Interestingly, a study on age-gap relationships indicated that cases in which the wife was older than the husband showed a higher than usual proportion of good fits, as did those in which the husband was eight or more years older. However, these same marriages also showed the highest proportion of poor fit.
The happiest group of husbands was found to have wives twelve or more years younger, but the happiest wives were four to ten years older than their husbands. However, the happiest couples were those in which the husband was three to five years older. So find out. Here are some helpful principles:
1. If the man is about the same age or slightly older than the girl, there will be no special age-appropriateness problem.
2. If the girl is a little older, there will be no special problem unless one or the other feels sensitive about it. The only question then will be: “How do you feel about it?”
3. As people get older, the age differences become less important. All things being equal, there will be less difference between a fifty-year-old woman and a seventy-year-old man than between a twenty-year-old girl and a forty-year-old man.
4. When one is relatively young and the other up to twelve years older, the couple should carefully review the following issues:
In these age gap relationships, there can be real differences in your interest in physical activities. If the man is the oldest, this may not be too important. A thirty-five-year-old man can play golf or even tennis just as well and swim as well as a twenty-year-old girl.
In fact, their age difference can make them more evenly matched. A relationship problem with a greater age gap will be the stage in which your interests are found.
Younger people often want to wander to dances, parties, nightclubs, and similar activities. As people get older, these activities are much less attractive and can become boring if they are practiced too much.
If the man is considerably older and he and his wife do what he wants, she may miss a phase of his experience that, rightly or wrongly, she will always regret. If they do what she enjoys the most, they will drag him through the same experiences twice, perhaps after he’s eager to move on to something else.
A compromised can work. On the other hand, it can result in a type of social life that is not satisfactory for either of you. A deeper phase of the same problem concerns one’s attitude towards life. For those with less experience, age-gap relationship problems seem much simpler than they really are.
Young people are likely to feel that the older generation must be rascals or fools, or they would have long ago abolished war, poverty, industrial strife, and mosquitoes.
Older people, on the other hand, often find the enthusiasm of youth amusing. They can tolerate them in their children, but they do not want them in their spouse. If the age difference is so great that the wife regards her husband as an old man, and the husband thinks of his wife as a mere girl who spends too much time and effort on things that do not matter, the situation is not favorable for a child . successful marriage.
However, just because age gap relationships are risky doesn’t necessarily mean they shouldn’t be attempted. A twenty-five-year-old girl who was marrying a man twice her age stated strongly that she would rather marry a first-class man in his fifties than a third-class man in his thirties.
There could be other advantages to such a union. The girl who marries an older man has a better chance of knowing what she is achieving. In any case, the most important consideration is not age, but maturity.
Younger people who are more mature than most of their contemporaries may find an older partner to be more likable. However, as in any age-gap relationship, the preference for a much older partner must be examined very carefully.
The danger is that the older person is psychologically a surrogate parent, rather than a partner.
