Why is it that older men love dating younger women, and many people don’t think much about it? It doesn’t require any research to realize that older men love someone who makes them feel young at heart. However, why is it that the younger women who loves to date older guys are often stereotyped?
While most research cite specifically deals with younger women-older gentlemen attractions, some could argue that younger men-older women relationships are now flourishing, as well. However, I will leave the second topic to a separate blog post!
Attraction to an Older Man
Some say that these younger women have daddy issues when they want someone older, but that’s not always the case. Others say they are just interested in money. You must put stereotypes aside and realize that some women love the senior guy because of his maturity. They also crave the worldly wisdom they’ve obtained as well as the financial stability they’ve acquired. Keep in mind that financial stability doesn’t always mean wealth. It just means that they’ve made their blunders at a young age and have already learned the hard financial lessons. Society tends to accept a small age gap, which is anywhere from 5-10 years difference. However, what about the women that date men that are old enough to be their fathers(20 years or more)? Is there a limit on age restrictions, and how do you know if the age gap is too much for a relationship?
There are both evolutionary and social motives behind a woman wanting an older man. Irrespective of the motive, both parties will have to overcome much stigma and many stereotypes to be together. If you are a bible reader, go find a relationship between men and women in the bible I believe most women are somewhat younger than their men... I have yet to read about an older woman with a younger man in any testament.
Many people will stop and gawk when they see an older man holding hands or kissing a younger woman in public. It has to do with cultural norms and what society expects. People passing have no clue about this couple, yet they are ready to make snap judgments on what they see.
Many studies have been conducted on these types of relationships, and science has come up with a few answers.
The Apparent Unfair Benefit of Age
In 2018, a study examined why there are so much prejudice and stereotypes when people are involved in age gap relationships. The bias rate was much higher in a relationship where the woman was younger and the man much older. Many think that the man has the upper hand in these unions, which equals relational inequity. Older men that enter a relationship with younger women are often called “cradle robbers,” but the women are called “gold diggers,” both of which are derogatory terms.
Other women see the younger lady with an older gentleman, and they perceive that they want a comfortable lifestyle that money and this guy can offer. In other cases, they may insist that it’s the connections and resources they wish to gain to help further their career or obtain a certain social status in life. Not all relationships are about money or influence. In fact, many people are together because they love each other and nothing else. True love doesn’t look at the chronological age and see any difference as it’s more focused on the heart and the brain.
Interpersonal Connection and Age
In 2016, a study was done on why some women wanted the older man as a partner. When the age gap is more than ten years, people think it’s an unhealthy relationship with the father. This study wanted to prove or discredit this theory, and they found that it’s not a fair stereotype because there’s no truth in these claims. Of the 173 participants in this study, 44 were dating men at least a decade older than themselves. Most of these women had good relationships with their fathers and did not need to seek solace or a father/daughter relationship with an older man.
About 75 percent of the women said that they weren’t looking for a father figure, but they preferred the company of an older man to make them feel secure. If the father had been a great role model for the younger woman in life, then the maturity level they observed growing up brings them comfort in their relationship.
Younger Women Want Pleasant, and Strong Relationships–Regardless of Age
A couple with any sort of age difference can enjoy a healthy, satisfying, and loving relationship. Regardless of whether there are ulterior motives or one of the parties suffers from past childhood issues, many have strong unions that can stand up against the scrutiny of society.
Sure, there are couples where a younger woman wants to date the older man due to ulterior motives or because they are looking for a marriage of convenience. However, it’s unfair to lump all relationships with age gaps in this category. More often than not, people come together because they love each other.
FINAL THOUGHTS.
As a man who had romantic relationships with both older and younger women. I was the guy who very seldom stuck to social expectations. Women who were my age sometimes made me feel like I had to fit in their requirement.SMDH! so I often search for the woman who liked the things that we both liked. Since I had older friends the social connections often got me into relationships with women who were not the same age as I was.
Everyone you marry has a weakness. So if you focus on your spouse's weakness you can't get the best out of his/ her strength.
