Older Women Get Lighter
older men get smaller. it isn’t age, it’s training — feelings outsourced early to mothers, then to wives. meaning was never out there.
I notice it as people age.
Older women often get lighter.
More social.
More alive.
Older men often get smaller.
Quieter.
Alone.
It isn’t age.
It’s training.
Many boys were never taught how to sit with emotion.
Jealousy.
Loss.
Fear.
Aging.
They were taught to compete.
To climb.
To win.
Feelings were outsourced early.
To mothers.
To teachers.
Later, to wives.
Someone else kept the temperature right.
Someone else translated the world.
That worked.
Until it didn’t.
When the regulator leaves through death, through divorce, through exhaustion— there is no inner toolkit.
Only anger.
Or silence.
“Get off my lawn”
isn’t cruelty.
It’s grief with no language.
Girls learned something else.
Not because it was fair.
Because it was required.
They learned to read rooms.
Deal with abuse Hold contradictions.
They didn’t want to.
They had to.
By the time they’re older, they’ve practiced loss.
They know how to rebuild.
Power is still coded as male.
Action.
Agency.
Reach.
So when a woman claims her full self, we call it masculine.
That tells you everything.
The ones who thrive are given both.
Permission to feel.
Permission to act.
That’s not gender.
That’s freedom.
Too many men outsource meaning early.
To women.
To work.
To achievement.
They trade inner life for performance.
Security for tenderness.
Capability for sex.
Money bends the spine.
Status fills the hours.
Toys get more expensive.
But nothing inside gets quieter.
Meaning was never out there.
It was never in her body, or the paycheck, or the win.
It was always inward.