Youthful Forties!

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 4, Issue 10, 1 April 1926, Page 30

Youthful Forties!

'jfiQeping CJime — and Women at %Arm jQengt/i

When Sir George Alexander, in his fortieth year, produced The Man of Forty, he said: “This looks like getting on in years, doesn’t it?” That was a popular idea at the time, but we have grown older and wiser since then. To-day the man of forty is quite a youth compared with his predecessor of twenty-five years ago, and looks a mere boy beside the whiskered ancients of forty as drawn by Charles Keene and George du Maurier. At the present moment, according to the figures of the RegistrarGeneral, there are five thousand Englishmen of forty who don’t even consider themselves old enough to marry, and so much is this the day of the young man that sixty-seven thousand over forty and well beyond it remain gay and debonair bachelors who would probably scorn any suggestion that they “were getting well on in years.” Forty and the Flapper TN this generation the man of -*■ forty, clean-shaven, well-groom-ed, carrying himself erect, looks and feels as young as the early-Victor-ian youth of twenty-five. I don’t say that all the young women are

running after him. They aren’t; or, if they are, they don’t marry him. Five out of every six men of forty are married, but the proportion of bachelors who wed at that age is very small — one out of every 156. The marrying time for men is from twenty-one to twenty-eight. After that they appear to get shy of matrimony. If a man has not married by the time he is forty, it is a 22 to 1 chance against his marrying at all. Despite his supposed attraction (in fiction) for flappers, it is vary rarely that a man of forty marries a young girl. Only one in a hundred has a bride under twenty, a mere 12 per cent, marry women of twenty to twentyfive, and less than 20 per cent, take wives of twenty-five to twenty-nine. The largest group wed women of thirty, but 43 per cent, of the brides are between thirty and forty. It is not to be supposed that those latter groups of brides are all dashing and merry widows. Nearly onehalf are spinsters. Of bachelors who wed at the age of forty only one out of four marries a widow. Even when the men of forty are themselves widowed nearly 72 per cent, of them prefer spinsters!