Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda, winner of Cecil B. deMille Award speaks during the 78th Annual Golden Globe Virtual General Press Room on February 28, 2021. (Photo by Handout/HFPA via Getty Images)

Aren’t we lucky to have Jane Fonda in our lives?

In a new interview – one that well and truly rivals her moving Golden Globes speech – the 83-year-old actress says she’s happy being without a lover.

“I don’t want to be in a relationship, a sexual relationship, again. I don’t have that desire,” Fonda says. “Do I fantasise? Yes…That I meet a professor or a researcher, somebody in that line who is really capable of loving, of cherishing a woman, so that I could test myself and see if I could show up. I think maybe now I could, but the problem is that, like a man, I would want a younger man. Isn’t that awful? It’s a thing about skin. I would want a younger man, and I’m too vain.”

An outspoken advocate for many decades, Fonda has protested war, violence, discrimination and our collective inaction when it comes to saving the environment. She has been married three times in her life – to French director Roger Vadim, political activist Tom Hayden, and billionaire founder of CNN Ted Turner. (On her latest marriage, Fonda says, “Marrying Ted is like marrying 15 people. You have to learn how to hunt, so I did. You have to learn how to fly-fish, so I did. He liked me to dress sexy, so I did. And so forth. I wanted to. Why be with Ted Turner if you’re not going to allow yourself to be absorbed in his reality and learn from it? And I’m glad I did.”)

“One of the painful things that I’ve realised by 80 – I don’t even know how old I am – 83, and single now. What I’ve had to really think about is that I’m not really capable [of intimacy],” she says in the interview. “It’s not them. It’s me. If a guy had come along and said, ‘Come on, Fonda, show up,’ I would have run away scared. I was attracted to men who never would have done that to me because they couldn’t necessarily show up themselves. I didn’t know that at the time, but now I know.”

Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda and her now-former husband Roger Vadim in 1968 in France. Credit: REPORTERS ASSOCIES/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

“Part of the reason I get into a relationship with a man is because I feel that he can take me down a new path,” she added. “I’m attracted to people who can teach me things and whose lives are different from mine, and so I give myself over to that. First of all, I want to please him. That’s a problem.”