The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more. — Colleen McCullough

The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.

Author: Colleen McCullough

Insight: There's something quietly true about how our taste gets sharper with time. When you're twenty-five, you might chase after whoever seems impressive in the moment—the confident guy, the mysterious one, the person who makes you feel something electric. But by forty, you've usually learned the difference between exciting and actually good for you. You've seen enough of how people actually behave to spot what matters beneath the surface. The joke here isn't really about age gaps or dating. It's about perspective doing something almost magical to your judgment. Ten or fifteen years of experience teaches you to notice qualities you'd have overlooked before—genuine kindness, stability, how someone treats people when nothing's in it for them. You become less dazzled by performance and more able to see actual character. A twenty-five-year-old's earnestness or energy, which might have felt ordinary when you were that age, becomes genuinely attractive when you recognize it for what it is: potential, freshness, hope. The real insight is that maturity doesn't make you harder or more cynical—it makes you a better evaluator. You stop mistaking butterflies for wisdom. And that clarity, that ability to truly see people instead of projecting what you want onto them, might be the most underrated advantage of getting older.