Whatever part of the conventional wisdom they buy into, American women find it easy to summarily reject younger men. They could be denying themselves the most wonderful relationship of their lives.I was married once before, to a man five years my senior. People were siphoning fuel from their neighbors' cars in the dead of night! She's older than he is, you know." Does our culture's collective discomfort with a reversal of the usual younger woman–older man dynamic come, as scientists suggest, from a deep-rooted evolutionary instinct that drives women to choose the wiser, older, more powerful alpha male over the untested young buck?
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"This is nothing compared to the long lines during the oil crisis," I say to my husband, Bronson, as he pulls into a particularly crowded Mobil station near the Holland Tunnel. Or could it be caused by something as shallow and immediate as a woman's not wanting anyone to think her date is her younger brother or, God help us, her son?
The reason for this is that he's Scarily Healthy.
Open up a younger man's medicine cabinet, and you will see shaving gear, hair gel, a toothbrush, perhaps a squeezed-out tube of pimple cream, and, if he's something of a sophisticate, moisturizer.
An older man, you may point out, has learned much from life and benefited from years of accumulated experience.
What he may also have accumulated is an ex-wife (or two), and perhaps a child (or two), which means you get to be Daddy's New Friend.
The serially cohabiting older man sees dodging the bullet of matrimony as a badge of honor.
His condemnation of marriage as a bourgeois convention makes him more of a tired, sad cliché than the ones he's using to describe matrimony.
A man who came of age in the 1970s or '80s doesn't think twice about being married to a woman with her own career, or splitting the household chores with her.
He probably grew up having to pitch in and help with dinner (if only to defrost it); he knows his way around a washing machine, and maybe even had to change a diaper or two.
Or perhaps he never married but has in his past a nightmare of a long-term girlfriend who cheated on him with his former best friend.