Warning: This article contains content of a sexual nature.
Charlotte-Anne Fidler, beauty entrepreneur and mother of two, was in her 50s when she found herself single. Now her Instagram posts about her new boyfriend have led to a wave of support, criticism - and envy.
“After my marriage ended, falling for a hot 27-year-old vet in my fifties was the last thing on my mind. But, oh my God, the orgasms. He’s an amazing lover, so I have been able to have orgasms in ways I haven’t ever been able to before. He totally knows what he is doing, going really slowly. He’s trained in tantric sex. We could do it for hours. My ageing body can suddenly go on for ever.”
You go, girl. You are in love with a man 25 years younger than you and having sensational sex. What’s not to like? It is easy to say grow up, get serious, too much information, steady on, you are not being responsible. But Charlotte-Anne Fidler has been through a soul-destroying divorce after 20 years of marriage and her glamorous career had seemed over in middle age. For the past four years, she has had a sensational boyfriend who adores her, and a thriving new business. Now her Instagram posts about her lover have gone viral. When the world is spinning crazily, you can either plant bulbs and quietly give up or, in Fidler’s case, after a miserable time, create your own company, pay off your mortgage and find a relationship that brings you joy. I am not going to judge. I like happy endings.
“Look at the new Bridget Jones film and Babygirl. It’s definitely a zeitgeist thing,” Fidler says when we meet at her home in a village in Wiltshire, which is all immaculate white sofas, open fires and sheepskin rugs. She is right. Even The White Lotus is looking at women of a certain age in a different way.
“Nicole Kidman has done funny and dark films with younger men,” Fidler says. “Anne Hathaway was a very cheesy older divorcee in The Idea of You. I’ve just read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo about a love affair that crosses ages. We’re everywhere. Just don’t call us cougars. I really dislike that word. It’s so unromantic.”
Not everyone, Fidler says, has been kind about her younger boyfriend (definitely not toy boy, which I agree sounds sexist). “I had some horrible messages, particularly from middle-aged men who thought I was showing off when I put my story on Instagram.”
What do the neighbours think?
“Initially people in the village were like, this will never last. Now they think, this rogue woman, she’s cooking up potions to lure him.”
Most of the responses, she says, have been incredible. There was a tidal wave of support from women, saying, “ ‘You are inspiring. You’ve given me hope after my divorce,’ ” she says. “Maybe I have given women who are unhappy and lonely the realisation that it doesn’t all have to be over at 50, that you can turn the tables, that miracles can happen. One divorced woman wrote: ‘Thank you so much.’ The message always feels like we must be grateful for the crumbs that are left over, lucky even to be looked at again.”
For years, Fidler, a beauty editor for glossy magazines Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire and Glamour, would have agreed. After she discovered her husband had had an affair and she was left with a vast mortgage, daughters and three Maine Coon cats in her fifties, while struggling to start a new business, she thought she would never be in a relationship again.
“My confidence and libido were low,” she says. “I was resigned to my children, my dogs and my garden. I’d been with my husband for a long time in what at first was a really happy marriage, and I couldn’t imagine having sex with anyone else. I felt it was all downhill to retirement in my slippers and thermals.”
Fidler’s story sounds similar to many divorcees, from the writer Nora Ephron to the BBC’s Amandaland. She met her husband in 1993, while she was a beauty journalist at Vogue and he had just graduated from Cambridge. They got married in 1999 in a pretty Saxon church. “The relationship, I think, was great for nearly 20 years, then when my daughters, Anouk and Bo, were little, we decided to move from Hackney in east London to the countryside in Wiltshire for more space and he started having an affair. I was travelling a lot for work, and it can’t have helped that I earned more than him. My husband was lacking attention.” The alarm bells should have rung, she says, when they didn’t have sex for six years.
“I wasn’t the object of his fantasy and so much of women’s sexuality is linked with feeling desired, so I think my libido just shut off.” His affair continued for six years. “I wish he’d just left straight away as I would have been younger and the girls still little. Eventually he moved out in 2016. He said I could stay in the house.”
After five months he returned. “But I was so broken by then,” she says. “Everything we built had collapsed. I couldn’t make it work. The trust had gone. We went on holiday and I said, ‘You don’t love me any more,’ and he said, ‘I don’t.’ I think he’d begun another affair.”
