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Jan Yanello's avatar

I appreciate this take. Personally, I’m leery of wide age gaps, but this arises directly from personal experiences of witnessing a significant imbalance of power/predation within those relationships. At the same time, I find nothing uncouth about those relationships which do have wide age gaps but a balanced give-and-take.

I’m really curious about how wide age gaps may have played out in marriage/partnership within historical contexts versus within today’s culture. Certainly women were bought and sold in many an ancient culture, but from what I gather there also seemed to be a sense of the older man answering to the family of the young woman being married to him. I don’t see that same necessity of answering to family/community around me, and I wonder if that lack of in-built accountability is in part why such stigma has been cast over relationships with wide age gaps. A protective mechanism in the absence of any real guardianship, perhaps?

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