Why Age Gaps Suddenly Became Creepy

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For most of human history, nobody panicked about age differences between couples. And now suddenly today, when a man is in his 40s and he's with a woman in her 20s, everybody looks at him like some kind of weirdo, some kind of predatory animal. They treat him as if he robbed a daycare center. People don't say things like, "Eh, gotta be careful," or, "I'm not sure that's going to work." Oh no, people react with moral outrage. Yet if we look at our grandparents, there was probably a little bit of an age difference there, wasn't there? And there was most definitely one with our great-grandparents. Nobody treated that as suspicious. So what changed? Did men suddenly become dangerous? Did women suddenly lose all agency? Or is the way that we interpret relationships quietly changing? For most of human history, marriage was not about, quote, "finding your soulmate." It was not about a lustful or emotional connection. Marriage was about survival. It was about making babies. It was about stability. It was about property and resources. It was about family continuity. Men didn't wait until they, quote, felt ready to get married. Men waited until they were established— when they acquired land, when they perfected their trade, when they built their business, when they got that inheritance. And all of that takes time. Therefore, men got married late 20s and 30s. Typically, that was seen as the time when men were most valuable. Women, on the other hand, were valued primarily for their Youthfulness and fertility. And that is not because men were evil and predatory, but rather because infant mortality was high. Life was a very fragile thing for the majority of human history.

Therefore, women married younger.

