties.’

Michael, forty-five.

Until the male-menopause strikes few men are accurately aware of their age or aware of the true process of getting old. Or how they look. They see aging in others perhaps but not in themselves. In their eyes although they spot the occasional greying hairs and the morning-after baggy eyes, they see themselves as still around thirty and never remotely consider themselves like the middle-aged people they see in stores, hailing taxis or sitting placidly in airport lounges. Never.

So the moment a person refers to their correct age as being old or compares ages in the office or, at a party, attractive company in its twenties talks about forty as being old, it comes as something of a shock.

*75/153/1*