Older Women, Younger Men. Felicia Brings
between older women and younger men as a lifestyle for everyone, we are acknowledging the need for a manual—a guide to what to expect and how to handle some predictable situations. We would like to see more women expand their relationship options and we want to share what we’ve learned, sometimes pleasantly and sometimes painfully. We want to shed light on the pitfalls as well as the perks of these relationships. We want to walk women through the existing minefields, empowering them to release their fears and false beliefs in order to consciously make choices that suit them. If we advocate anything, it is opening yourself to more love, greater happiness and inner peace.
So hang in there as we take you through this brave new world of relationship potential. It’s a ride you may well be sorry to have missed…so far. However, now that you’re reading this book, we hope getting older becomes about increasing—not diminishing—the joys life holds in store for you.
New Archetypes
Women should always marry younger men because men age faster.
Ruth (age 84)
Old barriers are being broken down all around us. Interracial marriages, single parenthood by choice, childless (by choice) marriages and openly committed gay/lesbian relationships represent examples of alternative life options that, unthinkable only a few years ago, are today becoming part of the mainstream. Nevertheless, all of them were—and some still are—met with resistance, derision and non-acceptance. However, the resistance is far less today than it was yesterday, as increasing numbers of people feel empowered to live their lives in accordance with their own needs, beliefs and values. The people who are entering these new territories and creating these new archetypes are, for the most part, sane, intelligent, responsible and productive members of society. Many of them happen to be older women.
According to Dr. Kathleen Calabrese, a Manhattan-based psychotherapist:
As a woman comes into her power, the greatest creative force on earth is unleashed. It is a woman’s nature to create, to stimulate growth, to challenge status quo, but a young woman often does not understand this to any depth. She does not take this in as true about herself. It takes time and living life for a woman to be in touch with her power and to become willing to exercise it. This feminine power is born of wisdom, which develops well after work has begun, degrees have been earned, marriages have been launched and children have been born.
The creators of these new archetypes are courageous enough to withstand the often overwhelming pressure to conform to the old social norms and traditions, norms and traditions that just don’t happen to work for everyone.
One of the most obviously manifest signs of an evolutionary change in the zeitgeist is in the new choices being made today by women. As women of the baby boomer generation mature, come into their own and exercise greater economic and political power, they are upsetting old traditions and creating new ones. Dr. Calabrese reminds us that today far greater numbers of women than men are choosing to dissolve their long-term marriages to face the hazards of the unknown. She goes on:
Increasing numbers of women are choosing to live their lives as single women. One of the ways we know that women are beginning to see themselves as multifaceted individuals rather than simply as caregivers and nurturers of others is because more and more older women are leaving the security and comfort of their long-term marriages to live life in a more honest, autonomous way. This is an indication that the stranglehold of the patriarchy is loosening, albeit slowly and painfully, and a more inclusive, expansive, feminine energy is coming in to offer balance and wholeness to a fractured world. It will probably be another millennium before this evolutionary process reaches and impacts all levels of culture, but women are the pioneers of this great revolution.
Older women/younger men relationships are far more prevalent and far more successful than society at large would have us believe. The theme that the social order reinforces often is the message that these relationships are a bad thing—and even under the very best of circumstances—are only a temporary thing. Popular movies, after all, suggest that it’s perfectly okay for a man in his fifties and sixties (and if the man looks like Paul Newman, in his seventies) to court, woo and end up with a woman twenty or even thirty years younger. However, in those rare cases in which the woman is older than the man, such coupling ends badly, sadly or tragically. The truth is, we’ve been sold a bill of goods, one we’re just beginning to realize is bogus. Our research for this book confirms that older women/younger men relationships are an increasingly viable (dare we say common?) phenomenon. But many of them are “hidden” because of widely accepted perceptions that they are somehow less than high quality relationships. Psychology Today magazine recently featured an analysis of this situation:
Today, more and more women find the men of their generation stuck in an outdated patriarchal mode and the men of the next generation more eager for gender equality.
Out here in the three-dimensional world, September-May relationships stand a good chance of working, if the aging woman can stop taking seriously the messages from the movies that tell her that men naturally want younger women. Real men want women of any age who like them, who want to make them feel good and who raise their testosterone level.
There is an enormous population of older single, divorced and widowed women (think baby boomers) who are repeatedly frustrated in their efforts to find appropriate mates. “There aren’t any men out there,” many complain. The “age appropriate” men they meet are too often far less evolved than these women or are threatened by the women’s success or are in depressing physical shape or are themselves seeking women who are fifteen to twenty years younger (trophy wives). As if this weren’t bad enough, there is also the fact that there are far fewer forty-plus men who are single to begin with. Men tend to re-couple quickly after divorce or the death of a spouse. And how about the much lamented recognition by many, many single women that “the best looking and most sensitive ones are gay?” Because of all the existing stereotypes, most women have never been open to the possibility of finding serious mates from the pool of younger men. Those who are open to it, however, are finding a lot of satisfaction.
Older women who choose partnerships with significantly younger men are an example of one aspect of a new archetype that is emerging. We have no role models and no one to show us how to successfully navigate this road less traveled.
Traditional relationships are tough enough to manage, even though for these we do have plenty of guidance and support. Still, they run aground. Look at the divorce rate. In creating a new relationship archetype, we truly are pioneers, with our courage, intuition and innate wisdom being our only guides. The pioneers who settled the Old West had to fight a challenging environment. Today’s relationship pioneers, the creators of all kinds of new family dynamics, have to fight, in many cases, hostile friends, neighbors and family members. We are birthing something new, and the process of giving birth is often a messy business, bloody and painful.
When the age difference is an obvious one and the woman looks decidedly older than her partner, some people will feel free to stare and make rude remarks. “Oh, are you his mother?” they might ask disingenuously, knowing full well that’s not the case. Since they wouldn’t dream of being so overtly rude and even cruel to a couple in which the man is clearly older, here they are engaging in age, as well as gender, discrimination. It’s like being back in the fifties when, even in sophisticated metropolitan centers, an interracial couple would be openly gawked and sneered at. Can you even imagine that being the case today? Interracial couples are a fairly commonplace sight wherever you go these days, and while some individuals still may not like the idea, they certainly don’t (most of them, anyway) express their prejudice in such a public way. They wouldn’t dare. Society evolves slowly and some people evolve even more slowly than that, but even they learn what they can and cannot get away with.
Bias crimes, for instance, are illegal in the United States today. Yes, they still occur, but the fact that they are illegal illustrates that the society at large recognizes these crimes as being morally outrageous. This recognition alone