“Now that we have managed to make life last longer, the big challenge is to think of ourselves with a longevity mindset.” Flora Proverbio builds on that idea to talk about a dimension that, all too often, falls outside conversations about aging: desire.
A female longevity expert, author of Silver Triangles and founder of the longevity consultancy GrandSpan, Proverbio will take part in the closing segment of BEST® Experience alongside Andy Clar and Beta Suárez, where desire after 40 will be the focal point.
Her perspective invites moving the conversation about age away from limits and toward what happens to longing, curiosity, and the capacity to imagine what still lies ahead.
Longevity Is Also About Sustaining Desires
For Proverbio, living longer poses a challenge that goes far beyond simply adding years to the calendar. If life extends, the various dimensions that give that life meaning should also be able to extend.
“Thinking of ourselves with a longevity mindset means doing things so that all the valuable dimensions of life also endure longer,” she asserts.
Among them, she places something as everyday as feeling good about oneself, feeling beautiful throughout life, and staying connected to what sparks interest and enthusiasm.
“Among those valuable dimensions of life is feeling good about ourselves, feeling beautiful all our lives, by doing what we can to achieve that,” she explains.
Desire Does Not Disappear with Menopause
One of the axes of Proverbio’s work is precisely to dismantle some of the commonplaces around female desire in maturity.
Her book Silver Triangles, published by Galerna Publishing, explores desire and sexuality in mature women. There, she questions the idea that desire disappears with menopause or that it is exclusively determined by hormonal changes.
But her definition of desire is even broader. “I also conceive desire not only as the sexual, but as the engine of life—the curiosity, the eagerness,” she explains.
For her, maintaining that link to the future also requires active participation: to engage, to explore, and to allow oneself to change.
“Desire Doesn’t Drop from a UFO”
There is a line from Proverbio that sums up much of her perspective: “Desire does not descend from a UFO and arrives suddenly.”
The idea is that the drive to act, to discover, or to project does not depend solely on something external that appears unexpectedly. It also requires attention and decision.
“It is our responsibility to feel hooked on what moves us, to set in motion what lights us up, to stay curious, to allow ourselves to place what we want at the center,” she maintains.
That may involve something as simple—and at the same time as challenging—as recognizing that what one once wanted years ago may not anymore represent what one wants today.
“Allowing ourselves to say: ‘I no longer want this for myself, because now I want something else’,” she proposes.
From Objects of Desire to Subjects of Desire
In that possibility of change also appears one of the central concepts of her view on female maturity: an identity that can continue to transform.
Proverbio argues against staying tied to who we decided we were at 20 or 30, urging us to embrace what comes with the passage of time: experience and self-knowledge.
“I think we have two great tools at this stage of life: experience and self-knowledge, which can only be gained by living,” she says.
And that journey also changes the way we think about desire. “That, for me, moves us away from the idea of feeling good or feeling beautiful or being a woman as a person to be desired, toward becoming subjects of desire.”
In other words, it’s not only about feeling desired by others, but about recognizing what one oneself desires and daring to put it at the center.
A Book That Seeks to Provoke Questions
Silver Triangles also emerged from research into the experiences of women in maturity. The book gathers interviews with more than 70 women and conversations with numerous experts, and blends popular science writing, first-person narratives, erotica, and some self-help resources.
Proverbio defines it as a provocation to connect with what moves each reader. Therefore, beyond stories and information, it includes questions and exercises.
“Because throughout the book the protagonist is the reader,” she explains.
The conversation that will lead to the closing of BEST® starts from the same place: putting on the table a topic that is often silenced and expanding the idea of well-being after 40. Not only how long we live, but also what we do with everything we still want to live.
BEST® Experience will take place this Saturday, September 5, from 3:00 PM to 8:00 PM, at the Four Seasons Hotel Buenos Aires.
