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.