A single woman in the countryside is like the black lamb of the flock. “You don’t fit in with the happy family scenario,” says Fidler. “Everyone knew me as a married woman, but now I was an embarrassment. They didn’t know where to put me. There was a widow in the village, who was invited to everything, but all my invitations stopped. I became unbelievably isolated. It was like, she’s no longer one of us. Not in a mean way; it’s just I was dispensable now.”
Fidler decided to set up a business where she could be in control. “I saw the gap with my daughters who used all these cute natural baby products and then nothing when they got a bit older,” she says. “So I started up my company, Spots & Stripes, which helped me to rebuild my identity. I felt I had a purpose again. I was good at it.” As a beauty editor, she had tried every brand. “I knew my stuff and I did my research and I convinced one of the UK’s best natural manufacturers to take me on. I tested the formulas on my girls, their friends and the sons of my friends. After two years of trying and tweaking, Spots & Stripes was born.”
Parents and teenagers love the simple, natural products that don’t smell “of old ladies” or “babies’ talcum powder”, as her daughters point out. She now sells cleansers, body washes, shampoos and moisturisers that are expressly formulated for Gen Zers’ young skin. Evidence of her business is all over her house. In the kitchen her younger daughter is wrapping up parcels to send to clients. There are boxes of her products everywhere. Her assistant is ticking off consignments. It is clearly thriving.
It could have been enough, but Fidler was still lonely. The odd friend would invite her to a party. “They would say, ‘Here’s gorgeous George,’ and you’d meet some embittered, middle-aged, divorced man and despair.” She remembers thinking, I’ll never have sex again.
Then an Instafriend messaged her, having recently divorced, and urged her to go on Bumble. She lived in Switzerland and had started dating gorgeous younger boys coming for the ski season. She encouraged Fidler to put her settings on younger men.
‘I hadn’t had the sensation of instant attraction for decades’
“I thought she was mad, but went for 27-39. I was 50.” Younger men, she says, seem to like older women. “Some, I realised, had had fantasies all their life about older women - maybe they fancied a teacher or their friend’s mum - but older women never believe that. Older men may assume younger women fancy them, but never the other way round.”
Fidler had her first fling in the summer. “It was very physical, not emotional,” she says. “I wasn’t looking for a relationship. I just wanted to get back some sense of feeling like a woman.”
Then she met the vet, V. “I was gardening in a very middle-aged way in November and I was swiping occasionally, as a form of entertainment, when V appeared. He had a gorgeous black and white pic. At first I thought it was a fake account. He said he was a vet and 27 and his blurb was a bit woo-woo, but I thought, you are very good-looking. We matched and had a great conversation. We started messaging every day. It was light-hearted - all pics of my view or his forests back home. He is Hungarian, but grew up in Transylvania, which is in Romania. It was a bit of amusement.”
A hot vet sounds like a rom-com hero. “I know. I should have told everyone we locked eyes over the consulting table when I took my three dogs to the vet. Finally, he said, ‘Let’s meet.’ I said I couldn’t because I was doing the Christmas tree. He offered to help. He wasn’t in a hurry, and I liked that. I said I would have dinner with him. I chose a Sunday in Bath because it was the most non-committal day of the week.”
‘It was the most amazing sex I have ever had’
The attraction, she says, was instant. This now sounds more like The Wife of Bath. “I hadn’t had that sensation for decades. We had perfect chemistry. I talked and he listened. Then he told his story. We were the last people in the restaurant. I went to put my coat on and he hugged me. Here was a man just wrapping his arms around me. His body was unbelievably hard. I thought, oh my God.” They went for a walk up to the Royal Crescent. “He was walking alongside me like a puppy, kissing the side of my face,” she says. “We had a big kiss at the top of the crescent and I remember thinking, this is so exciting. I never expected to feel that again.”
V had been working as a vet in Northern Ireland and Tahiti before coming to the West Country. “We would meet and sit in my car and just talk about life,” Fidler says. “He was very thoughtful. There were no games, no chasing, no ghosting. My attitude was just go with it. I had lost so much I didn’t care any more.”
It was all very chaste. “Then on Christmas Day I felt so sorry for him on his own that I made him some Christmas dinner too. I took it down the hill on a freezing moonlit night and he ate it in the car. I lay in his arms under a blanket and we kissed for hours. I couldn’t believe what was happening.”
