The wedding of a midlife and older celebrity husband and his much younger wife invariably triggers the speculation that she’s looking for a father figure while he’s trying to validate his aging virility. Most recently, we heard about new dad George Clooney (56) and his 18-year-younger wife, Amal, but there’s also Donald Trump (70) and his FLOTUS, Melania (age 47). Conversely, was French president Emmanuel Macron (age 39) who married Brigitte, a woman in her mid-60s, seeking a mother figure? In each of these instances, commentators become psychoanalysts, and invariably, they’re critical of the age-mismatch matching.
There’s an implicit social acceptance of the idea that men are older than their wives, and an age difference of up to 10 years is generally not looked at askance. Once a man is literally old enough to be a woman’s father (or vice versa, for older women), public opinion starts to shift from acceptance to skepticism.
Recently, St. Mary’s University’s (Halifax) Sara Skentelbery and Darren Fowler took on the topic of “age gap relationships” (AGRs), noting that such pairings have an evolutionary imperative. For the species to survive, so the thinking goes, a middle-age or older man should continue to partner with younger women, especially after his female age peers are no longer able to produce offspring. This argument contrasts with the sociocultural perspective, which proposes that negative attitudes involved in ageism and sexism cause older women to be seen as less physically attractive and they easily become tossed aside. According to this view, species survival is not really an issue at this point in the history of humanity. More relevant is the perception that women become less desirable because society deems them so. Men in power want those younger “trophies” attesting to their wealth and influence.
Skentelbery and Fowler also believed that AGRs might represent another dynamic, the one that armchair psychoanalysts like to tout, in which younger women are seeking to replay the dynamics of their early childhood relationships with unloving or neglectful fathers. The scientific framework behind this interpretation is derived from attachment theory, which proposes that early infant-parent relationships set the stage for all of our later close relationships. Skentelbery and Fowler therefore sought to compare AGR women on a measure of attachment, known as “attachment style,” with women in SARs (same-age relationships) who presumably aren’t seeking daddy figures.
Testing their predictions on a sample of 173 women, all involved in a romantic relationship, the study's authors compared those in AGRs (with a nine-year or larger age difference) vs. SARs (with just one-to-four-year differences). The AGR women ranged from 18 to 53 years old, with partners, on average, 17.3 years older than themselves. Using standard questionnaire measures, the research team asked all participants to rate their attachment styles as well as their relationship satisfaction.
Consistent with large-scale attachment style studies, nearly three-quarters of the sample had perfectly healthy attachment styles, allowing them to relate positively to their romantic partners. However, the AGR and SAR women showed no differences in attachment style at all. Assuming this “non-finding” wasn’t due to flawed methods, we should be able to rule out the daddy-figure factor in the AGR as not being particularly relevant.
The dynamics of midlife relationships are influenced by many complexities, but should they include cross-generation pairings, the Canadian study suggests that replaying abnormal parental ties isn’t part of the picture.
Reference:
Skentelbery, S. G., & Fowler, D. M. (2016). Attachment styles of women-younger partners in age-gap relationships. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 10(2), 142-147. doi:10.1037/ebs0000064