At 7 a.m. on a recent Monday, I sat in a beige waiting room surrounded by back issues of AARP The Magazine
and pamphlets on gastrointestinal health. “Is anyone here for Jack?” a
nurse asked. I raised my hand, and she searched my face for the word she
needed.
“Your…uh…um…”
“Husband,” I filled in for her.
“Right,”
she said, eyebrows raised. “Your husband’s colonoscopy is done and he’s
nearly ready to go home.” She walked me to where Jack, still loopy from
anesthesia, chatted merrily with the surgery center staff, his naked
butt exposed in his backless hospital gown. He made the nurses giggle
with slurred jokes about Snapchatting his experience in the endoscopy
ward—funny, because Jack's never used Snapchat.
“He’s such a hoot!” one of the nurses said.
Couples like us, with an age gap of 20 or more years, have a 95 percent chance of divorce.
Ten years ago, I couldn't have imagined settling
down with a man 20 years my senior, “hoot” or not. There’s the biannual
colonoscopy to sit through, because at 52, Jack’s at that point in life.
There’s also the social stigma, the difference in career phases, the
fact that Boyz II Men brings him no childhood nostalgia whatsoever. Our
differences, experts say, give couples like us, with an age gap of 20 or
more years, a 95 percent chance of divorce.
Given the statistics, why do women like me yoke ourselves to men old enough to be our fathers?
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Popular theory suggests gold-digging is in effect,
since older men presumably have greater financial security. But three
years into my marriage, I’m still (happily) driving a 2004 Honda Element
with 160,000 miles and a back door held shut with my German Shepherd’s
leash. While I’ll admit that it was Jack who introduced me to the joys
of bottled wine over boxed and hotels over hostels, my husband is a guy
who invests most of his money back into his business and his
community—one of the reasons I fell for him—and I work hard to bring in
my own. Besides, recent research suggests it’s millennial men who are most likely to marry for money. With more than 40 percent of American breadwinners now female, I'd argue we're looking at the rise of the sugar momma.
Harder
for me to write off, according to scientists, is another unflattering
explanation for May-December romances: the dreaded daddy-issues theory.
While an American Psychological Association study debunked the hypothesis that younger wives are compensating for lousy
father-daughter relationships, the research didn’t address women like
me, whose dads have been caring and present and normal. Could we be the
ones subconsciously attracted to a ::cringe:: daddy-husband?
“The short answer is ‘yes,’” says Pepper Schwartz, Ph.D., AARP's love and relationship expert and best-selling author of American Couples.
“A woman can have a healthy relationship with her dad and still be
looking for that father figure in a spouse. Someone who can protect them
and teach them—someone who has taken on the world, and who can help
them take on the world, too. It’s not that these women are sexualizing
their dads, but the things that a dad represents.”
Initially, Jack represented nothing for me but a
job. When we met eight years ago, I waited on his table at a fancy
restaurant in a small New Jersey town. I was a graduate student studying
journalism, and I knew Jack (who was on a date at the time) was the
owner of a local publishing company. Between taking an order and
delivering a check, I pitched myself as a writer-for-hire.
A
gig wasn’t in the cards—his company wasn’t hiring—and neither was a
romance. Jack would tell me later that, although he’d found me cute in
an overly eager, naïve sort of way, I wasn’t his type. His celebrity
crush is Martha Stewart, and I have neither her bone structure nor her
flair for miniature fruitcakes.
“A woman can have a healthy relationship with her dad and still be looking for that father figure in a spouse.”
But a year later, Jack stumbled upon a blog I wrote
and sought me out to offer me a job. It felt thrilling to finally be
working in a real office with real business cards and a real mentor.
When I needed an apartment—tough to find in a resort town with sky-high
rents—Jack offered me a room in his house, which meant we frequently
worked late before coming home to split a bottle of wine. It was here I
discovered Jack’s bleeding heart for animals, his passion for restoring
vintage typewriters, and his talent for narrating dull car trips with an
uncanny Sean Connery impersonation. Somewhere between copy-editing and
cabernet, we became great friends...and then more.
It complicated everything. I fretted for months
over revealing my new relationship to my traditional parents, who were
surprisingly alright with it. I worried that already living with Jack
would torpedo our chance at love. And I worked extra hard at my job in
order to show the small-town-gossip set I wasn’t some floozy with a
fetish for baby boomers. So the implication that falling for Jack could
have been a ploy by my subconscious to secure a daddy figure who’d make
life easier? Cue the explosion of my feminist head.
My
raised hackles are to be expected, sociologists say. Although society
is trending toward greater acceptance of individual choice, there still
exists the idea that by marrying older, a woman has turned against her
gender (i.e., she’s perpetuating the fallacy that men should be
providers while a woman’s value is as a trophy). One friend told me he’d
lost all respect for me when I committed to someone so far my senior.
And when Jack and I married three years ago, acquaintances placed bets
on how long it would last.
“It’s a paradox,”
Schwartz says. “In many cases, the more progressive a woman’s friends,
the more likely they are to raise their eyebrows at a big age gap.
Often, it’s not that there is anything wrong with the love or desire
between the individuals, but with the way it works in terms of placement
in the world—she may get a lifestyle upgrade or an intellectually
potent guy, but it often displaces the woman more than the man.”
Case
in point: Shortly after we started dating, I’m the one who quit my job.
