Age Is Just A Number And Maybe That Number Means Something To Me?

A couple of months ago, I had a strange experience when a 22-year-old hit on me and expressed an interest in dating. That wasn’t the strange experience, it was my response that caught me by surprise. I could not bring myself to even process the proposition because they felt way too young for me, I could not even look at this person in evaluation of my attraction to them because their age made it a non-starter for me. That was, new.

I’m not against age-gap relationships at all, I am wary when a person can only date someone younger (or older) and I am vigilant when an older man expresses an interest in me that is largely predicated on how much younger I am, but overall, I think compatibility transcends age sometimes. My spouse is a decade older and it’s only a factor in so far as his back hurts more frequently than mine. I also don’t believe that people in a relationship need to have an equal amount of life-experience or “maturity” in order to be together, but I do believe that people should be mindful of how socio-political power imbalances could influence their interpersonal relationships. My ex-girlfriend was 5-years younger than I am, but she was still a student, and I have been working for almost fifteen years so that led to a financial-disparity between us, and while that kind of disparity can also exist between people of the same age, it is sometimes compounded when one party is younger and in a different phase of their career. I don’t ever want to be in a position where someone feels obliged to me because I am older or their financial security.

For instance, some of my (heterosexual) friends who are married to (slightly) older men are just getting their careers started, and the men are established, so the women are constantly expected to make compromises in their careers to support the career of the main breadwinner because it just makes sense. When one party tells you that you needn’t focus so much on your financial growth because they will always support you, there is always the subtext that your security is dependent on being in that relationship (and no, I am not saying that cannot work, I am saying it often does not when it is the social factor that has influenced the decision, and not personal choices). This is partly why the arranged marriage market in India still seeks to match younger women with (somewhat) older men, because they will provide the stability, and she won’t be so grown that she is not able to be moulded to his needs. That kind of influence permeates into relationships.

But, it wasn’t, at all, why I couldn’t bring myself to date a 22-year-old.

The idea made my head spin and gave me the ick. I am not at all of the opinion that younger people cannot be smart, thoughtful, brilliant, sensible or any of the other traits I would find attractive in a potential mate, but I couldn’t even look past the factor of age long enough to assess for any of that. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that when I was 22, they were 12. That was the only thing I could think about so I talked to my spouse about it. After all, when he was 22, I was 12, and I wondered if he ever felt uncomfortable with that. He didn’t. He told me that when we met, I was a self-assured, confident and smart grown-ass woman, and that is all he saw in me, he didn’t even think about how old I was as a factor in our potential union. For a second, I was so confused and shocked by our experiences being so different, but only for a second, because then I realised why our experiences are so different, I am a woman.

There is some backlash towards men who only date substantially younger women, but it’s also something we accept as natural in society, and we use an (often specious) “evolutionary” argument to justify it. We consider it pretty normal for men to desire the young simply because they are young, but it’s different when women desire younger mates.

For one thing, it is automatically viewed as more salacious (which makes sense because it’s just more taboo to do it). Or, it is viewed as the older woman paying the younger man in some way for his interest (which, on the face of it, I don’t care who pays whom for sex, I’m all for it but the idea here is that there is no way a younger man could be interested in an older woman unless she paid him). In fact, there is even a cultural element to it that I see around me all the time. I know there are a lot of places in the world that frown upon a woman being older than the man she is with, but it’s hella serious in India. My cousin had to fight his parents for two years to marry his girlfriend who is six months older than him and that was the only problem they had with the union. The six months. One of my friends is a European woman married to an Indian man living in rural India and she is seven-years older than him, and that was never going to be acceptable, so they forged her a birth certificate. She told me she has absolutely no doubt that if her real age was discovered by the family, she would be kicked out of her home. They have three kids, which means when she went to the doctor, she gave them the wrong age, potentially jeopardizing her health, because she couldn’t let anyone find out she was older than her husband. All of that factors into how I am been socialised to view dating someone younger. Socially, it is not normalised for an older woman to date younger people.

