Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon; Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher; Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake. These are just a few of the well-known couples who have broken one of the most nonsensical barriers for women in relationships: age limits.
“For a long time, we’ve been fed this idea that women should look for a man to take care of her,” she says. “A man that is more educated, has a better job, and makes more money”
Stigma has always been attached to younger men with older women relationships, swayed by the Freudian idea that older women are actually substitutes for mothers for these younger men, or are “robbing the cradle.”
Valerie Gibson, Toronto-based journalist and author of Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men, first used the term “cougar” to describe single women over 40 who were sexually active to represent a sleek sexiness, aggressiveness, and a desire to take control of one’s life.
Gibson says the ideal of an older man comes from a time when women were simply “baby-making machines” who have no other purpose than to procreate. According to Gibson, after they reached 40, they had nothing to offer, but at the time, they rarely reached 40—women would die of disease or in childbirth at a young age, allowing their husbands to remarry.
Now, knowledge of diet, exercise, and medicine allows us to live long past 40, and often into our 90s, and since easy divorces are possible, many women are able to leave troubling marriages at an age when they still have half of their lives ahead of them.
Relationship conventions have changed dramatically in recent years, and ideas about an acceptable age for one’s mate are increasingly ignored.
While women delay marriage more and more, men have woken up to the appeal of independent, financially secure, and sexually confident, older women. Women who date younger men are, for the most part, not the amusingly desperate manipulative seductress types depicted in shows like Desperate Housewives.
It is, in fact, almost always men that first initiate contact with older women, and do so because they are attracted to them physically. “Younger men are attracted to me,” says Gibson when asked if younger men are her personal preference. She speaks with a sexy playfulness that resonates youth. “I guess I’m a very energetic old woman, very vital, very outspoken perhaps.”
We are exceeding expectations in traditionally male-dominated fields, are paid equally (for the most part), and can take care of ourselves. Something as meaningless as age shouldn’t matter.
In the UK, 23 per cent of wives are older than their husbands, and in the US, a third of women aged 40-69 are dating men who are younger by 10 or more years.
Really, one of the biggest problems with being in such a relationship is dealing with the reaction of friends, family, and society in general. A study, published in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, found that couples thought their age difference mattered more to everyone else than it did to them.
Gibson herself has noticed a significant change in thinking—younger people are much more accepting, and view this as just another alternative type of relationship. It is the older generation, and especially older women, who are the harshest critics of cougars.
She credits older female celebrities for making it publicly known that relationships with younger men often work well, and for making it acceptable for older women to be sexy.
Gibson finds the best thing to come out of the cougar craze is that it has freed women from fear of aging. “I’m sick of hearing the disease of the month we’re going to get,” she says. “Aging should be about desire and dancing.”
“That half of your life should be exciting,” she adds.
As a society, we should embrace this new trend. It is indicative of progress, and brings us closer to the goal of true equality. Women and men of all ages should have the autonomy to make important choices, like who they want to spend their life with, without fear of being vilified.
Ultimately, age has very little to do with compatibility—what’s more important is the intensity with which our partners live their lives, and that it matches ours. That is what we should look for when choosing our mates.
