Myself: female, 22 years old. I’ve only had one boyfriend who was a year younger than me. We broke up five months ago. Anyhow, the reason why I’m posting it here is the following: last month my mom found out that a daughter of one of her friends was marrying a man 15 years her senior. She’s 25, he’s 40. It’s a first marriage for both. Neither of them have kids. She’s ready to settle down and start a family. My mom said that she’s making a huge mistake and that he’s way too old for her. Obviously, my mom kept her opinion to herself. She did however say that the fiancé looks about 32 and that when you see them together you don’t see a big age difference between them. He’s a fitness instructor.
So, we’ve discussed it a few times and my mom basically says that this girl is ruining her life. When I mentioned that legally he isn’t even old enough to be her father, my mom said that it’s still too much and that ideally it should be under ten years.Now, I’m not talking about extreme cases like Hugh Hefner or Anna Nicole Smith where you had a difference of 60 years, or Rupert Murdoch - 37 years. Still, what do you think is the cut-off point in age differences? Is my mom right?
I am exactly 20 years older than my partner, same birthday. We’ve been together over 25 years, with no end in sight. In many ways the age difference adds to the relationship, because it can broaden our respective points of view.
I just looked through some websites with statistics about the influence of age differences on divorce statistics. The conclusion of most research is that age differences have little effect on the probability of divorce. Some studies think that there is some tendency for marriages with the wife significantly older than the husband to be a little more likely to end in divorce than those with the husband and wife the same age, but the effect of age difference there is still not large. Most studies show that the husband being older has no effect on the divorce rate.
No, your mom sounds like an opinionated suburban idiot who thinks that anyone who doesn’t follow the same exact mediocre life plan as everyone else she knows is “ruining her life”.
First of all, short of going to jail or becoming an unemployable homeless drug addict, there are really very few ways to “ruin your life”. Shit happens sometimes - people get divorced, they lose jobs, people they know die, whatever. You adapt and move on.
15 years is a big age difference, but it’s not like she’s 19 and it doesn’t sound like he’s trying to relive his college years or anything like that.
Do they account for religious/cultural factors? There are social sets where marrying off young women to older men is a thing, and divorce is not acceptable.
My grandparents differed 10 years in age, and though it “worked out” and my grandmother did not “ruin her life”, she does always advise others against such a big age gap.
As they aged the gap widened. My grandfather became an “old man”, while she was still young and fit and able to do stuff. They used to be incredibly active and loved travelling, and while she was still up for that he could barely move about anymore. And mentally, as well as physically. He became a grumbly old conservative, out of touch with the world and hostile to everything new. So she could no longer share her life with him, or have an interesting conversation with her partner.
It was sad, and it might well be easier if you age together. Of course, there are no guarantees. People change, people get sick, people stop loving one another, regardless of age difference.
At least my grandparents were committed to each other, they stuck it out. She looked after him until the end, even though they didn’t really get to do the aging process together.
Depends on what you mean by “work out.” I was with my first long-term SO for 13 years; she was not quite +11 years on me. In the end, it was less age-related issues than intellectual ones; she was a wonderful person of perfectly adequate intelligence and education, but had no ability to keep up with my pursuits. She married a contractor and was happy - and still in love with me - until her premature death. So: did that work out or not?
My uncle’s second wife was actually slightly younger than his eldest child- he had her at 18 (oops). They were both divorced at the time, though she was still only in her 20s I think. That worked out fine for nearly 30 years, until his sudden death last year.
If there’s a significant ‘life stage’ gap, there can be issues, but that really is a personality thing rather than a simple age gap. For example a friend married a guy in his 30s when she was 19. She’s not stupid, and I don’t think a guy her own age would have been able to manipulate her in the way he did- but she didn’t have the life experience to realise that being older did not make him necessarily more sensible or reliable. In less than a year, she was out of university, and stuck at home with twins, because he’d convinced her that as he was ready for kids, he’d look after them all and it’d be OK.
They’re not still together, but he is still irresponsible.
I know this is only an anecdote – But my father was 26 years older than my mother, and they were very happy together with their three kids until his death. The marriage was a marriage of love, no arrangements whatsoever (they met by chance at the hospital where my mother worked as a nurse – my father was a doctor and he was carrying out some kind of visit there).