Secret 2
Everyone has a dark history. No one is an angel. When you get married or you want to get married stop digging into someone's past. What matters most is the present life of your partner. Old things have passed away. Forgive and forget. Focus on the present and the future.
Secret 3
Every marriage has its own challenges. Marriage is not a bed of roses. Every good marriage has gone through its own test of blazing fire. True love proves in times of challenges. Fight for your marriage. Make up your mind to stay with your spouse in times of need. Remember the vow For better for worse. In sickness and in health be there.
Secret 4
Every marriage has different levels of success. Don't compare your marriage with any one else. We can never be equal. Some will be far, some behind. To avoid marriage stresses, be patient, work hard and with time your marriage dreams shall come true.
Secret 5
To get married is declaring war. When you get married you must declare war against enemies of marriage. Some enemies of marriage are:
1. Ignorance
2. Prayerlessness
3. Unforgiveness
4. Third party influence
5. Stinginess
6. Stubbornness
7. Lack of love
9. Rudeness
10. Laziness
11. Disrespect
12. Habitual Cheating
Be ready to fight to maintain your marriage zone.
Secret 6
There is no perfect marriage. There is no ready made marriage. Marriage is hard work. Volunteer yourself to work daily on it.
Marriage is like a car that needs proper maintenance and proper service. If this is not done it will break down somewhere exposing the owner to danger or some unhealthy circumstances. Let us not be careless about our marriages.
Secret 7
The Creator of the universe cannot give you a complete person you desire.
He gives you the person in the form of raw materials.
I was watching an interview with Kerry Washington, where she told the story that her dad was not her biological father. As it turns out she does not know who her biological father really is.... her mother went to a sperm bank. Her father is still unknown to her. I will read her book just I can understand what she is feeling after realizing that her dad was not her dad!
Some People share Their funds (but begrudge it), others split everything two ways. How do folks negotiate joint incomes is a relationship minefield.
A woman may think. "I know it’s an unusual arrangement to have a joint account for absolutely everything, but I think it works because he’s generous to a fault. There are times I feel I’m not pulling my weight these days, though in the past I’ve been the breadwinner(while single). He’s absolutely a good guy; he’s never made me feel bad. It’s been, “This is our bank account, this is our Debit card, you do what you need to do.”
She doesn’t go and buy herself clothes if she doesn’t feel she needs them. She has not earned much that month. she knows if she said that to her husband, he would say, “Look, that’s ridiculous.” He’d treat her to a pair of new shoes if he felt she was neglecting herself.
It’s old-fashioned; a bit strange, definitely. When she discusses this sort of thing with her friends, there aren’t many people like that. I don’t think there are a lot of men who would say, “You haven’t earned anything but go and treat yourself to new shoes.”
Discussing this with a friend recently, she said she wouldn’t be able to tolerate this arrangement. She said every time she bought a cup of coffee or a lipstick from the joint account, she’d feel he was breathing down her neck. But our personality types make it quite a laid-back arrangement. Neither one of us is particularly organized or are very good with money.
Should I have a bit of financial independence or freedom? I don’t feel that’s something I need. If something terrible happened, I’d cross that bridge when I get to it. I won’t live for the worst-case scenario.
We moved in together after a year, and everything was fine until we got a mortgage. I thought it would make sense if we had one account for all the bills that we could pay some money into, and then whatever we had left would be our own. So I got the forms for a joint account, and he never signed them. They lay there for three years until I chucked them out. I reminded him and he said I was nagging, so I stopped mentioning it. Since I got pregnant, he’s bought our son one jumper and I’ve bought everything else; he hasn’t paid her back.
All the bills are paid on a very casual basis – I pay some, he pays some – and it gives me a headache, because I never know where we are with money. Both of us probably think we pay the bigger share, but I don’t actually know who does.
There’s no system at all. I’m paying all the childcare at the moment and he just keeps saying, “Oh, I’ll do it.” I would drop dead with shock if she came home from work and had sorted it out.
