How old are you?

Don’t worry, I don’t really want to know. What I’m more curious about is whether you’d actually tell me.

There are those who proudly announce their "number," all but daring the other person to say: "Gosh, I never would have guessed you were (fill in the age). I would have thought you were only (fill in an age at least five years younger)."

Then there are those for whom telling their age is no big deal, and others who are insulted at the question, believing that age is the kind of thing, like your salary or your sex life, that is not discussed in polite company.

And then there are those of us who give an answer—but not necessarily the correct one.

I never figured myself for the kind of person who’d lie about her age. From the sunny side of 40, I assumed I’d let my hair go gray, my wrinkles bloom, my age be a matter of public record.

And then I turned—well, never mind how old I was when I decided that maybe I didn’t want to let it all hang out after all. It wasn’t even one of those big milestone birthdays, the kind your loved ones insist on throwing a party for, wrecking all your chances to hide the reality of your age. Let’s just say I reached an age that I knew any twentysomething would consider shockingly high. I realized that it was not going to help me in any way for the world at large to know that number. And so I started to lie.

Or not lie, exactly, but simply not tell. The few times I was asked outright how old I was, I replied that I didn’t confess my age to anybody, and I wasn’t about to start now.

My son suggested that, with each birthday, I start subtracting instead of adding years. While I love the idea of getting younger every year—at least until I hit junior high again—I’d rather avoid the age issue entirely. Is it really that much different, after all, to say you’re 58 instead of 64? Every number, it seems, carries its own special freight.

In the work world, the perception of age can be particularly damning, increasing the pressure to obscure your number. If you’re anywhere outside that Golden Zone of, say, 31 to 37, somebody’s going to see you as too young or too old, inexperienced or over the hill.

For women, even the Golden Zone isn’t so golden. When I really was in my 30s, my mind was on anything but work. Those were the years I was making a home, having babies, building a life. For women, your age is bound up with how long you’ve been married, the ages of your kids, whether or not you have children or grandchildren—and all this factors into people’s ideas of who you are and who you should be.

That’s the real problem, isn’t it—not that age really matters but that it becomes a yardstick by which other people measure you. People immediately use it to gauge how good you look, how much you’ve achieved, how healthy you are, and what more the world can expect from you before you join that age-free cohort in the sky.

I don’t want to tell my age because I don’t want my life to be judged by anybody else’s timetable. If I want to get married at 19 or have a baby at 44, if I decide to go back to school when I’m 58 or keep working when I’m 84, I think that’s nobody’s business but my own. If I feel I’m just beginning to hit my stride, I don’t want anybody telling me to slow down.

This is what I have learned: The only way to break the power of the number is to turn the issue completely on its ear. If you’re going to pick an age, for instance, don’t shave off a mere year or two. Instead, tell a real whopper. Claim you’re 17, for instance, or 29 and really nervous about turning 30. Or admit that you’re actually 108—but you’ve been told you don’t look a day over 95.

But there are always those who continue to press. To them, I suggest you say point-blank that you don’t think numbers are important. But since they apparently do, maybe they’d like to tell you how much money they have in the bank—and what they weighed this morning.

Pamela Redmond Satran is the author of the novel Younger, published by Downtown Press this month.