Much Ado About Nothing; Age-gap Relationships

There is nothing wrong with a 70 year old dating an 18 year old

Over the past few years, relationships with a huge age gap between partners have gotten a bad reputation. People are quick to gape at some older Lolita dating a grey fellow and exclaim in horror; predator! She is only 18 years old, you sick fuck! You are old enough to give birth to her — why have you decided to abuse this young lady so?

A few years ago, I agreed with this framing of things. I remember a conversation with my cousin where I agreed that I also would despise a 50 year old who became bed-mates with my 18 year old daughter, no matter what the law says on the matter. It sounded like great logic at that time. I have come to realize that it is no logic at all.

The people who are disgusted by these sort of relationships are never honest to argue that their disgust is backed by just disgust. Like every good filosofizing human being, they try to make arguments from shadowy principles to back their disgust up. And like most philosophers, the arguments are just not good at all. Let’s see what these arguments are.

One of them is that the parties are so unequally yoked that they might never have anything to talk about! Some septum-ring-wearing genius would wonder; what could a fifty year old possibly have to discuss with an 18 year old, or a 20 year old, or a 25 year old, and so on and so forth? If the social-criminal in this instance is given leave to talk, he might argue that they don’t do much talking anyway, and the delightful younger woman is more of a moaner, not a talker. And how is that any different from the sort of relationships young people regularly enter into? I don’t remember a lot of talking when I remember past lovers!

Another common argument is that the gap in experience and maturity between both parties makes it easier for the older party to manipulate the younger one. Who doesn’t know that forty-year-olds are such reservoirs of knowledge and experience that manipulating any 18 year old is soft work? Who doesn’t know that 18-year-olds are such innocent and naive specimens that anyone significantly older than them — especially one who has seen things — can take them along on a joyride of the mind without much effort? And who doesn’t know that such dastardly dynamics never exist between couples of the same age? No one ever manipulates anyone in an ideal romantic relationship!

There is also the argument of a power differential. Being older than someone automatically gives you psychic powers over them, and these nasty and dirty forty and fifty and even sixty-year-olds are merely using their psychic powers to control the young women they bed. Who can blame these eighteen-year-olds who are ultimately controlled by powers they have no agency to refuse? What’s that? You think women have agency? Well, dear sir and ma, the concept of personal agency just seems like a patriarchal conspiracy theory to help men avoid accountability for their many crimes.

As far as I can tell, these arguments sum up the reaction that people have towards couples with significant age gaps. They think that the older person in the relationship is taking advantage of the younger person, and think that is bad. Because, as we all know, regular couples are never in the business of taking advantage of one another. That just never happens, and is totally not a common dynamic.

These arguments used to look sensible to me and I now realize why. Bear with me, as I psychoanalyze my own feelings towards these sort of couples. There is a sort of innocence that comes with young women and it takes a lot for that innocence to wash away. A young boy, even if twink-ish, loses his innocence, at least to the world, when his voice breaks, and he gets taller, and gets a nice beard. He doesn’t even need to have ever had sex. All of this usually happens before he is eighteen, so by the time he is eighteen very few people think he is a child. That is why the state can ask the boy, without any pretense, to sign up for war and the glorious opportunity to die for his country. That is why people can ask, without any pretense, for the death of the 18 year old criminal. He does not even have to be eighteen — he could be seventeen, and the justice system could decide that he is to be tried as an adult.

This is not so for young women, many of whom retain their innocence, at least in the eyes of sane society, until their first child or the faint whispers of menopause. The young woman with gigantic breasts on her chest is still seen, by her parents at least, as a young lady who shouldn’t be defiled by foul men until she is safe within the wedlock, even if she enthusiastically participates in this defilement via various monkeying maneuvers. Even as an adult, the state still prioritizes her concerns over that of men of the same age. During disasters, men are grouped alone, while women and children are grouped together. It is okay and sporting for two men to go at it through a brawl on a corner street, but two women doing the same just seems a bit off.

This means that when people see an older person with a much younger woman, they immediately think the older person is a creep who only wants to feast on the innocence of the young woman. In fact, in a weird bastardization of the Madonna complex, people don’t even see the young woman — they only see a paragon of innocence about to be devoured by this horrible older fellow. They see Beauty and a nasty Beast. They see a man who is only attracted to the fountain of youth, one who is only driven by carnal desires, one who wants to lie horizontally with a young woman and nothing more. Who would want that for their friend? For their child? For their sibling? No one. There is just something unsettling about it.

But try as we might, disgust isn’t an argument. People are fond of reasoning backwards from disgust to moral positions, but that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Take the first argument here. What are we really saying when we argue that people in these relationships are unequally yoked? The assumption here is that people with significant differences in age can not have similarities or similar interests they can talk about. But this is a transparently stupid argument, as even people of the same age group can be at wildly different stations in life and have such divergent interests that they would be even more unequally yoked than a 60 year old and an 18 year old. What does one person in one country have to speak about with another person in another country? What does a famous superstar have in common with a fan? What does a doctor have in common with an artist? What does a disabled person have in common with an abled person? Yet, these unequally yoked people manage to make it work without millions of morally outraged people breathing down their neck. It follows that the argument — that these couples have nothing in common — cannot be a rational reason to detest them, as we don’t detest other couples who also have nothing in common.

