Older Men and Younger Women

It is generally assumed that men and women will choose partners of roughly the same age, and the vast majority do. They share life experience and outlook in a way they would not with much older or younger partners. Shared experience and outlook are ingredients in helping to make a rich emotional relationship.

Yet fairly often older men - even up into their 60s or beyond -- pursue women in their 20s, and sometimes marry them. Sometimes it is these younger women who are pursuing the older men.

In my part of the world the accepted explanation is what I would call the feminist take: the men are denying their mortality and want to feel younger. They want a woman they can more easily manipulate, due to her inexperience. The woman they seek might be called a trophy wife. As for the women who accept the courtship by the older men, they will be called gold-diggers, or women who want a daddy figure.

There may be some grains of truth to these explanations, but there is something more profound going on, something that goes back to human mating patterns in our environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA, a key concept in evolutionary biology). Evolution strongly favors leaving more descendants than fewer. Women over 45 rarely bear children, while women who are 20 or 30 very often do. So it is a simple and powerful evolutionary force that would tend to make men attracted to these younger women more intensely than older women. In our society, we see this played out in men whose marriages end (due to widowhood, or divorce initiated by either party) and marry younger women. In many other societies polygamy is practiced, and there the men don't need to divorce their older wife(s), they just add on the younger one -- or more than one. In some of these older societies women do not have choice as to whom they marry, and some might be very upset to be stuck with an older man -- but quite possibly not all.

Some young women today who have undeniable freedom of choice do freely choose an older man. Why would they do that? There is an evolutionary explanation for that preference as well. Evolution programs women to seek two things in mates. First, like all mammals and a great many other creatures, the females seek males with the best genes. Presumably those genes will make the offspring more successful at reproducing, and the women's genes that are along for the ride will also spread more widely. Second, humans have a rare pattern compared to other mammals -- males actively help to provide resources for their offspring. So when choosing a mate, women will prefer males who seem better able to do that. In our terms, that could be summarized as "richer". A woman may well prefer a successful young man to one who seems unable to keep a steady job. All else being equal, she would prefer a younger man to an older one. But how to trade off these two desires? It is quite common that a relatively rich older man can be expected to provide more resources to his children with his second wife than a poor young man could to those with his one and only wife. The quality of genes does not vary significantly over lifespan. So even if a man is physically past his prime, his genes will tend to produce young men who are like he was as a young man -- not as the older man he is when he (re)marries.. However desirable they once were, women of 45 rarely produce any children, while men of 60 usually can father children quite reliably.

Evolutionary explanations are very often not expressed directly. Instead, they mold our desires in a way that meets the ends of evolution without our conscious choice. A very clear case is sex and contraception. If we were guided only by a conscious desire to produce offspring, we wouldn't bother with sex if we weren't planning to reproduce, and there would be no need for contraception. But evolution has not endowed us with a desire to produce offspring, it has given us a very strong desire to have sex. This accomplished the goal very well, in the original environment where there was no contraception. So we still strongly desire sex. Knowing intellectually that it cannot produce offspring in most cases barely attenuates this desire at all, and we are not embarrassed to seek out contraception and still want sex very much.

Return now to marriage. In many societies, marriage is an economic contract, with no pretense at romance. The two partners have sex, but otherwise their lives are lived in quite separate men's worlds and women's worlds, but each helps in their own sphere to raise the children. But in our society -- and a great many others -- men and women feel a strong desire for each other and often feel love. This helps them stay together in the face of adversity and jointly raise their children and also induces them to conceive more children. But the subjective experience is love -- a very powerful feeling.

The same thing is likely to happen between older men and younger women. They love each other. Evolutionary explanations like wanting to father more children or wanting more resources for children are typically not experienced psychologically. The young woman and the older man genuinely love each other! The feminist story devalues such feelings as shallow illusions, and they claim any actual examples are quite rare.

We have no right to discount a young woman's desire for an older man because it might stem in part from his success in life. Her yearning for him must be respected on its own terms, as is any other romantic yearning. And I assert that we also have no right to discount an older man's yearning for a younger woman. When such yearnings are reciprocated, the result is a love as real as any other.

In my experience, it is older women who judge such situations most harshly. They will give young women a pass on the theory that they are inexperienced and misguided, but the men will get nothing but hostility. A man's desire for a younger woman is attacked, even if he is single and there is no question of deserting an older women. If his desire is not reciprocated, he is in for even harsher treatment. What on earth made him think an attractive young woman would go for *him*?! This entire attitude is demeaning and disrespectful.

It might also be selfish. Older women -- which here might mean age 40 and up -- want male partners as much as younger women -- this desire does not disappear when their fertility drops, though it may become noticeably less. The men who are pursuing younger women are not available to them. Older women may not at all like the idea that younger women are in an important sense viewed by men as more valuable than they are. They also might realize that their condition of being without a partner is partly their fault. When they were young and more desirable, they were perhaps more choosy about a mate than they would have been in retrospect, or busy with careers that might not really have been worth it, if the consequence is to live the rest of their lives single and childless. This surely does not apply to all women or even most women.

But kind-hearted people are sympathetic when anyone develops romantic interest in someone their own age and it is rejected. They don't look hard for reasons why it wasn't a genuine interest. They should be just as sympathetic if an older man develops romantic interest in a young woman.

I speak from the perspective of a coastal, blue-state, leftist culture. There are a lot of women who might have a different view. Donald Trump felt confident that women liked it when he grabbed their pussies, and bragged that he did so frequently. This was not enough to keep a majority of white women from voting for him. This certainly opens up the possibility that such women do not hew to the feminist stance on other sex- and gender-related subjects too. This might include older men with younger women, and some may have what I would consider a more realistic attitude. But this is just speculation.

I am now a single man in his late 60s. I am myself aware of an emotional and sexual interest in young women. I would like to be able to tell others, including casual acquaintances, about crushes and feel confident they would respect that feeling. They are most welcome to point out practical difficulties to any relationships that might emerge from such feelings, and in fact I heartily agreed and typically regard them as insurmountable. But that does not invalidate the initial attraction.