Here Is How You Can Feel Ageless

Just hang out with much older women.

By
Published April 30, 2026
Illustration of two women seated at a table holding their drinks while having a conversation
Tara Jacoby

The youngest person I’ve ever known was 90 the last time we cackled like schoolgirls over martinis. “How’s the sex? Good?” she asked me about a man I had just started dating, a professor she happened to know. “If you like him, we’ll throw a wedding in my back yard!”

My friend and I shared the same first name, “Janice,” and went by the same diminutive, “Jan.” While I’m more Sandra Dee than sexy siren, my friend Jan looked like Elizabeth Taylor. She was such a stunner of a soprano, she played Laurey in the national tour of Oklahoma! in the late 1940s.

She was a true Auntie Mame — and lived her life as if she were the leading lady in a rousing musical number.

When she’d call me to set up a lunch date, she’d bellow: “Jan! It’s the Other.” As in, the Other Jan.

Once, she gifted me with a black lace negligee and wrote a note: “Unwrap yourself on Christmas Eve. YOU are his present!”

Until the end of her life — she died on January 31, 2021 — Jan McArt looked 50-something and behaved 30-something. She’ll haunt me if I type her exact age.

“I don’t care if I live to be 100, I’ll never be 80,” she would say.

I suspect the last time she noted her age was in the 1940 Census, when she was 12.

There are books and movies galore about intergenerational friendships. The wonderful Eleanor the Great, the 2025 directorial debut of Scarlett Johansson, starring the delightful June Squibb, is a prime example. A young woman who has lost her mother finds a companion in an older woman who also feels lost.

The Holdovers, starring Paul Giamatti, is another. A world-weary professor finds the courage to change his life because of his friendship with a student.

Kim Murstein and her “refreshingly unfiltered” grandmother Gail Rudnick are the latest viral example of a kinship that values connection over chronology.

Their social-media collaboration, Excuse My Grandma, reaches millions across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. They’ve recently launched an advice column for the New York Post, Excuse My Advice. Their slogan: “Modern problems. Classic solutions.”

Grandma Gail’s classic advice is never old-fashioned. “It’s about having standards,” she explains. “It’s about knowing who you are before the world tells you who you should be.”

That kind of self-awareness and the confidence that springs from it are the greatest treasures older women can pass down to younger ones.

Kim is 30. Grandma Gail is 80-something — and so cool and adaptable, she can share vintage Chanel jackets with her granddaughter, then sling hilarious and ribald one-liners on social media, which she’s mastered like a Millennial.

On a recent podcast, she advises Kim, “don’t have kinky sex” in front of the window that faces her neighbor’s apartment.

Their honest repartee resonates because it’s rare.

“What people are responding to isn’t just advice, it’s the relationship,” Kim says. “So many families don’t slow down enough to really talk across generations. We do that publicly in a relatable and fun way.”

They like and respect each other. “There’s something grounding about watching a granddaughter sit next to her grandmother and genuinely want her perspective,” Grandma Gail says. “I think people miss that in their own lives, or want more of it.”

That’s true, according to a study done by Carewell, a caregiving company, and shared with Fortune magazine. Only 18 percent of Gen Z responders (people born from the late 1990s to 2010) reported they had a strong relationship with their grandparents, compared to 32 percent of Millennials and 41 percent of Gen X.

Without cross-generational connection, it’s harder for young people to see how confidence is built and grows stronger with age.

“Watching Grandma Gail be so comfortable in her own skin has changed how I think about getting older,” Kim says. “It made me realize aging isn’t something to fear.”

That’s how I felt about Jan McArt, aka the Other Jan, my Auntie Mame — knowing her was a flashy crash course in how to be forever fabulous.

As Auntie Mame suggests in the 1966 Broadway musical: “There’s a thank you, you can give life, if you live life all the way.”

The Other Jan’s flamboyant exterior wrapped a tender and generous heart. She was both a meteor and a mentor, both smart and silly. It takes a serious person to make life a song — because nobody’s life is free from tragedy, and hers certainly was not.

She decided to make life a banquet. She drove a Cadillac — red, to match her lipstick. There was not a day she could not attract a lover, if she wanted one.

Her last boyfriend, a handsome fellow actor named Jay, shared her passion for romance. All he had to do to make her happy, she told me, was “take me down a road I’ve never been.”

That’s a simple secret to life: keep dancing down new roads.

I turn 70 this year. Now I’m the Auntie Mame.

Last Christmas, my daughter’s best friend Catie posted a photo of us on Instagram, and another classmate they’ve known since kindergarten commented: “Is Jan still iconic?”

I didn’t know I was iconic, but now that these women are 39, I can see they look at me the way I looked at the Other Jan.

I rock a Stevie-Nicks style, drive a colorful car — mine’s yellow — and make snappy pronouncements like a Mame might. “Confident women walk with purpose!” I instructed them when they were 12.

Catie’s answer to that Instagram question: “Jan’s more iconic than ever.”

Jan Tuckwood is an award-winning journalist who was associate editor and revenue content director of The Palm Beach Post for 30 years. She’s also a former fashion editor of The Denver Post, and her work has appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Glamour magazine, among other publications. She is the editor of five books, including the official history book of Palm Beach County, and she is the co-author of Too Young to Be Old, the 2022 memoir of Diane Gilman, HSN’s “Jean Queen.”