We went to a counsellor and this came up. The counsellor said to him, “It’s a form of control; you really need full financial disclosure.” Her husband was surprised at her strength of feeling about it and that she saw it as him being secretive. But if I bring the subject up, he gets really wound up and changes the subject; it ends in a row. It’s not the 1950s. He’s full grown man! Grow up.
‘I pay for everything we do’
We don’t do joint finances because The man is too proud, and because I spend it all recklessly rather than save. I pay for pretty much everything that we do. It’s normal – I make much more money.
I’ve said lots of times, “Why don’t we just pool the money in a joint account?” He doesn’t want that: he doesn’t want to feel as though he’s in a sugar-daddy relationship. He prefers not to go to fancy restaurants; he prefers something simpler.
He always says things like, “Oh, I need to pay you back for this”, and of course he never does. It doesn’t matter, but it helps him feel I’m aware that he’s grateful. He’s got a credit card with his name on it, but it’s my account, my current account. Yes, I give him money sometimes. It depends how much he needs: when he went to the US, it was $1,300. Like any relationship, it’s “What’s mine is yours”.
‘We see ourselves as one’
They’ve been married more than 30 years. Since they moved in together, all their money has been each other’s – they have a joint account. Everything is jointly owned. I think it’s a Christian thought that what you have, you share, and that you are part of one family.
I am guided by the teachings of Jesus in terms of having a one-world perspective. We have a lot of creature comforts, but we don’t value material possessions that much. At different times in our lives, my husband has worked, I’ve not; and I’ve worked and he hasn’t – we see ourselves as one. The principle is to help each other, and that would include members of the wider family: others who might be in need. Whenever we can, we donate to charity. At the moment we’re living on £1 a day for food for Lent, to raise awareness of third world hunger.
I think it’s about sharing. You have a responsibility to care for other people, because the way in which we survive is interdependent on a global scale. It’s about being mindful that what we have is not ours.
‘We put everything in an Excel document’
You’re going to laugh: I have a life plan based on an Excel document. It works. It’s got columns for monthly salary in, outgoings, savings and savings towards the mortgage. When my fiancée came to live with me, we said let’s build on this Excel document and adapt it for both our incomes. We worked out a system.
We have separate accounts. In terms of how much of the bills we each pay, I have split these in proportion to our salaries. I earn 70% of our total income, so I pay around 70% of the aggregated total including water, electricity, cable and internet.
In terms of food, she pays all of it a month and I will cover the difference if she short– we usually spend around $200 on food. She’s got a credit card, but I pay it off if it’s for food and household stuff. It was just a way of being fair. I know it sounds very precise and mathematical, but it works.
I suppose the whole point of being engaged is that it’s a trial period to see how things would work out in married life. If she were earning more than me and if she paid more of the bills, from a male point of view I wouldn’t feel comfortable. There’d always be the dreaded conversation with the in-laws – her parents would be like, “Ah, well...” I think we’d probably go back to 50:50. I do have a little pride.
Her family is far better off than mine. I’ve had to struggle to get money. A lot of my friends get help from their parents with mortgages, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that. That’s probably why I feel that fairness with money is important.
‘I just think he’s tight with his money’
To me, a proper couple shares everything. We’re very much two individual people in a relationship and it’s really difficult. My boyfriend wants it to be that his money is his and my money is mine, even though we have a five-year-old boy and we’ve been together seven years. He also expects me to pay for our son’s childcare and for half of all holidays.
He earns four times as much as I do, but he’s very much, “Why should I pay for more because I work hard for my money?” He feels that his money should be his to do with as he likes. He thinks that I have a nice, fluffy little job and I get to do lots of nice things and I don’t work very hard. I just think he’s tight.
The house belongs to me. I bought it before I met him and he moved in. He grudgingly pays half the mortgage, but he doesn’t think he should do any jobs in the house because it’s not his. When I say jobs, I mean fixing, cleaning or decorating.
If I want to go out at night, I have to send him an email and ask, “Is there any chance you can be around to have [our son] on this night?” He just plans what he wants to do when he wants to do it.
