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The Last Taboo: Older Women--Younger Men
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15650 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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2 / 1989 |
2,385 Words |
| Author
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Steve Kaplan
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Older woman-younger man relationships may represent one of the last taboos in today's free-thinking society. Stereotypes, often negative, abound in perceptions of such relationships. Marcia Appel knows this only too well. Appel, an attractive, energetic blonde, recalls saying goodbye to her younger boyfriend (who later became her husband) at the airport. As he was getting onto the plane, she burst into tears. A woman standing next to Appel turned and said, "Is your son going off to college, too?"
It is hard to imagine Appel, barely seven years older than her husband, being mistaken for his mother. But too much of America, if a woman is with a younger man, it is assumed she must be his mother or aunt; the thought of her being his lover somehow makes people uncomfortable and is vaguely unacceptable. However, these perceptions do not reflect today's realities.
The truth is that more than one out of five marriages today involve women who are older than their husbands, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. In one out of every seventeen marriages, the bride is at least five years older than the groom. Almost one-third of divorced women marrying men who have never been married before are older than their husbands. And census statistics show that marriages in which the woman is older than the man are rapidly increasing across the United States. When you think about it, these data make good demographic sense.
The simple fact is that the older a woman gets, the less chance she has of finding a mate among men her own age. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are three times as many divorcees, widows, and single women forty-five years and older as there are available men. In addition, women in this age group must face the fact that their middle-aged male counterparts tend to marry younger women. More than two-thirds of men older than fifty marry women younger than themselves, with more than half that number marrying women ten years or more younger. The obvious solution to this dilemma is for single women to include younger men in their dating possibilities, a solution they have been quietly yet enthusiastically adopting.
There are, of course, some widely trumpeted cases of older women-younger men relationships. Forty-three-year-old Cher's relationship with 24-year-old Robert Camilletti, and 52-year-old Joan Collins' marriage to, and subsequent divorce from, 38-year-old Peter Holm have kept the gossip pages and tabloids afire for months. But they are viewed as unusual affairs--indulgences of the rich and famous. In the everyday world, such relationships are given much less leeway. Society tends to view women who marry younger men as "cradle robbers" and men who marry older women as subconsciously wanting to marry their mothers. Sylvia Grant, a New York City-based psychotherapist (who is married to a man ten years her junior), says such speculations are meaningless, as all relationships are based on early life role models.
"We all look for some other person who reflects what intimacy was for us in the early part of our lives. But age difference alone is a poor indicator of whether or not we are looking for a parent model. The way a couple interacts will tell much more clearly than their age difference if one or the other is seeking a parent model."
Marriages between older women and
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