Five million years ago, in the ’90s, I was a young, gleefully slutty newspaper writer who basically made dating my profession. I pitched an adorable little dating-diaries column about a fictional character loosely based on me, but my editors told me it wouldn’t work.
Meanwhile, over in Britain, a young, gleefully slutty newspaper writer named Helen Fielding tried the same thing at The Independent. That column, titled Bridget Jones’s Diary, would become four bestselling books and three (now four!) movies, and burn the lexicon of “singletons,” “smug marrieds” and “stick insects” into the brains of Gen X women forever.
Now, with the release of “Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy,” Helen Fielding is a millionaire many times over. I am not, but here’s my adorable little column about it.
“Mad About The Boy” — which hits theatres on Valentine’s Day — follows Bridget, still played by Renée Zellweger, now 55, as she steps back onto the dating scene. She’s now (spoiler!) a widow and a single mom; RIP Mark Darcy. The boy in the title is 28-year-old Leo Woodall, noted TV boyfriend of “One Day” and “The White Lotus” heartthrob, who was all of four when the first Bridget Jones movie came out in 2001.
It’s right on time: Age-gap relationships featuring older women and younger men are having something of a cultural moment. Miranda July’s blockbuster novel “All Fours,” which centres on a 45-year-old woman’s sexual awakening and was dubbed “the first great perimenopausal novel” by the New York Times was received so rapturously that I wouldn’t advise borrowing a paper copy of it from the library.
There’s also ”Babygirl,” where Nicole Kidman’s She-E-O becomes sexually liberated via a kinky affair with her 20-something intern (call HR!)—but guess what, she still looks like Nicole Kidman. In “The Idea of You,” curator and single mom Anne Hathaway bags a boy-band star, but guess what, she still looks like Anne Hathaway.
It’s a relief that Bridget is still just … well, Bridget. She’s mousy, with messy hair and questionable fashion choices — though one notable difference in the latest film is that her weight, a central preoccupation of the earlier books and movies, isn’t mentioned. Now, instead of stumbling around London bars in ill-fitting skirts, Bridget is wearing penguin jammies to school drop-off amid the glamorous Mean Mommies — stick insects, every last one!
It was this utter averageness that helped turn wine-swilling, foul-mouthed, chain-smoking (that, too, is gone) Bridget into the icon she became. Legions of women saw themselves in her droll but painfully self-aware self-loathing, and her striving for self-improvement. We hated ourselves too! We shagged scoundrels like Daniel Cleaver too! We too answered our pre-call-display phones by announcing ourselves as “Wanton sex goddess,” only to discover it was our mothers on the other end!
But Bridget, despite all her faults, always seemed to have handsome men fighting over her. See? You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be perfectly charming and you can still have your happy ending.
But life doesn’t end when the credits roll on the wedding scene. Like Carrie Bradshaw, another now-middle-aged pop-culture heroine, Bridget has learned there are many more chapters to come: unhappy marriages, divorce, death, and dragging our arses back up to the dating plate, years after we’d thought we thought we’d met cute for the last time.
“I’m nonviable,” Bridget insists when her friends try to encourage her to date lest her labia attach itself back together. “I’m completely non-sexual; nobody will ever fancy me ever again. I have hung up my tongue.”
But lo and behold, mere days later, she happens upon an attractive park ranger she dubs “Tree Adonis,” who rescues Bridget and her kids from a poorly planned tree-climbing adventure. Oh, Bridget, you silly goose! He has to grab your silly goose arse to help get you down! His actual name is Roxster (as in rock star, get it?)! I’m glad the writers are having fun.
I nearly spit out my camomile tea laughing when Roxster tells Bridget how he finds older women so much wiser and more emotionally mature. Am I an ancient, still self-hating ogress? Yes. Do I think it’s hilariously unlikely that Leo bloody Woodall would go out of his way to sincerely pursue a mother of two more than 20 years his senior? Definitely. But rom-coms are gonna rom, and who am I to deny Bridg a bit of entertainment with a side of emotional trauma?
I have several friends in their 40s and 50s who are back in the dating pool now too, and from what I’ve seen, if Gen Xers thought dating in our 30s was already a horror show, dating in our 50s does not look cute. It’s amusing for some of my friends — particularly the ones who truly are just looking for a bit of fun. I have one 53-year-old polyamorous pal who is practically drowning in 35-year-olds; apparently there’s nothing a youngish, horny man likes more than a woman who doesn’t want a boyfriend and literally can’t get pregnant. But finding love “later in life” (barf!) has eluded most of them; many of my perfectly cute, charming, employed single mom friends are watching their years of singledom stretch well into the double digits.
Bridget may find herself the object of a hot 29-year-old’s adoration, but the reports I hear from midlife women in the app era is this: never mind younger men, even many middle-aged men aren’t considering women their own age. That 53-year-old I mentioned always sets her age as 49, otherwise she’s completely disappeared from searches, even by men who are 60 and up.
We haven’t even gotten to the effects that perimenopause and menopause can have on many women’s sex lives, and neither does “Mad About The Boy.” I would have loved to see Roxster’s reaction to Bridget’s sultry pillow talk whisper: “So, about vaginal atrophy …”
Luckily for Bridget (spoiler!), she also happens upon an age-appropriate, handsome, kind and miraculously completely available man because, after all, this is a rom-com. I just wish I could say the same for all the single middle-aged women looking for their own happy endings.
