On Becoming a Glasses Wearer

There are two things my mother hates more than anything else – tattoos and glasses. She’s been fortunate that none of her children has ever had a tattoo. Her grandchildren, however, are a different story and so she’s being forced to come to terms with the idea that body art isn't just for butch bikers, and that being “inked” will neither prevent you from getting a “proper” job or a respectable partner in life. Her prejudice against glasses, meanwhile, comes from a childhood spent wearing them in an era when, as Marylin Monroe put it in How to Marry a Millionaire, “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.” In the film, Monroe’s character Pola spends most of the movie bumping into walls and reading books upside down because she fears wearing glasses will prevent her from meeting the man of her dreams (or a rich one at least), until, that is, her soulmate turns out to be a spectacle wearer too.

When my mother began wearing glasses in the early 1950s at the age of about ten, she was given a pair of round, steel-rimmed “corporation glasses” (so-called because they were free). Her own mother brought them to the Eye and Ear hospital to have brown frames added because her father thought they would look more respectable that way (in other words, not free). She hated them and broke them deliberately, which I find fascinating, because my mother has always been the amenable type, the peacemaker, a “good” girl. To think of her doing anything so transgressive is mildly shocking.

Despite the persistent brainwashing throughout my youth that glasses were bad, I’ve always been intrigued by them. Watching eighties TV, they were presented as having transformative powers; one minute you’re Diana Prince wearing oversized frames, the next you’re spinning into Wonder Woman. In Working Girl, a pair of red-framed glasses complete Melanie Griffith’s transformation from Staten Island outsider to upmarket Manhattan businesswoman. Indiana Jones is a spectacle-wearing professor-cum-whiplashing bounty hunter. Having a pair of glasses to play with was like walking through the magic door at the back of the fancy dress shop in my favourite childhood cartoon Mr Ben. You could create an entirely new identity with a simple pair of specs.

The stereotype that glasses make women appear sexless, intimidatingly smart and unattractive held no truck with me.

Yes, there was Velma in Scooby Doo, I guess – the brains of the group as opposed to the glamorous Daphne – but I liked her preppy style (nobody loves a polo neck more than me and Velma) and I liked that she always had the answers. I wanted to be the woman who had the answers, and wearing glasses seemed to suggest I could be, or at least I could appear to be. In fact, according to a 2018 study published in the journal, Nature Communications, needing to wear glasses is associated with higher levels of intelligence, and a variety of other studies show that wearing glasses is linked to dependability and honesty. Despite these findings, and as much as I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of wearing specs, I could never quite bring myself to buy a non-prescriptive pair. If it really is true that glasses make women look smarter, I felt donning a fake pair would have just the opposite effect. I’d certainly feel stupid even if I somehow managed to avoid looking it. GQ was pretty damning in 2015 when it described wearing fake glasses as, “bottom-of-the-barrel hipster behaviour”. Ouch.

But late last year, my decades of eyewear envy ended and I was prescribed a pair of reading glasses for the first time. The joy was tempered only slightly by the fact that my vision had actually become impaired. I don’t remember any of my TV icons squinting and looking red-eyed from rubbing when not wearing their specs? Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth always tied up its intended target – her aim suggested perfect vision – while Dr Jones never grabbed the wrong artefact, shot the wrong mark or missed the stirrup while jumping on a horse. In Neighbours, “plain Jane the super brain” ditched her glasses for prom night and never looked back (in a pair of specs anyway). I, on the other hand, couldn’t read my book in bed without rubbing my eyes vigorously in the hope that the average-sized print would become clearer the way a windshield does when you turn on the wipers.

I’d been so caught up in the dramatic and sartorial possibilities of wearing glasses, I’d forgotten that they also mean you can’t read the Directions For Use on, well, anything.

The reality of getting glasses in your forties is that it does make you feel “middle-aged” in the official sense. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just a part of the ageing process. It’s what I call a midlife milestone. In my early forties, the idea of being middle-aged felt more abstract and was something I saw happen to other people but couldn’t really imagine happening to me; like a pandemic pre-2020. Now as I approach 46, it’s manifested itself in a myriad of tangible ways, from wearing glasses and “catching the news headlines” before I go to bed, to avoiding town at night and tea after 4 pm. I find myself propping my specs on the bridge of my nose and staring over the rim of my frames at the TV just as my Dad used to. Like my mother, I catch myself cleaning them absentmindedly with the bottom of my T-shirt. I play around, resting them on my head, like I would sunglasses, or sometimes around my neck, choker-like, as my older brother does. Glasses are less of an accessory and more of an identifier of the stage I’m at in life, like a fitbit was in my thirties.

The most surprising thing for me about my new glasses-wearing persona is that my mother actually likes it. Despite qualifying her approval every time by reminding me of how much she usually hates glasses, she thinks I look good in them. It’s doubly shocking given that I chose a men’s pair. While I had wistfully imagined visiting Optica on Dawson Street and allowing the wonderful Deirdre McNally to choose the perfect pair of modern frames for me, the kind that remedy the proportion of your brow to cheekbone, forehead and chin – or whatever wonderful things expensive glasses do – my newfound status as a freelancer put the kibosh on that. Instead, I’m wearing a €29.99 pair from Specsavers. Having said that, I love them. Money can’t buy style after all. One of these days I’ll actually wear them outside of the house, and hopefully I won’t make a spectacle of myself.

Marie Kelly, August 2020.
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