http://www.africancrisis.co.za/Article.php?ID=78037&


My Mother's strange marriage advice on the best age difference between happy men & women...
Date Posted: Sunday 20-Jun-2010

An American lady was writing to me about my recent article about love and marriage. In my reply to her I told her something that I'd mentioned recently to some of my single men friends - which got one of them thinking.

My Mother was 87 when she died, and she would from time to time give me her thoughts on love and marriage and modern men and modern women. And sometimes the things she said to me were most surprising.

These days, it appears to me many couples are of almost exactly the same age. In prevous times men were almost always older than the women they married. These days I see young men dating women much older than themselves - and pretty much anyone goes out with anyone else.

I was quite stunned one day when, after much thought and reflection on her life my Mom came up with this one. My mother said that looking back on her life, the happiest couples she knew were the ones where the men were 10 - 15 years older than their wives. She mentioned this to me several times and she felt this was a good benchmark to work on.

If you look around you'll see interesting examples of this. Celine Dion for example is happily married to a balding man who is 20 years older than her. I was once chatting to a quite attractive Afrikaans girl at my work one day and she mentioned her husband. When I went to her desk I saw a photo of her with her husband and he looked about 20 years older than her.

I have a theory about male and female attractiveness. It goes like this (this is very general and I give it as a rule of thumb):-
o Women lose their attractiveness as they grow older.
o Men become more attractive with age (because a lot of their attractiveness is not bound so closely to physical appearance).

So then you often get this situation: A young couple marry, then come middle-age, the man discovers his sexuality, he dumps his wife and marries someone much younger than him. He finds he is middle-aged and he still has a lot of energy.

The solution is for him to marry someone younger at the outset.

When my older brother was in his 50's, and he'd been married by then for almost 30 years, he told me that he suddenly was finding 35 year old women hitting on him. It seemed, in his 50's he was rediscovering that he was attractive to women. He was quite delighted by it. (He remained married however! He did not run off with the 35 year olds - but he definitely did enjoy this discovery and the flirtations with them!).

My Mother firmly believed men must LEAD. Men must have EXPERIENCE which they can pass on to their wives. She firmly believed a man must TEACH his wife certain things. She never thought it should be the other way around.

She would tell me the things my dad taught her which she appreciated. Sometimes my dad made austere choices when they were young, but she respected the fact that it had turned out to be worthwhile.

My dad (in his early life at least) was a very organised fellow. My dad was pretty much perfect in many ways - until he became an alcoholic. That totally destroyed him, his life, his marriage to my mother, etc. It caused endless shame to our family and he even went to jail for things he did while he was drunk. (I saw what alcohol can do and I never drink alcohol at all - ever - alcoholism is also hereditary and just one drink too many can trigger a problem).

I have often thought about my mother's advice especially when I see how similar in age couples are these days, while at the same time, marriages just don't last. Maybe there is something to this wisdom from the past...
Posted By: Jan
AfricanCrisis Webmaster
Author of: Government by Deception

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
(George Orwell)

My all time favourite movie quote is from the Dwarf in Lord of the Rings: "Certainty of death, small chance of success... what are we waiting for?"