When the girls went to their father’s, he came over in the evening and knocked on the door. “He just took my hand and took me upstairs. I let it all go. Bridget Jones overthinks. I just gave in. He is very uninhibited and was so in charge and confident, I didn’t have to worry. I don’t want to say it’s a general younger male thing - it may not be true - but he has thought a lot about it. He has had loads of girlfriends, like many millennials. I have slept with fewer than 10 men. It was mind-blowing, fabulous sex. He looked like a sexy Bambi. It was the most amazing sex I have ever had in my life.”
Millennial men, she says, understand what women want more than Nineties men - sorry, boys. “They have access and knowledge now,” she says. “Maybe that is the upside of porn. It’s incredible. He doesn’t want me to communicate my needs. If I ever go, ‘Can you put your hand there,’ he says, ‘Stop telling me what to do,’ but not in a cross way.”
In every other part of her life, Fidler felt the need to be in charge. “I follow him and that’s empowering,” she says. “I am surrendering, but it’s my decision because everything is better when I do. It’s also kind of sexy.”
‘He looks at me and doesn’t see all the faults’
The former beauty editor doesn’t feel the need now for endless tweakments or magic creams. “I’m on such an endorphin high, I don’t need many potions,” she says. “I only see him at weekends. The rest of the week I wear my big knickers. In the summer I might wear a dress for him. You’ve got someone around you who, the minute they turn up, is desiring you. My children are sometimes like, ‘Get a room.’ We pick a time they are not around.”
Unlike Bridget Jones, Fidler still has immaculate hair and make-up. “I’ve always exercised and been the same size,” she says. “I don’t have to worry about that. I’ve put on a bit of weight, but V didn’t notice or care. He looks at me and doesn’t see all the faults, post-children.” His body, though, is perfection, she says. “He has a great, ripped body, angel skin. I look at tiny bits of his body now and marvel at it. It’s so stunning. That shoulder, it’s beautiful. His hands. It’s like I’m appreciating a male physique properly for the first time.”
She also now waxes regularly. “I take it all off. Not just a Brazilian; the full Hollywood. That is what millennials are used to. I remember thinking, why do you want to look like a porn star? Yet here I am and it’s my new normal. It feels better down there having sex now. It makes everything soft and you feel stuff more.” Boomers may now be blushing.
“People say, ‘You’re glowing, Charlotte.’ I have these permanent endorphins, dopamine and oxytocin. I think it’s very good for our bodies to have lots of sex because everything relaxes. Use it or lose it.” Menopause isn’t a problem. “Instead of worrying about hot flushes and symptoms, I think about sex.”
Some men will wonder whether an older man could ever eulogise in the same way about a hot young chick they were seeing. And it is true, post-#MeToo, that dating a much younger woman sets off alarm bells. But often the relationship is based on an uneven power dynamic while Fidler just seems to want to have fun. “It’s not me grasping at youth. It is me going, ‘I find younger men more attractive and if they find me sexy, amazing.’ It’s not just the sex. He has never had his heart broken or any baggage. He doesn’t need me for a visa - he has one - or for money.”
She knows it is not forever: ‘One day he might want a family’
They have been together for four years, but she knows it is not for ever. “He is now 31. He is not interested in young girls who want a husband. He likes an older woman with no pressure, but one day he might want a family.” He hasn’t told his family in Transylvania. “His grandmother wants great-grandchildren, but he has time.”
From day one, she says, she knew there was not a future.
“I decided to do it anyway, but that’s very liberating. I went into the bedroom thinking, just enjoy it. When I was falling in love in the Nineties, I was looking for the One for the rest of my life, Wuthering Heights and all that. I fully embraced it. Now I just think, relax.”
Her former husband might be surprised. “I’ve never discussed it with him. I’m not doing it to make him angry or upset. It’s not revenge. I am not bitter. We have a good relationship now. I was heartbroken; now I feel peaceful.
“Grab happiness where you can. It’s so elusive. After my marriage ended, I assumed love, romance and sex were over for ever. The only problem is I’m not sure I could go back to an older man. But, as V says, ‘Don’t worry about tomorrow. We’re having a great time now.’ ’’
Written by: Alice Thomson
© The Times of London