I’m in love with a great guy who happens to be twenty two years older than me–I’m thirty-one and he’s fifty three. He’s been married and divorced, and has children not much younger than I am. My family thinks I’m making a big mistake, and have come right out and told me that they don’t approve of the relationship. Am I being naive to think our age differences don’t matter?
Yes, you’re naive if you think your age differences don’t matter. They do, but so do all the other differences in your circumstances and personalities. So ignoring this issue, or any issue, won’t work. The more you insist that there aren’t any problems, the more you are probably suppressing your concerns for fear that they will sabotage the relationship. Both you and your partner need to honestly and directly face and discuss all the various problems that have or could emerge around your age difference.
Significant age differences between partners can cause serious problems in relationships. The word “significant” is important here: If your partner is four or five years older or younger, it won’t make much of a difference. however, if your partner is ten or more years older or younger than you, it can cause difficulties depending on your ages and other aspects of your personalities. I’ve found that age differences mean less as both partners get older. For instance, a fifteen-year age difference between a thirty-five year old man and a twenty-year old woman will probably create more potential hazards than that age span in a sixty-five year old man and a fifty-year old woman. The age difference will affect the first couple more, since their maturity and experience levels are usually much more dissimilar than the second couple’s.
Here are the most common issues couples face when there is an age difference:
If you’re the older partner:
1. You can become impatient with your mate.
If you are significantly older than your mate, you may lose patience with his level of immaturity, lack of life experience, and learning process. This will be especially true if your mate is between twenty and thirty years of age. After all, you’ve already gone through a lot of what she’s dealing with; you’ve realized it’s not the end of the world when you go through a crisis, because it always works out in the end; you’ve made mistakes and figured out how to do things the right way. So it’s not easy watching your younger partner stumble through these same life experiences.
2. You have a tendency to act like a parent to your mate.
When you have ten, twenty or thirty more years of life experience than your partner has, you will find it next to impossible not to offer advice, correct, and direct him or her. After all , you’ve been through this before–you know the best way to do it. Of course your intentions are loving; you’re only trying to help. But the effect can be very destructive to your relationship. YOU BEGIN ACTING LIKE A PARENT AND TREATING YOUR PARTNER LIKE A CHILD. Naturally, your mate feels as if you don’t trust her, you don’t respect her, and responds just like a rebellious teenager would–she becomes resentful and pulls away. And this parent-child game will quickly destroy the passion in your sex life, since your relationship starts taking on incestuous overtones.
3. You may be much more financially successful than your partner.
Most older partners have more financial stability, and therefore, more power in the relationship. You’ve had many more years to build up your income, purchase property and possessions, etc. This financial superiority can create tension between you and your partner in numerous ways–you may feel resentful about being the one who provides more, especially if you are a woman; you may feel like you should make the important decisions (what to spend, where to live, what kind of vacation to take) because it’s your money, and your partner might not feel this is fair. You may have difficulty lowering your standards of living to accommodate your mate’s.
4. You may be tempted to control your partner because you hold more of the power in the relationship.
All of the warning signs above add up to this one–it’s easy when you are much older than your partner to get into a power trip and become controlling . You have more money, success, experience and therefore it’s tempting to “pull rank” on your mate.
5. You may be tempted to compromise or sacrifice your interests, friends and activities in order to appear more compatible with your partner.
If your mate is much younger, you may give up interests he or she doesn’t appreciate and take on habits that make you appear younger.
If you’re involved with a much younger person, here are some questions to ask yourself:
“Do I respect my partner?”
“Am I proud of my partner?”
“Do I trust my partner?”
“What am I learning from my partner?”
If you’re the younger partner:
1. You may put your partner on a pedestal and give up your power.
If your mate is much older than you are, he or she is probably more successful, experienced and financially secure. This may influence you into unconsciously feeling your partner is “better” than you are, and tempt you to idealize him rather than see him for who he really is. When you allow yourself to feel less than because of your mate’s chronological advantage, you give up your power. You take his advice rather than trusting your own; you blindly believe his criticisms of you rather than questioning whether or not he’s correct; you invalidate your own needs and feelings out of deference to your partner. You tell yourself:
“He’s the one who’s paying for it, so we’ll do it his way.”
“I’m sure he knows what he’s doing. After all, look how successful he is.”
“He knows much more about these things than I do because he’s older.
Even if your partner doesn’t want to play this role with you, you may be tempted to fall into this pattern simply because of the age difference. And if your partner happens to enjoy his role as the older, wiser one, or actually uses it to control you, watch out–your relationship won’t be very healthy.
2. You may set your partner up to be like a parent.
Another consequence of being the less experienced, less worldly one in a relationship is that you may be tempted to re-create a parent/child dynamic with your partner. If you are always asking his advice, counting on him to help you, depending on him for money, using his connections to your advantage, allowing him to make decisions for you, you are, in essence, behaving like a child and giving him the authority to be your father (or if you’re the younger man, your mother.) This prevents you from truly growing up, and opens the door for all kinds of Emotional Programming to run itself out.
Even when your partner doesn’t control you, you may feel controlled and intimidated just by virtue of the fact that he or she is that much older. You may react by becoming rebellious, withdrawn or difficult. Perhaps this is the relationship you had with your own parents, or you may be acting out the anger you never had the courage to express to them when you were growing up.
3. You may be tempted to compromise or sacrifice your interests, friends and activities in order to appear more compatible with your partner.
If you are involved with a much older person, here are some questions to ask yourself:
“Does my partner respect me?”
“Does my partner treat me as an equal?”
“Do I feel like an equal with my partner?”
In your case, there are two other issues you and your boyfriend must discuss: First, whether or not you want children and expect him to start a second family; and how you both plan to deal with your perspective families (your parents, his children).
So that’s what to watch out for. Now, the good news–A relationship between two people of very different ages can work if both partners avoid falling into the patterns we’ve just talked about by being aware of them, communicating about their feelings, and making agreements that help create an equal and respectful relationship. The more you have in common and the more committed you are to working on the relationship, the better your chances for survival.
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