The second and third arguments are more compelling. It is obvious that the older partner in an age gap relationship often has more power, authority, and ability to control the younger partner. This can sometimes have bad outcomes, as the younger person in the relationship may actually do stupid things under the influence of the older person. However, this also happens with couples in the same age group! It even happens between older couples. Reddit message boards are populated by 45 year old men and women just realizing that their significant other has been taking them for a joy ride for most of their lives!

At an elementary level, these arguments are bad because the control these older men have over women is usually a function of wealth, not age. If we really cared about female exploitation at the hands of powerful partners, people would also hate relationships between upper class and lower class people. A woman with a billionaire her age is subject to the same control as she would be if she were with someone forty years older. Besides, maturity and experience do not necessarily come with age. People like to think age and wisdom correlate greatly, but the evidence is just not there. Stupid younger people don’t suddenly become wise when they grow older, and older wise people were probably wise when they were younger too. I have met many remarkable idiots with grey hair, and at 18 I was already more insightful than many of the adults I knew. In actual fact, the 18 year old could be the one manipulating the 60 year old! Don’t clever yahoo boys in Ekpoma, Lekki, and Life Camp prove this every day by manipulating older white people into emptying their bank accounts for false promises of affection and love? And don’t say it isn’t possible; even children who cannot yet speak have the ability to manipulate their parents!

It is therefore clear that the potential for manipulation due to age gap differences isn’t a coherent reason to despise these relationships, as we don’t despise relationships where the potential for manipulation is even greater. Some of the biggest opponents of age-gap relationships even pray (very publicly, one might add) to meet a billionaire who would sweep them off their feet. Somehow, they never consider the sort of control and authority someone with that level of wealth would exert on them. Perhaps they believe that they are immune to the very problems in power differentials they point out in age-gap relationships? If they could delude themselves into thinking they are immune, isn’t it obvious that the younger partners in age-gap relationships could also delude themselves in the same way? And how could that possibly be unethical without the mirror case also being unethical?

I won’t blame you if my arguments don’t convince you. They aren’t even meant to, as the reaction people have to these relationships isn’t really based on any coherent rationale, but instead subconscious disgust, and that sort of disgust is impossible to argue against. No one needs to tender a reason why they hate this food or the other, or why the like this color and hate the other, or why they are attracted to certain types and not other types. In the same way, you don’t really need a reason to hate these relationships. You can just hate them because they disgust you. However, one should be intellectually honest and admit that their hate is borne of disgust, and not any super-rational reason, because that is just the truth.

Our disgust is tied to the fact that we view the older person as one who is only with their partner for sexual reasons, and that is usually true. These older men don’t choose younger women because of their opinion on art, or because they have a “matured mind” or any of that nonsense. They choose them because younger women have more energy, are more supple to the touch, and are frankly better to have sex with. It is pure carnal desire in most cases, and we recognize this for what it is, and detest it for that reason alone.

But even this disgust is delusional, as most relationships, especially between younger people, is borne on the foundation of sex. Would any rationale man have any romantic interest in someone he doesn’t have a sexual interest in? And what if the primary driver of his romantic attraction is sexual in nature? What of it? Does that somehow make the attraction unethical? Perhaps it does for sexless prudes, but it does not seem obvious that that should be the case.

Nevertheless, we feel this disgust all the same, even though it is clearly irrational. My argument isn’t that we should ignore this disgust we feel. In fact, I argue that we should embrace it, and should make practical choices based on it if we can. However, we must, at the same time, realize that this disgust is subjective, and merely a unique quirk of our mind that has no bearing on the actual morality of the people in those sort of relationships. For example I can think that Chelsea fans (including my poor girlfriend) are nothing but dry-gin drinking touts who should be excluded from rational footballing discussions, but it would be stupid to infer anything about their actual morality via that observation alone.

Unfortunately, this level of nuance is hard to encounter in the wild, so people end up being sucked into seven levels of outrage for disgust reactions that should probably be quietly managed. I just don’t think that is healthy at all. So, to be clear, the world will not cave into itself because some sly 19 year old thinks a 65 year old and his wallet are a cute combo. In most cases, she — or the man — will move on to better romantic relationships, and the lady in question will probably remember her younger trysts with a man old enough to be her grandfather fondly, if you can believe it. This fact may make your stomach churn, make your eyes water, and make you clutch your non-existent pearls, but you have to realize that your disgust is completely irrational and you are not sitting on some actual moral high ground. Romantic relationships should be defined only be personal agency, and not the disgust we feel when we see an unlikely couple. After all, that is the same argument we make to homophobes who are controlled by no less a disgust reaction.

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