u/SoftlikeaNeedle

Anything else is just a scam and setting them up for a lifetime of misery. They develop stress and health issues that just feed the system we are currently living through. Most the people I know from college who didn’t have this kind of support from parents, you could tell. They weren’t happy with their lives and they blamed society. When really, their parents should have thought about how to better support them. Instead of just throwing them out into the cruel world without help.

I said what I said. Because think about what “aging well” actually requires: consistent sleep, nutritious food, exercise, low chronic stress, preventative healthcare, time to recover, sun protection, and enough money and support to maintain those things. Now compare that to the lifestyle many women are socially expected to tolerate—pregnancy, childbirth, interrupted sleep, childcare, domestic labor, career demands, and very little recovery time.

We treat the consequences as inevitable female aging instead of asking how much of it is actually shaped by lifestyle, environment, and lack of support.

If it were considered normal for mothers to have real domestic support—a cleaner (or for gods sake an adequate household-skilled man as a partner) childcare, prepared nutritious food, adequate maternity recovery, time to exercise and sleep—what we think of as “normal aging” in women might look very different.

All in all, the men who tell women they “hit the wall” should spend more time studying the science of aging and figuring out how we can help more women age well instead of perpetuating a myth that creates unnecessary stress and anxiety.

Aging is not one fixed, definitive process that happens identically to everyone.

There are well-studied, identifiable factors that influence how quickly we age and how aging shows up in the body, and many of those factors are targetable and thus modifiable.

Maybe instead of convincing women that their value has an expiration date, we should be giving them the knowledge, resources, and support to preserve their health for as long as possible.