From this morning’s Facebook peanut gallery: the unwashed masses of social media are debating Vogue’s recent article on age-gap relationships. Opinions, as you might expect, are all over the board.
The clichéd expectation about an age-gap relationship is the following: a wily older man lures a nubile young woman into his embrace, usually exploiting some sort of a power dynamic. Because—as we all know—everything turns according to the whims of the patriarchy, which is dominated by Evil White Men Over Forty. Cue sinister music.
Here’s another example, this one from real life instead of internet memes:
My friend’s younger brother is married to a woman 18 years his senior. They met in the early 1990s, when he was a comparatively naive young man of 21, and she was a 39-year-old divorcee with two children.
More than three decades later they are still married. She is now seventy years old, and he is in his early fifties. Because of the age gap, my friend’s brother has never had children of his own. He is now caring for his much-older wife much in the way one would care for an elderly parent.
It has been said that opposites attract. Perhaps, but over the long haul, opposites tend to clash, and serious differences in age, religious beliefs, socioeconomic background, and political ideology are more likely to divide a couple than to unite them. In an ideal world, we would each marry a high school sweetheart, a boy or girl who grew up down the street from us. But of course, that scenario has become increasingly more difficult in the fragmented and mobile twenty-first century. We move around and marry late, often far from our origins.
I don’t think that age-gap relationships are inherently “exploitive”. If a 25-year-old woman (or man) can be so easily manipulated by a partner just because the partner is a few decades older, then I want to raise the voting age to forty, because young adults are clearly too simple-minded to make decisions about our democracy.
The real problem with age-gap relationships is not the “power dynamic”, but the actuarial differences between say, a 40-year-old and a 65-year-old.
Most of us love our parents. Being in love with a man (or woman) who might have gone to high school with Mom or Dad is another matter entirely. And this tends to be a lot more difficult over the long haul.
-ET