Hugo’s piece was originally published at the Good Men Project Magazine.
Both at the Good Men Project and at my own blog, my most popular posts in terms of page-views are invariably those that focus on one particularly controversial subject: older men and younger women. (Here’s “What Young Women Are Really Looking For From Older Men.”)
As I’ve laid out in those pieces, for a number of reasons I think we should be suspicious of age-disparate heterosexual relationships in which the male partner is substantially older than the female one, and in which the woman is still quite young (say, under 23). Put simply, the potential problems in these relationships seem to diminish based less upon the actual number of years in between the partners and more upon the age of the woman involved. I’m more concerned about an 18 year-old woman and a 30 year-old man than I am about a 30 year-old woman and a 55 year-old man, even though the latter relationship has twice the number of years separating the partners. The research of psychologists like Lynn Phillips—who has written extensively about relationships between teen girls (including those above the age of consent) and older men—bears out how damaging these relationships can be. Keep reading »
