Recent studies indicate there are some recent studies

By Ed Goldman

Feeling older than your chronological age is associated with a higher likelihood of dementia, frailty, stroke and heart diseases, according to recent research by scientists and academics studying links between psychology and health,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

If this is true, I’d have contracted Alzheimer’s disease at birth, since my mom once said, presumably as a compliment to my seeming maturity as a toddler, “You were born 35 years old.” Had I chosen to believe her I’d have thought I was 50 when I entered kindergarten. And arrived at my high school prom by ambulance. Or hearse.

But my mom was largely correct. When I was a kid I often longed to be older—out of school, with my own car and apartment, a daily newspaper column and, if it helped complete the picture, even mild sciatica symptoms.

The WSJ article’s thesis, of course, was that feeling younger might make you healthier. Or, as it states in the opening paragraph, “Is it true that you’re only as old as you feel?”

Ironically, the week this story appeared, there was a fairly heated argument among some Facebook Friends in response to an ad that appeared on behalf of Just For Men, which has a line of hair dyes. Every comment was a variation of “I like my gray hair!” and “I earned every one of these gray hairs!” These came from guys, needless to add.

It took me by surprise because in my decades of interviewing people I started noticing a shift in how men and women handled the more visible vicissitudes of aging.

Most women have always worn makeup and/or dyed their hair, which I understood as partial vanity, partial recreation. Many little girls love to play “dress-up.” How sweet to still be doing it when your daily cares have evolved from making mudpies to making a living. 

Then, at a lunch interview about 30 years ago it struck me that the man I was talking to had not only dyed his hair, eyebrows and mustache to an almost reflective shade of onyx, but also sported a light blue line of shadow above his already aqua eyes. He probably looked great in photos—just as heavily made-up actors and models can—but across a table at a busy restaurant he looked like a caricature of himself or a wannabe guest on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” (Candor dictates my sharing that RuPaul’s show actually began airing in 2009, making the foregoing an anachronistic gag. I plan to travel back in time to correct it or issue a formal apology.)

The icing on the cake was when the tinted fellow asked me to not reveal his age in the column for which I was interviewing him. He was only about five years older than I was (he probably still is);  I was in my early 40s (I no longer am).

It was the first time a guy had made that request. Until then, some of the women I interviewed had asked me not to write how old they were. But it was (and in most cases, remains) a common reporting practice to include a subject’s age. It’s usually a valid piece of datum since it helps the reader get a fuller picture of the interviewee’s accumulated wisdom or lack thereof.

Yet at about this same time, women stopped making the ask, sometimes even insisting that I include their ages in my articles. They were proud of what they’d achieved in their lives and I think correctly surmised that their authenticity could prove downright inspirational for the next generations of women.

These days, I’ve noticed that more than a few men I interview dye their hair. For some reason, they’ve been convinced that going a light shade of vermilion is preferable to letting nature provide them with a salt-and-pepper look (which is my own look, by the way—though the salt started dominating the pepper a few years ago).