It’s not wrong, but a lot of people think it’s weird. They think that the man is taking advantage of the girl. They think it’s unequal. They think the relationship is unbalanced.
Friends of mine are like that. I think he was ten or so years older, back when he was 30 and she was 20. Now that’s not so much of a difference, but back then it made a big difference. She saw him as a kind of guru and teacher, and basically she did whatever he said. She wasn’t really her own person.
At some point in their relationship, things changed. She had grown sufficiently that she no longer needed nor could tolerate such an unequal power relationship. It was pretty difficult for them to negotiate this stretch, and it was weird, because they wrote about it in their Christmas letters. But they are still together.
She definitely had issues about her father. I don’t know what they were, but I know they were there. I would feel safe making a generalization that the vast majority of women who are only attracted to older men are looking for the father they never had. This is not conscious, of course. But it makes sense. I don’t think it’s psychobabble, either.
I think they are dealing with self-esteem issues. Their fathers never told them anything nice about them. They look to other older men to get the approval they never had. They are trying to figure out what makes them worthy of any attention at all, and often times, they think their bodies are what makes them worth anything.
Of course, bodies get old eventually, and so that is not stable ground for self-esteem, so it’s a trap, because when they do get older, the older men often “trade them in” for a newer model.
The older men have issues, too. They are often immature in a way. They aren’t comfortable dealing with an equal. They derive their worth from being able to order a woman around, but when women get older, they tend to gain more power as they begin to understand their worth comes from something other than their bodies. A lot of men are uncomfortable with this, and prefer the girls who dote on them and worship the ground they walk on.
It makes me sad that these patterns play out so often. It seems difficult for any kind of understanding to happen between people (and not just older men and younger women), because we play out these scripts that we learn as children, but they don’t work for us. There are a number of scripts, but I’m not sure there are all that many.
That’s scary because it means we aren’t as unique as we’d like to think we are. I don’t want to be predictable, but anyone who knows my past will be able to make a lot of good guesses about how I will respond in various situations and they’ll be right on target. I used to think that mental illness made me special, until I discovered thousands of people who react to the same situations exactly the way I do.
I’m a lonely guy and I always will be a lonely guy, no matter how many people love me, because I’m the one who doesn’t believe the love. I’m the one who can’t see it is genuine. If I had a young woman adore me, would I believe that? It would make me feel good. But I don’t know if it could last.
My wife , who is my age, has stuck through a lot of serious, often marriage-breaking troubles with me. She has saved my life. She loves me to death. But do I feel it? Sometimes it seems like you can’t win even though you are winning everything in sight.