It does rankle, and a lot of people think I’m a single mum, but I’ve got to the stage where it’s not worth arguing about. It’s never going to be any different. I don’t think it would change if we were married, I really don’t.
The main reason we’re together is because of our son, so he can have a stable upbringing. It’s not the best relationship in the world. I feel as if I’m not a valid partner in the relationship.
‘We split everything two ways’
We have separate accounts. We haven’t been cohabiting very long and it’s safer to buy some things individually, in case we were to split.
We moved last weekend and bought some furniture together. We said that if we were to split up, the other person would pay the difference to buy it off the other.
We’re very open. He earns a bit more than me, and he’s got more disposable income, so if he wants to buy something and I’m all, “Oh, I don’t really want to buy that”, we’ll both use it but he pays for it. We’ll joke about it. I’ll say, “You earn more than me, it’s so unfair.” It’s not like resenting him or anything. It’s quite a laid-back relationship.
Everything has a receipt: we say how much it costs and we’ll split it two ways. Receipts for everything that we both use go in.
I think if we got married, there wouldn’t be as much keeping track of how much we spend. For us, it’s still quite early on. You never know what’s going to happen.
‘I have a separate account for my gaming’
You’re going to laugh: I have a life plan based on an Excel document. It works. It’s got columns for monthly salary in, outgoings, savings and savings towards the mortgage. When my fiancée came to London and we got our own flat, we said let’s build on this Excel document and adapt it for both our incomes. We worked out a system.
We have separate accounts. In terms of how much of the bills we each pay, I have split these in proportion to our salaries. I earn 70% of our total income, so I pay around 70% of the aggregated total including water, electricity, Sky and internet.
In terms of food, she pays me $80 a month and I will cover the difference – we usually spend around $210 on food. She’s got a credit card, but I pay it off if it’s for food and household stuff. It was just a way of being fair. I know it sounds very precise and mathematical, but it works.
I suppose the whole point of being engaged is that it’s a trial period to see how things would work out in married life. If she were earning more than me and if she paid more of the bills, from a male point of view I wouldn’t feel comfortable. There’d always be the dreaded conversation with the in-laws – her parents would be like, “Ah, well...” I think we’d probably go back to 50:50. I do have a little pride.
Her family is far better off than mine. I’ve had to struggle to get money. A lot of my friends get help from their parents with mortgages, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that. That’s probably why I feel that fairness with money is important.
‘I just think he’s very cheap’
To me, a proper couple shares everything. We’re very much two individual people in a relationship and it’s really difficult. My boyfriend wants it to be that his money is his and my money is mine, even though we have a five-year-old boy and we’ve been together seven years. He also expects me to pay for our son’s childcare and for half of all holidays.
He earns four times as much as I do, but he’s very much, “Why should I pay for more because I work hard for my money?” He feels that his money should be his to do with as he likes. He thinks that I have a nice, fluffy little job and I get to do lots of nice things and I don’t work very hard. I just think he’s tight.
The house belongs to me. I bought it before I met him and he moved in. He grudgingly pays half the mortgage, but he doesn’t think he should do any jobs in the house because it’s not his. When I say jobs, I mean fixing, cleaning or decorating.
If I want to go out at night, I have to send him an email and ask, “Is there any chance you can be around to have [our son] on this night?” He just plans what he wants to do when he wants to do it.
It does rankle, and a lot of people think I’m a single mum, but I’ve got to the stage where it’s not worth arguing about. It’s never going to be any different. I don’t think it would change if we were married, I really don’t.
The main reason we’re together is because of our son, so he can have a stable upbringing. It’s not the best relationship in the world. I feel as if I’m not a valid partner in the relationship.
‘We split everything two ways’
We have separate accounts. We haven’t been cohabiting very long and it’s safer to buy some things individually, in case we were to split.
We moved last weekend and bought some furniture together. We said that if we were to split up, the other person would pay the difference to buy it off the other.
We’re very open. He earns a bit more than me, and he’s got more disposable income, so if he wants to buy something and I’m all, “Oh, I don’t really want to buy that”, we’ll both use it but he pays for it. We’ll joke about it. I’ll say, “You earn more than me, it’s so unfair.” It’s not like resenting him or anything. It’s quite a laid-back relationship.
