The other day I was chatting to my friend K about dating.
"What age man would you consider?" she asked me.
"I don't know," I said. "I guess up to fifty... fifty two?"
Later on K confessed to me that she had thought that was really old. "Until," she said, "my fifty-one year old husband wandered into view."
K, like me, is forty-five.
Yesterday, my friends J and J came to visit me. J (the female) is forty-five. J (the male) is fifty. I know he is fifty because I was at his birthday party. But I have known J ever since he was in his mid-twenties. And whilst I don't necessarily still think of him as twenty-six (even I can perceive the difference in his hair), I cannot possibly comprehend him as being fifty. He will always be hovering in his thirties to me.
I'm not sure what age I see myself being, but it's certainly not forty-five. I know that I don't feel stuck in my twenties, because being around twenty-something's makes me feel about one hundred. But the word 'fifty' seems utterly preposterous, an age I can't even begin to fathom.
My parents, who are actually 69 and 70, are, in my head, around 36 and 37. Now this is odd, because that would place me at around 12. And I know I'm not 12. My eldest child is 14, so my being 12 would involve a level of time travel I can't quite wrap my head around.
Even more confusingly, I'm pretty sure I see myself as somewhere in my mid-30's. And how this works when my parents are the same age is a bit beyond me.
Now, this has nothing to do with maturity or mental age. Believe me, I have lived a thousand lives in my 45 years. Sometimes I feel far, far older than my age. At other times, I feel as naïve as a teenager. That is normal, I think. I suspect I'll feel that way till I die.
But I do believe we freeze frame ourselves somewhere in the middle of our lives. I believe that life moves quicker than our brains, and that it takes us a while to catch up. Perhaps when I'm 60, I'll feel 45. Perhaps when I'm 70, I'll feel 52.
For now, I am the same age as my parents. And that's not a bad age to be.
How old do you feel?