Age itself doesn’t mean a whole lot, but I think it can correlate with some factors that do. For instance, how likely is it that two people 10+ years apart are going to share similar interests, be at similar levels of maturity, be in similar places in their lives, etc.? Chances are, they won’t have much in common. But, even that is misleading because if two people don’t have anything in common, what is the likelihood that they will meet, get a connection, and bring it far enough that they would consider getting married?
In other words, two random people that are 10 years apart are probably less likely than two random people around the same age to get along, particularly as they’re both younger. However, two people in a relationship aren’t a random, even if their meeting essentially was. And, in fact, some people may ultimately have better luck with people of a significantly different age if their lives aren’t much like their peers. So I don’t think age is much of a predictor for the success of a relationship beyond the initial stages.
From my personal experience, I know several relationships I would call successful, married for decades without any current signs of marriage issues, with significant age gaps. Hell, one is somewhere around 18 years difference and they’ve been together well over 30 years.
My favorite happy couple with a large age difference is Maxwell Caulfield and Juliet Mills. They married in 1980 when he was 21 and she was 39, and are still together 33 years later. They met in a play and have been acting both separately and together ever since, so they do have some common interests. I think every relationship is unique, and blanket statements about what will and won’t work are shortsighted. My mother objects to any couple that has too large a height difference, even though she is 8 inches shorter than my father. I just roll my eyes.
Ten years doesn’t seem like that big of an age gap that he should turn into an “old man” so quickly. I know guys in their 20s and 30s who act like old men while there are men in their 50s or 60s who still have a youthfull outlook on life.
I only have personal experience with one such couple- one of my wife’s friends married a man who was at least 20 years older. (She was 25.) They got married a couple of months after they met. 20 years later they still seemed to be perfectly happy and content. No children, by choice. Although we lost touch with them around that time (we had an irreparable falling out), ten years later we learned they were still together.
As others have said, it depends on the people. My husband and I married when I was 27 and he was 41. First marriage for both. We just celebrated our tenth anniversary, and all signs point to us being together until somebody dies.
Everybody seems to assume that he will die and leave me as a young widow, but his family are generally long-lived so who knows. And guess who got cancer first? Me!! (I’m fine.) There really are no guarantees no matter how close in age you are.
It really doesn’t come up much except when he reminisces about something and realizes I wasn’t born yet when it happened, but we find that funny. Or when he doesn’t want to do something and tries to beg off because he’s “old and tired.”
And I get to make jokes about the lecherous old man that won’t keep his hands off me. That doesn’t work as well when he’s only got a year or two on you.
> My husband and I married when I was 27 and he was 41.
> Everybody seems to assume that he will die and leave me as a young widow . . .
A 27-year-old American woman is expected to live another 54.73 years. A 41-year-old American man is expected to live another 37.31 years. So at your marriage one could expect that he would die and leave you a 64-year-old widow, after which you would be expected to live for another 17 years. Would you be a young widow at 64?
Vera98 writes:
> She’s 25, he’s 40.
A 25-year-old American woman is expected to live another 56.67 years. A 40-year-old American man is expected to live another 38.23 years. So at their marriage it can be expected that he will die leaving her a 63-year-old widow, after which she is expected to live for another 18 years.
Actuarial Life Table:
We seemed to have jumped from one objection to such a marriage to another. We started with the objection that such a marriage is much more likely to end in divorce. That’s not true. We then went to the objection that such a marriage is likely to end with the woman becoming a young widow. That isn’t true either, unless you stretch the term “young widow.”
Thank you for allowing me to do research. I’m not sure I’ll take you up on it, though. I do think, however, there is a pretty good point in what I brought up.
I don’t think marriages with large age gaps are automatically doomed, but I do think they bring a set of challenges that wouldn’t be there if the age-gap wasn’t there. And I’m wary of anyone marrying under 25 or so.
My wife is 13 years younger than I am. We have been living together for 15 years and married for the last six. I can’t think of any instance where the age difference has caused an issue. We met when she was 28 and I was 41. I was a single father raising two teenage boys and had my mother living with me at that time, and she* still *stuck around. We continue to be perfectly happy with each other.
If we had met at a younger age there might have been more issues. I started college when she was only 4 years old, so we couldn’t really date.
So I wasted some time marrying my childhood sweetheart and another woman I didn’t have anything in common with. Just to pass the time.
