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Sparkle (1)
We went to the movies to celebrate my 50th birthday last weekend (a double-header with the new Indiana Jones and the new Narnia flicks) and saw a trailer for “I Could Never Be Your Woman” – a tale of a mother who falls for a younger man while her daughter falls in love for the first time. Given that my husband is 15 years younger than me – well, right now he’s actually 16 years younger than me until his birthday next month – we both enjoyed the clips, especially the jumping on the bed part (which, yes, we have done).
It piqued my curiosity to think that the media is finally paying attention to age gap relationships. So I went searching on BlogHer to see what my sisters are saying about younger men and older women partnerships. I found several great blogs - by Susan On Dating Younger Men, by Liz Dating a Younger Man, and Chantelle had me rolling on the floor with 3 Pros And Cons of Dating A Younger Guy. But that was it. And none of them talked about long-term relationships.
While it would be scandalous, and in most states illegal, to match a 15 year old boy with a 30 year old woman, when that young man reaches 20 or 25, the 15 year difference doesn’t seem so insurmountable, even if it does remain fuel for gossip. Such matches are more easily understandable as women have the means to stay healthier and good looking much longer than their mothers did. Even so, it’s that element of scandal, of taboo, that keeps many women from taking the advances of younger men seriously.
I was born in 1958. Growing up in California just north of San Francisco, I became interested in boys sometime between puberty and starting high school. Like other girls of my generation, the boys I was interested in were predictably older than me. At home, though, I had different role models. My mother was 5 years older than my father. Then she was 8 years older than my stepfather. When I reached 17, my 32 year old sister left her husband of 18 years for a friend of the family – an 18 year old classmate of mine. That was when I took notice and started thinking something weird was going on. Too weird for me, thank you very much.
The skewed public images of young man/older woman matches didn’t help the issue either. In films, for instance, we can start with Harold and Maude (the spunky Crone must die to free the enchanted Teen), move right along to Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (the first Cougar willing to sacrifice his future for her pleasure), and round it out with How Stella Got Her Groove Back (the Amazon Warrior unwilling to trust a man).
Off screen we had Elizabeth Taylor (the classic Man Eater) and she was followed by a lengthening line of aging actresses who can’t find a moment’s peace with today’s media – like Demi Moore and Tina Turner (my idol, but frighteningly powerful nonetheless); and even now the Harry Potter star, Daniel Radcliffe, is stepping out with a woman 7 years his senior.
According to the press then and now, if one of the partners has money, the other is a gold digger, and if the woman has a mind of her own, she’s a lecherous Cougar. None of these images led me to believe that my mother or my sister had made wise choices.
But when I was single and in my 30s, I started meeting a new breed of age gap couples: older women and younger men who neither hid nor flaunted the difference in their ages, people who loved each other because of their age difference, not in spite of it.
A closer look at real life demonstrated a long list of the attractors of age gap relationships for both partners. For the woman, her young partner was usually an independent thinker that encouraged her
