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Try to think of the situation in reverse. If my niece or one of my younger cousins when they come of age at 18, told me they were currently dating a 30 year old man, it would certainly give me pause and reflection to wonder where his particular interest comes from, that's distinct and different from someone in the same age group as they are. Would you feel differently if the tables were reversed in your case? It's a matter of differences in the stage of life. An "adult" at 30 isn't even on the same level as an "adult" at 50. It's less questionable because there's likely mature development from both parties from 18 to their present age that's taken place. A person at 18 though is too green to have that life experience that feels right. Would you take advice from yourself at 14? How about 18? I know more about everything, including myself; today in 2026 than I ever did back then, but looking back, although I was lacking in knowledge about certain things, I was every bit on the right track.
I was rejected once by a woman who was 1 year older than me and said it she felt it she would be like dating her younger brother. Seemed petty to me and it would've landed better without the insult. My ex-girlfriend of almost 8 years was a year and a half older than me. We'd known each other prior to dating, so there was already an established history there. Maybe that was something that softened any kind of weirdness. Looking at most of my age cohort today, I've done amazingly well by comparison when I see so many woman who still act like 16 year old girls. If I ever got a word with mom and dad and I'd tell them they clearly failed as a parent.
I agree that it's kind of a red flag. (And I say this as a man in his 50s who is engaged to a woman who is 18.) The issue is that there are men out there who are "in love with a number," i.e. they are kind of obsessed with dating young women. Such a man can be expected to quickly lose interest in the woman he is seeing, because everyone ages. Which isn't necessarily a problem if you are looking for a fling, but if the woman is interested in a long-term serious committed relationship, that's a problem.
Fundamentally, the situation is no different from when a woman dates a man who is known to be a "player" type. To me, that's an even bigger red flag. I find it annoying that society is far more tolerant of "f*ck boys" than of older men in relationships with younger women.
Were you married before? Are you a widower? My main problem with age gaps like this is they're often the product of cheating or divorce. They also take away from young men.
I don't want to delve to deeply into my personal life, mainly because I don't want to dox myself.
But in general I agree that (1) polygamy (and polygyny) are bad for society; and (2) age gap relationships can act as a kind of polygamy -- since (1) they can result in one man monopolizing the reproductive years of multiple women; and (2) they can result in a man not giving one set of children his full paternal attention.
That being said, the trope of the man who becomes successful and ditches his first wife for some young hottie is a bit like stranger kidnappings and police shootings of unarmed black men. All of these things are rare but splashy and get far more attention than they realistically deserve because they serve some kind of narrative. In reality, most divorces are initiated by women who are bored and/or monkey-branching and high class polygamists like Donald Trump, Leonardo DiCaprio, or Elon Musk are pretty far down on the list of things undermining society and making life more difficult for young men.
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I certainly have no moral problem with that, provided you both have honorable intentions. But, on a prudential level, how are you thinking about your future marriage in the context of aging? A six-year gap may get smaller as a couple ages, but surely a thirty-five-ish–year gap will get larger; in thirty years you will be in your eighties and she in her forties.
I don’t mean this as a gotcha. I assume you have thought about this, and I am curious about those thoughts.
I'm not thrilled about the age gap situation. The trouble is that it's just so hard to find a woman in the West who is (1) not obese; (2) not a single mom; and (3) not into woke progressive nonsense. Sadly I am not 6'2" with a chiseled jawline, so I have to compromise.
What can I say? I try to eat carefully and go to the gym a lot.
This really is the issue.
In many cases there's not a huge, noticeable 'maturity' difference between a 21 year old woman and a 28 year old woman. One will just have a lot more 'baggage' than the other.
There's definitely an experience difference... but rarely does a woman take those experiences and learn good lessons and improve from them, i.e. mature. Oftentimes it just spirals as she justifies further bad decisions as a mere incremental step from what she previously did. So if the choice is between a 21-22 year old or a 28-29 year old, you're signing up to deal with an emotionally unstable partner with a naive idea about how the world works either way.
But the latter is also going to be bitter and have higher expectations and be more judgmental, and the former is more likely to be pleasant, inquisitive, and eager to experience new things. The light hasn't been snuffed out yet.
I had the very dark thought recently, that it would be very helpful if we could develop amnestic drugs of some kind that a late 20's woman could take that would 'reset' her memories and mental states back to its youthful state. Literally have her forget all the previous mates, all the hookups, all the horrible breakups and emotional trauma and debauched decisions she's made over the past decade.
If she's otherwise physically attractive and now has the attitude of a 20-year-old, she's suddenly much more appealing as a mate. Unless she has a kid, can't easily remedy that issue.
As a sage on twitter put it:
It gives me no happiness to report it, but my generalized experience with women is that by age 26, their personalities aren't ever improving from what they've displayed up until then.
This is not to say a single woman automatically becomes unmarriageable after that point! If their personality is good, its probably going to stay that way too.
But that age appears to be when the traumas and bad decisions will pile high enough that they can't be suppressed so long.
The Hail Mary of having her pop out a kid and see if that unlocks the nurturing part of her brain has many risks.