Everything has a receipt: we say how much it costs and we’ll split it two ways. Receipts for everything that we both use go in.
I think if we got married, there wouldn’t be as much keeping track of how much we spend. For us, it’s still quite early on. You never know what’s going to happen.
‘I have a separate account for my gambling’
We’ve got a shared bank account and individual accounts, and we each put money into the shared bank account. Then we use our money – what we’ve got left – on what we want. Food, shoes: all the stuff that’s non-couple-related.
And I have a separate account for my gambling – mainly football betting. Each month I put about $350 into that. I’ve made a few grand a few times. I’m doing OK at the moment, but sometimes I lose it all. I wouldn’t want to gamble with her money, definitely not. She probably doesn’t realize how much I spend on it. We’re trying to save at the moment, so she’d probably mind.
A lot of my friends do pretty similar things, if they’ve got girlfriends they’re living with. People like to keep their independence. It’s nice to have that bit of privacy and to be able to spend what you want without your partner having a go at you for being frivolous.
‘What was hers was mine and what was mine was my mine’
I was brought up when there wasn’t a lot, with violence from my father, and left school at 13. When I met my wife, she had a big bank account – when she met me, it disappeared very quickly. I’m an alcoholic, but I haven’t had a drink for 26 and a half years.
I never had a bank account until the mid-1970s. You used to get your wages in cash. I gave my wife her money every week and I had my money to drink. It was a struggle; we struggled through life.
The missus didn’t work once the first child came along in 1967. What was hers was mine and what was mine was my own. I was contributing, but being an alcoholic you’re self-centered – you must have your fix, and I suppose I wasn’t the best father.
This year we’ve been together for 50 years. Our only income is our pensions, which pay for our housing association home. Growing up, we always had family, and families seemed to pull together. I don’t think there’s enough of that these days.
I carry a very small purse: sometimes it’s empty, sometimes it’s full of change. Very rarely there’s notes in it, but I’m never broke. It was Valentine’s Day the other day and I had enough in to buy flowers for the missus. They weren’t red roses, they weren’t chocolates. They were a small bunch of daffodils and now they’re blooming.
We spent my money and saved hers’
Pete, 47, lives on benefits. His ex-wife Zoe is 45 and a full-time mother of their two children.
We were a couple with no children in our mid-30s with two good incomes. My ex was a secretary and I was in marketing and helping to run nightclubs. We were up in London painting the town red.
It was always in the arrangement that we would spend my money and she would save hers, putting away for the likelihood of family and a deposit on a house. That arrangement worked well for me, because it meant I didn’t have to think about it. We went out clubbing and I would pay for the taxi, I would pay for the club entrance and the drinks – she was ordering champagne by the glass at the restaurant.
After a couple of years, she got pregnant and we moved to a rented house in Wales, where we’d both grown up. I was going to take some quality time out for paternity leave, start a new business, but it takes time to set that sort of thing up, and by the time our second child came along, we started arguing and the relationship was suffering.
When finances became an issue, I said, “Well, we’ve got savings and if this is a rainy day, perhaps we need to dip into them.” She said: “Oh no, no, that’s been set aside for a deposit on a house.”
That was four years ago; we just got our divorce after a very vitriolic family court process. I’m trying to set up a business, but I’m in a bedsit, and the housing benefit doesn’t cover my whole rent, so every month I go further into debt. She went around our home town telling mutual friends that I wasn’t maintaining the children, but I know she is actually drawing upon the tens of thousands of pounds she saved when we were together, so my conscience is clear. Then she had an affair and I had to leave. I found out that over the previous nine months she had squirrelled the savings out of her account into her mother’s and brother’s accounts. So it wasn’t there and it wasn’t easily provable.
I have confronted her – she just sneers and walks off. At one point she said, “Well, it was mine in the first place.” Well, hang on, you were drinking champagne by the glass out of my wallet. In a future relationship, I’ll have a joint account.
