Marrying A Younger Man Can Work

My next book, He's Not Too Young for You, is about older women with younger men. Last summer while I was in line at a supermarket, the front cover of a magazine at the checkout counter caught my eye. The photo featured a stylish woman holding hands across a restaurant table with her dinner companion. Women look so good today their precise age is hard to know, but she was certainly older than the man sitting across from her. He was good looking, muscular, clean-cut, and wearing an adoring smile. They were sharing a bottle of red wine. My thought--can it work?

I grabbed the magazine and looked inside. More pictures of them skiing on a white mountain, playing tennis, and, the picture that told the outcome--the lovely woman and her young man with a baby in her arms. I skimmed the article. She described her relationship as one that revitalized her life. “Yes I broke the taboo,” she said. “I was 40. He was 28. It wasn’t just sex. Don't get me wrong. Sex was great. But we fell in love. And I did what everyone warned me not to do. I married him. We both wanted children and knew that my clock was ticking so we hurried. As luck would have it, I became pregnant at the age of 41.”

Her first marriage fell apart, largely due to the travel demands of her job. She was distraught mostly because she thought she might never have a child. And then she met Tom at a support group. She described the group as being one “for repairing casualties of divorce.” Tom’s first wife ran off with another man a year into their marriage. “My friends and family warned me against a relationship with Tom. As my sister put it, ‘how can you go with a guy who was playing little league baseball when you were in college?’”

On the last page of the article, there was a picture of the couple with their 10-year-old daughter. The caption read: “The roar of disapproval stopped when we married and had our daughter.”

I drew some conclusions from the article—that there may still be some disapproval; that disapproval evaporates when the couple can demonstrate genuine love, and, most importantly, that these reverse-age relationships do work.