Its such a cruel/weird trick of nature that the age of 18-25 is when men should be doing their best to gain life experience and toughen themselves up... whereas women should be doing their best to avoid getting debauched and should be protecting their general positive life outlook as long as possible.
And under current social paradigms, we basically encourage the opposite arrangement.
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I agree that this can be an issue, but for me it's not necessarily a deal-breaker -- depending on the degree of bitterness, of course. The bigger problem, in my opinion, is that secular women are fed a constant stream of anti-male propaganda through their smartphones.
Same difference, ultimately.
The singular best green flag I can see in any woman, if she passes the other basic filters, is NOT being utterly addicted to screentime. And specifically, not having instagram, tiktok, dating apps, or certain other apps that do little but feed mental distress. If they have a loop of checking their phone ever 30 seconds, or being stuck on it for long periods, or are addicted to posting every detail of their lives/choreographing things for maximum appeal, I tend to write off any further interest in them as a partner.
I've had the displeasure of watching behavior shifts in real time of young, 18-24 year old women who were generally pleasant to be around, and through a combination of the corrupting influence of algorithmic feeds AND the massive influx of digital attention any attractive woman gets if she posts herself online, basically becomes entitled, narcissistic, and usually fairly dismissive of her IRL relationships in favor of cultivating the online following.
I, personally, have spoken to a depressed, anxious young woman who knows she is mentally unwell, and knows to some degree that the apps are driving her down a bad path, and I had literally said "hand me your phone and I'll delete every one of those apps off of it for you" and she balked and did that Gen Z stare thing, said 'no thanks' and then walked away to do something else.
I think it's a good heuristic for young men too. The manias are different but the causes are the same.
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Whatever your degree of "compromise" is, it's not nearly as significant as the compromise the woman marrying a man 30+ years her senior is making.
I have a corner of the extended family that includes a man who, after his kids were grown, divorced his wife and remarried someone slightly older than his kids and had a full second family. They are nice folks that clearly love each other and I like them, but I can tell it's been rough on them in various ways due to the age gap: the dad hit (practical) retirement age while the youngest kids (one with special needs) were still in middle school, and I know the wife has had to start working, presumably to close the budget. I know she's been having to take care of him (now in his 80s) physically too since before the last kid left the house, and I can't help but occasionally think about how she's actuarially likely to be widowed in maybe her early 60s, and how she'll handle that long-term.
Nothing against them personally, but I think they'd have been happier overall if they were closer to the same age and met earlier. I wish them well, though. Life throws things like that at you sometimes. I hope it goes well for the GP here, too.
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That's an interesting question, because she has a thing for older guys and is therefore getting what she wants out of the age gap, or at least what she thinks she wants. Presumably she is compromising on other things though. Sadly, everyone does. (Well, almost everyone.)
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The same place all male interest in females comes from. Historically, 30 year old men (or even older) routinely sought out 16-18 year old women to form families with. The question is entirely in the quality of the man. I happen to have this exact situation in my family, with a cousin dating and then marrying at 19 to a man 12 years her senior. He is a very good dude who happened to really, really want a large family. To my knowledge, he adores her, never speaks down to her or has treated her as less than an equal partner, and 8 (or maybe 9? I've lost count) kids later they are one of the happiest families I know.
It goes without saying men are biologically attracted to women. Not all desire is a form of healthy expression or interest. There are a lot of very attractive women in my family and a good handful of them I view like younger sisters. That men would find them attractive is no surprise and I don't hold it against them for thinking that. I'm against a man who would manipulate them into sex without requiring love, mutual commitment, support or investment. Yeah, sexual congress is universal. I get it. The goal has never been to prevent that. The goal is to keep that within context.
I wouldn't inherently reject a man who comes along and tells me he's interested in one of my relatives. I've had it happen before. Like you, it depends entirely on how I vet him to be. When I was a teenager, a group of my friends were out in the city once late at night doing things they shouldn't have been doing. As the night continued to get late, I drop word in with my best friend that my younger cousin (which they all knew) is out at a party past her curfew so I asked him to swing by to pick her up and join them while they walked her home. At one point one of the guys in the group made a pass at my cousin and my best friend who was there walked up and popped him in the face pretty hard, and told him to "shut the fuck up." After she was dropped off, they rolled through my place as it was nearing the morning and they told me what happened. Me and said friend in that group are still friends to this day and he apologized the night that it happened, but our relationship has been strained for decades after that. He's definitely been out on the periphery of things ever since then. But that was all par for the course with how we grew up. We policed each other's behavior and kept one another in line. It was a strongly enforced norm. Homeboy chose to make an degrading attempt instead of keeping his mouth shut.
It's about the kind of man you are and how responsible you are. If you can prove you're a mature suitor and a respectable man, that's more than enough social proof for me to have my blessing, but "proof" is the key word in that sentence. If he was much older than her but came from my friend group and we'd had a multiple decade long pedigree with each other, I'd know the man well enough to know whether he's a good fit for someone in my family or not. One of my best friend's cousins is married to one of my cousins and they have two kids with each other and it's a very happy marriage. We've long passed the point of being best friends, we've been in-laws now for quite awhile.