And then, on the other hand, I have also been taught that I should be flattered by the interest of a younger person because it validates my own youthfulness. I didn’t really used to think of youth and age as concepts that affected me (and, I know, the hubris of youth is why I didn’t), but as I get older (and especially as I get older and continue to date), I find myself, more and more, in situations where I am the older person, and my age (or experience) is the object for which I am desired (and please, I know, I am not that old, but I gotta talk about what is really happening in my life and it’s this). That is new, and interesting, especially for a person who has dated a lot of older people in their life, and is realising they may not be so capable of reversing roles in those situations, and I wonder if it’s because I want to avoid feeling older as well. After all, when you’re with someone younger, you’re always older.

I’m not so noble and sorted, I have feelings, misgivings and thoughts about getting older. Professionally, it has been delightful to get older, because I’ve experienced being taken more seriously (and being paid more), but in terms of my body, I don’t really love getting older. Things hurt more. I can’t heal from shit as fast as I used to. I have surprise back-aches. I find myself terrified by consuming caffeine past 3 PM. It’s pretty shite. Not as shite as how frequently I am aware of my own mortality and comfortable with it. I know it sounds like an okay-thing, better than not being comfortable with it, but when I was younger the invincibility felt amazing, you know? As did the fact that I didn’t have to think about it. Now I do. Now, I also think about whether I should partake in skincare. I reject most skincare because it feels like I am cowering to beauty and the societal demand to look young, and I don’t want to do that. I’ll moisturise because I swim, but I don’t know what a toner is and I don’t know why a night-cream cannot be used in the day, and I like it like that, but then, I bought one. Why did I buy one? I know that society is harsh on women who look their age and I know I don’t care for that, so why did I buy a night-cream, then? Somewhere inside me, there must be a version of me that doesn’t want to stand next to their younger partner and look older. A part of me that realises that even if I personally don’t care about looking older, I am still subject to a society where that has meaning, and I will be assessed as such.

It's so weird to me that I must participate in the preservation of my youth(ful appearance), but I must not covet it out loud. Out loud, I must always say that I prefer to be older because I know my boundaries and I must say that I am comfortable with my age (and I am comfortable with it, there are things I like about it, but surely, I can like them without it being a hierarchical competition between young and old). Based on the advice I have received from the women in my life over the years, I must douse my feet in vaseline and cover them in plastic bags to keep them soft. I should have started using anti-ageing products at 25 because it is already too late now. I should get a chemical peel and laser off my pubes. I shouldn’t leave the house without make-up that makes me look fresh (ffs, I am a person, not cucumber water). But I should also, do all of them only for myself, I shouldn’t say that any of that is part of a culture of impossible, sexist beauty standards that view women as obligate nubile goddesses. Again, if you do those things, I don’t judge you for it, I even believe that there are people who do actually do it for themselves, but things are rarely that monolithic and I find myself struggling to have the space to discuss the complex conundrum that is womanhood and ageing in all of its facets.

If I discuss the oppressive elements of youth culture, I am just a jealous woman who is past her prime (again, I am a person, not a cut of beef). If I talk about the cultural conventions that surround dating a younger person for a woman, I am hypocritical (and that’s even a little bit true, actually, but I am fine with that because I’d much rather avoid even the potential for a power-imbalance that may enable exploitation and I am okay with losing the opportunity to date some people because of it, and that too, is because women are raised to be more conscientious and evaluate the impact of our existence on everyone) and that is somehow worse than men who will continue to date younger even to the end of exploitation. If I question age-gaps in a way that is analytical but not conclusive, I am given parroted adages like age is just a number and you’re as old as you feel, and maybe they mean well, but it’s not helpful. Ageing is something we all go through, but it’s also, so poorly discussed. It’s not just physiological, it’s not just personal either, there are so many aspects to getting older that are interesting and sometimes unsettling, yet all of the discourse is mired in pitting the young against the old(er). Deciding what is better. Grandstanding with generalisations galore. Ugh. In reality, I cannot decide if it’s me who cannot date a 22-year-old, or my socialisation, and I seriously cannot be the first person to have pondered this question.

Ie: I do know about the night cream.