Since Jack’s life in New Jersey was already established, I also
reimagined my five-year plan, which had involved moving to a bigger city
with a larger network of young professionals and fewer early-bird
specials. I can see how, on paper, the power dynamics of my relationship
look ripe for judgement. And that judgement is not entirely unfounded.
In addition to his lumberjack good looks, I am attracted to
Jack’s intellectual potency, his worldliness, and the unwavering way he
protects the things he loves—all idealized “daddy” qualities (albeit
ones I’d also find attractive in a 20-something).
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There have been times—like when we started
having sex—that I’ve happily let Jack take the lead. After all, he’d
been doing it longer than I’d been alive. You would think his
considerable experience would make me, a relative prude, feel
self-conscious about my lack of sexual savvy, but it did the opposite.
I’d spent my adult life pretending to be comfortable with physical
intimacy, trying too hard to be sexy and desirable. Being with someone
so seasoned in the sheets—coupled with my desire for an honest
relationship with this great guy—allowed me to relax and let Jack teach
me. (The lesson: I should be enjoying sex, too.) The double orgasms I
started experiencing made it easy to laugh off friends who said they
didn’t “get” my relationship, as though it were a word problem from high
school algebra. The 2011 book Getting Intimate: A Feminist Analysis of Old Age, Masculinity and Sexuality,
details several studies indicating men become less selfish in bed as
they age. In it author Linn Sanberg, Ph.D., quotes a Swedish verse:
“With the older man you need not worry. He does it thoroughly; he’s in
no hurry. But younger men, they are just shit. They barely get there
before ‘that’s it.’”
For every sexy advantage, there’s an unsexy obstacle: Jack’s idea of classic TV heaven is Gunsmoke; I’d rather binge Gilmore Girls. He bemoans the entitlement of the, ahem, millennial generation over dinner. And my innate millennial thirst for adventure often clashes with Jack’s desire to protect a wonky ankle.
Jack’s idea of classic TV heaven is Gunsmoke; I’d rather binge Gilmore Girls.
A recent ziplining fiasco comes to mind. After
accidentally zipping half-way back, Jack was left spinning forty-five
feet above the ground in slow, dizzying circles, spewing four-letter
words that echoed through the aerial course I’d harangued him into
trying. Later, while laughing about his rescue over a beer, he told me
what had run through his mind while swaying in the breeze: “I’m too old
for this shit.”
Then there’s the greatest
practical disadvantage to marrying older: the worry that you’ll spend a
chunk of your life feeding him Ovaltine through a straw before
ultimately dying alone. Last year, after Jack contracted Lyme disease
but before we received a proper diagnosis, I convinced myself he was
dying and that the thing everyone had warned me about, the relatively
short shelf-life of my marriage, had come to pass. If Jack had been in
his 30s, I’m not sure I would have made the leap from “strange symptoms”
to “certain death” so quickly.
So, if it’s
possible to argue that marrying older wasn’t in my best interest, in
whose interest was it? My hypothetical children's.
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Evolutionarily, "women who were attracted to older
men fared well and produced healthy offspring, since older men tended to
have resources," says Darren Fowler, M.S., a Halifax-based clinical
psychologist and the co-author of the aforementioned daddy-issues study.
"These types of sexual preferences have been molded into our brains.”
In
prehistoric days, “resources” would have included a good network of
hunters, better equipment for spearing saber-toothed tigers, and
generally more caveman knowhow. Today, “resources” refers more to
financial prowess—a diversified portfolio or a job near the C-suite—but
the general idea is the same: the guy who's had more time to accrue
these things is presumably better equipped to help care for a child. The
fact that I’m not even sure I want children? Doesn’t matter, Fowler
says; I could have been nudged by my subconscious.
But
everything's a tradeoff. Coupling up with an older man compounds the
pressure to have children that’s placed on all women; I can hear my
biological clock ticking louder whenever I picture Jack coaching little
league at 65. All the studies confirming links between aging sperm and high-risk pregnancies don’t help. The danger is so great, scientists in New Zealand have spent $345,000 studying the sexual habits of zebrafish in an attempt to pinpoint the biological drive that compels human women to choose older mates, despite the hazards.
While I’m not sure I care to know what a fish has
to say about my life choices, I understand the fascination with age
gaps. Determining our comfort zone (5 years? 20? 40?) is an interesting
litmus test for our personal moral framework and an opportunity to
reflect on the social constructions within that framework. I’ve spent
some time thinking about this well-argued piece by Heather Schwedel,
in which she calls women like me traitors to our generation. Schwedel
refers to an especially large age gap as “everything that’s wrong with
our sexist, youth-worshipping, male-privilege-run-amok society.”
Honestly,
I don’t know where I stand. Maybe I am a traitor. Or maybe Schwedel’s
belief is informed by the same mercurial zeitgeist that determines when
shoulder pads are out of fashion and wallpaper is hip again. Maybe we’d
all do well to dress and decorate and marry however the heck we want.
Isn’t it possible two mismatched people get together simply because they
hit it off, no complex sociobiological equations required?
“The
ultimate thing is looking at this person to person, marriage to
marriage,” Schwartz says. “Sometimes, there’s no accounting for the
psychological bond between people." And sometimes, a few failed ziplines
or dates in the endoscopy ward are a small price to pay for that bond.
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