Absolutely, and this is one of the advantages of a strong family, as it has been historically. If a man knocks up a woman and doesnt do the honorable thing, the womans family has certain duties involving pitchforks and/or shotguns. But an age gap is not a good indicator of lack of commitment, I would argue both historically and currently its the inverse. Even the sour-grapes danger-haired feminists who shriek about such things couch their argument in terms of power imbalances rather than a lack of commitment.
Certainly. I've had some of those in my own family as well and have known others it's happened to. I have a non-blood relative who has been married but separated now from one of my cousin's who's been like an older sister to me all my life. When he got her pregnant a long time ago, her older brothers cornered him one day and he got the violently coerced, "Congratulations, I hear you're marrying my sister," treatment in the bathroom. We haven't seen him since his separation, but we know where he's at. He 100% knows he's a dead man walking if he shows up around our family again.
The girls in our family were always on a much shorter leash and were more controlled than the boys were, and I think it's for good reason to this very day.
The short leash and overprotective brothers thing doesn't seem to work though. It didn't work in your example your cousin still ended up a single mom and it didn't work in among the kids at my high school. The girls end up sneaking around anyway and half end up pregnant out of wedlock. The girls from middle and upper class liberal families whose brothers don't care who they date seem to have much better results. And you might say it's a class thing and sure maybe it is but still that's the half of it I can't imagine a family of respectable doctors and engineers getting together to force some disreputable boy to marry one of their relatives.
Does it work in every case? No. But it worked an overwhelming amount of the time. They're still married to this day and he walks around in fear of retribution. I don't see any logic that gives way to the notion that the situation improves further by a complete withdrawal of that attitude.
Does still married matter if they are separated and your family will beat him if he ever shows his face at Thanksgiving? That doesn't seem like a successful outcome to me. And I don't think that attitude has much effect. Middle class American young women and girls tend not to have family with that attitude and they don't get pregnant out of wedlock or indeed get pregnant much at all anymore.
A lot of lowerclass and working class young women with protective family attitudes like that do end up pregnant out of wedlock because single motherhood is excepted in their social milieu.
To us it does, yes. Catholics are prohibited from divorce. He doesn’t just not show up at the holidays, he doesn’t show up anywhere near the neighborhood. Our friends know the places he likes to go.
Per the tagline by the username. If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t. It’s worked for many people we know because that attitude meant that most of the women in our lives growing up didn’t end up as a feral, serial dater from the get go; like you find in the big cities today. Dating was a serious matter from the very beginning that was usually initiated in small ways between the parties interested but was largely handled through intermediaries.
That model was nowhere near as dysfunctional as the dynamic between people is today by a mile. It’s not even close. Almost every couple I know in my peer group that followed that system (which is to say remained obedient to their parents and peers) is happily married with kids to this very day.
Incidentally the man in question that my older cousin got with, she picked herself. Her brothers didn’t pick him for her.
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Well, the argument being couched that way merely conceals the complaint about a lack of commitment; gynosupremacists feel entitled to male commitment.
"Power imbalance" is the way they legitimize that entitlement, as the power imbalance has favored the woman in any relationship for the past 50 years or so. Compare "eat the rich" (and the people who say it); in both cases, it's just a fight over whose version of entitlement is enforced at gunpoint.
I've always adopted the approach that whether we're talking about employment, gender relations, family, interpersonal interactions, whatever it is, if you want to live and be independent of the group that's your right to do so, but you in turn receive no benefit by your lack of membership in it.
If I and other men are implicitly held to be responsible for how the men around us behave, such that it's our job to keep them in line so women feel comfortable and happy going about their business, then they're in turn obliged to follow men's rules at the end of the day. I can fully understand why a woman wouldn't like to constantly live her life in deference to men, but there's no good alternative around this. The only other way to live is by accepting the risk that your independence makes you fair game for anybody and everybody. If we have to compete and you wind up getting in a fucked up situation, you signed onto this, so don't ask me to have pity for you. Despite what others told you, you knew what you were getting yourself into. Every man understands this in his dealings with other men.
If you're complimentary to me, then I obviously owe you certain rights and privileges in virtue of our obligations to serve out the roles we carry for one another. If you're my equal then you're a competitor to me in all aspects of life and your misfortune and pain is a natural consequence of "losing" in the game of survival we're playing. The fact that you lost isn’t proof of your innocence, all it proves is that you’re weaker than me. Sorry, but that's how it is. Life is full of trade offs.
A lot of what men deal with in life they figure out through difficult experience, trial and error. Life is a catch-22 for us because if I don't go to work, I starve. For women (yes, not all of them), plenty of these choices are optional, such that you don't 'have' to work if you don't want to. Or at least has hard as a man does. Women have options where men often have no choice. So a lot of the bad choices women end up making for themselves are expressions of their desire to engage in that activity; and so they’re there by choice. So when you end up getting "burned," you aren't a "victim," you're simply an idiot.
Sorry, what exactly is the "this" here? Every man understands that they're signing up to compete and potentially get fucked up?
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