And this pattern shows up throughout human history, whether it's ancient Rome, medieval Europe, early America, in Asia, in the Middle East. We're looking at 8-year age gaps being pretty normal, 10-year gaps, 12-year gaps. Therefore, a man who was seen with a younger woman wasn't looked at as creepy. He was looked at as successful. He was established. He was a guy who had his life together. And a woman with an older husband wasn't seen as exploited. She was judged as secure because relationships were judged as a function, not on the optics of the whole thing. Did your relationship work? Did it last? And did it produce stability? Now, whenever this whole age gap thing comes up, somebody will invariably say, actually, if you look at the data, the age gap thing is historically insignificant. That it was actually somewhat uncommon amongst most people. That statement actually sounds careful and responsible, but it doesn't tell the full story. The first thing we need to do is define what exactly we mean by a large age gap. Today, when we hear about a large age gap in a relationship, we think like a 15, 20, 25-year age gap. And then people say, "Most marriages weren't like that," which is true, but it's somewhat misleading. Historically, a 6 to 12 year age gap was significant because a 35-year-old married to a 25-year-old, those two people are not on similar life stages, two completely different worldviews. Yet that pairing was extremely common. You'll also often hear that historically the average age gap was only a few years. This is where the stats are doing rhetorical work because averages tend to flatten out reality. Averages hide patterns because that history includes first marriages with smaller age gaps, second marriages with much larger age gaps, elite marriages with even larger age gaps, and poor rural marriages with smaller age gaps. If you blend all those together, then the structure tends to disappear. But that does not mean that the structure wasn't there to begin with. All it means is that all the math just washed everything out. It's like saying that if you go to a hospital, that the average temperature —of a patient there is normal, when in fact we have a lot of people with really high fevers. Another common rebuttal to the whole age gap history thing is that age gaps were only common amongst aristocrats, the super wealthy, and that historically the super wealthy, the elites, were a relatively small sliver of the pie. And that sounds perfectly reasonable, but it somewhat collapses under scrutiny. Historically, elites are the ones that determine what success what success looks like. They're the ones that set the societal norms. They set the cultural standards. They are the ones that model aspiration. In other words, people don't look at the poor farmer and say, "That's what I want to do." People tend to look upward for what to do. And so when people look at the cultural elites and see that they are marrying younger, that's what people aspire to do. Society approved that, and the culture considered that to be a legitimate practice. Norms tend to flow downward. Yes, peasants throughout history tended to marry closer in age, but that is not because the peasants thought that age gaps were inherently wrong. It's simply because they couldn't do so. They had no career ladder, so to speak. They had very little in terms of surplus. They were constantly facing their mortality. They married as soon as possible, and that's a constraint. What people do historically with very little options tells you very little about their preferences. Another problem is that the whole remarriage stats just blows all of this up. This is the little detail in all of this that gets quietly ignored. Historically, death was everywhere, whether it's in war, whether it's during childbirth, whether it's because of disease. Widowers, men who lost their wife to death, was common across all classes. And when men remarried, even the poor men they often remarried way younger. Often this age gap was anywhere from 8 to 15 years, sometimes even more, whether they were farmers or tradesmen or aristocrats. The moment the constraint loosened, the pattern returned. That's the tell. If age gaps were in fact viewed as exploitative and abnormal, you would see a lot more pushback. Historically, you would see religious condemnation, uh, legal constraints and overall social stigma. But overall, we don't see that. We see acceptance, we see outright admiration. And that tells you overall how our society has looked at these things. So as far as age gaps are concerned throughout history, here is the accurate summary: extremely large age gaps were less common, moderate age gaps were normal, peasant marriages were more compressed by necessity, and remarriage reintroduced the large age gap thing to all the classes. Across cultures and across history, we see the same thing over and over again. Established men prefer younger women, and younger women prefer established men. Even in the most egalitarian societies on the planet Earth, throughout history, we see an age gap. A smaller age gap, sure, but the age gap is still there. This is not culture. This is human beings interacting with opportunity. So why the moral panic now? This whole thing about older men being predatory on younger women, it's a relatively new thing. The concept has exploded over the last 15 to 20 years. Historically, relationships were always judged as a function. Do both adults consent to the relationship? Is the relationship stable? Is it producing? Power differences, the concept of power differences was assumed throughout all aspects of life. The goal was to regulate the power differences, not necessarily to eliminate them completely. But our modern-day thinking has flipped this. Now everything is looked at through the prism of power. Age becomes an imbalance. Income becomes coercion. Experience becomes exploitation. Once we adopt that lens, every difference is looked at with suspicion. Not necessarily bad behavior, not necessarily abuse, any kind of difference. And this whole thing creates one of the strangest contradictions in modern culture. Historically, a woman choosing an older man was taken at face value. She was an adult. The choice was hers. But today, modern ideology treats us differently. If she chooses a peer, somebody around her age, she is empowered. But if she were to choose an older man, uh-oh, there's a difference there. And a difference means that there must be some kind of power imbalance at play here. She must not have chosen. She must have been conditioned. She must have been influenced. She must have been manipulated by an inherently evil patriarchal system. That same woman becomes a psychological minor. Agency becomes conditional. And that is not empowerment. That is paternalism. Basically, we're saying that the woman cannot be trusted to choose her partner. If we extrapolate that, Then is she able to choose anything? Is she able to choose her career? Is she able to make her own medical decisions? Is she able to choose her own political party? That logic doesn't stop at the old dating game. It spreads outward. This is why we hear things like, "It doesn't matter if she's happy or not, it's still wrong." Historically, that phrase would make zero sense. Moral judgment used to be about outcomes, and now it's about symbolism, because even healthy relationships are looked at negatively if it goes against a theory. What actually destroys relationships? It's not an age gap. Bad character destroys relationships. Control issues, immaturity, dependency, emotional instability. Those things destroy same-age couples every single day. Age isn't the toxin necessarily, but personality is. This is in part why a lot of modern-day men feel very confused. Because what we see as kind of normal human patterns are moralized. Natural preferences are pathologized. Instincts are treated as suspect. Men are told to distrust ourselves, and we are offered no coherent replacement. And this creates anxiety, overcorrection, or just paralysis. We freeze. We don't know what to do. And that environment damages relationships far more than any silly age gaps are concerned. Men in relationships today don't need more moral panic. They need clarity. They need security. And this is exactly what we talk about in the Brotherhood, my private support community for men only. And you can learn more at help4men.com/join. In that group, we have hundreds of men from around the world trying to navigate this whole very confusing world of relationships as far as marriage and dating and divorce and starting over is concerned. Men aren't broken necessarily. The culture, it's just very confusing. If you don't understand how all of these rules have quietly changed, then you end up blaming yourself for problems that you did not create. Do me a favor, if you like this video and want to see more of it, hit subscribe, hit like, hit follow, however it works wherever you're watching this. And guys, thank you so very much, and we will catch you on the next one.