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Eh, I don't have a dog in the fight, I married someone a whopping three months younger (pedo alert!). But people can be directionally correct for bad reasons.
I would say as a very great generality for the bulk of humanity for the bulk of history, the basic matchup and the best one for fertility is for men roughly 20-30 marrying women roughly 15-25. I think in modern society it's completely normal to expect men in their late twenties to date women in their early twenties. Part of it is resources, part is maturity differentials, part is fertility differentials, part is stages of life, the biggest is linear time. The fertility stuff is just obvious, there's no pro-natal way for women as a population to delay fertility beyond 30. Individuals can do what they want, but society will not hit replacement with women who start at thirty. It cannot possibly work.
Fundamentally, so long as both people are legal adults, I'm not that concerned with age gaps at all. Anyone trying to get high school girls for themselves is obviously sus, but the rest of it is just moralizing and wishcasting. Yeah, a lot of romantically unsuccessful guys will come up with convoluted explanations for why they should be given hot young women somehow, without learning game or going to the gym. Just as a lot of romantically unsuccessful women will come up with convoluted explanations why they should be considered hot young women by billionaire werewolves.
None of this impacts the basic underlying math of fertility and what that means for a society. Whether a given group should be at replacement fertility is a value question, but if you accept that, you must necessarily accept a system of social organization that provides for the bulk of women in society to have children prior to age 30, and the closer to 15 they start, the higher fertility will be. Once again, what rate of fertility society should allow/encourage is values and politics. Higher fertility is not necessarily better, and there are trade-offs no matter what you do.
If you have a good chance of being dead by 40, often in childbed, then okay get married at 15 and start having babies. In our current society, that is no longer ideal. Two 22 year olds getting married and having kids by the time they're 25 is the better choice there, I think.
But the main thing with these kind of pieces that riles me up is that it's not about "I want to get married and start on that family of 10 kids as soon as possible", it's "I'm literally twice her age, she's a hot little piece of ass, is it my fault that Evolution ensures men like hot little 15 year old pieces of ass, why does society blame me that she gives me a boner, the teasing little vixen!"
I don't even care that much that she gives you a boner, I do care when it's "I wanna fuck 15 year olds with no consequences" getting dressed up in "Well ackshully it's about TFR and the best way to ensure the best and brightest in society reproduce and that the inverted pyramid of too many old people and not enough young taxpayers gets put back the right way up".
No, you want to be able to have as much novelty and ability without bad societal effects that you can get to fuck the next cohort of hot little 15 year olds once the current cohort you are fucking age out of your preferred range.
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