Age and Marriage

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Couple with age difference kissing

“Seems like kind of a dirty old man,” a female colleague said, referring to a sixty-something gentleman engaged to a woman eighteen years younger.

“How old is his bride, sixteen?” I baited her.

“Of course not, but that’s a lot of years difference,” she snapped back.

“Hardly seems like robbing the cradle,” I suggested, but she had an axe to grind.

“The reason older men pursue younger women is because they’re afraid of death. They’re trying desperately to hold on to their own fading vitality by attaching themselves to a symbol of youth, someone young enough to be their daughter,” she maintained.

Irrational Bias

Curiously, over a third of Americans report having dated someone 10 or more years older or younger than themselves. However, when it comes to marriage, the average age difference among heterosexual couples is 2.8 years, and among same sex ones, 4.7 years.

Some folks harbor a passionate and irrational bias against couples whose difference in age surpasses single digits. They like to read grimly between the lines of these relationships, even those socially sanctioned through marriage, by inferring that some sort of psychopathology is at work. Here are the most common stereotypic biases:

• The younger woman seeks “daddy” in the older man.
• The older man seeks a fountain of youth in the proverbial “nymph.”
• The younger woman is a “gold digger.”
• The older woman wants a younger man to reaffirm her sexual desirability.
• The younger man is driven by his Oedipal complex of forbidden carnal love toward his mother, which he sublimates through a surrogate, the “older woman.”

While there is no way to prove or disprove such conjecture, one thing seems obvious. When we don’t like how people behave, we label them “sick.” We smear what we fear.

Kidding Themselves?

My cynical colleague called my suggestion that the older man and younger woman might be genuinely in love “Unlikely.” 

“They’re probably kidding themselves,” she insisted. “Once the shine fades from their infatuation, they’ll both realize they aren’t acting their age, and they’ll feel foolish.”

As I view it, if we are going to assail age-disparate relationships as driven by twisted subconscious motivations and desperate lunges at fading youth, then age-acceptable pairings are fair game for armchair analysis. Along those lines, maybe marriage merely reflects a blind, reflexive response to the genetic imperative of procreation (humans as hormonal robots).

Or perhaps couples come together out of dependency, an irrational fear of loneliness, and the absence of emotional self-reliance; traits that can be viewed as signs of an unhealthy personality. As one therapist postulated, “Maybe you can’t have a romantic bond without being neurotic and co-dependent.” If we regard one kind of emotional need (younger woman needs older man, for example) as sick, why not all kinds of needs that drive partnering?

Are there perverted, destructive, twisted relationships? You bet. Are they correlated with significant age disparity between the partners? Not in any data I’ve encountered.

So, let’s quit trashing couples who are age-blind and start remembering that regardless of age, race, gender, or anything else, most romantic bonds are born of a little madness, a dollop of blind passion, and the desire for meaningful connection and intimacy. In other words, love.

And where there’s genuine intimate love, the rest is details.

For more, visit philipchard.com.