Older Women, Younger Men. Felicia Brings
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and she was also his muse. The character, Esther Jack, who appears in Wolfe’s novels, The Web and The Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again, was based on Aline Bernstein.
Still another to choose a younger man, Adelle Davis was a very popular writer and lecturer on issues concerning public health and nutrition. Her most popular books, Let’s Cook It Right (1947), Let’s Have Healthy Children (1951), Let’s Eat Right To Keep Fit (1954) and Let’s Get Well (1965), sold ten million copies during her lifetime. Time Magazine, in 1972, called her “the high priestess of a new nutrition religion.” A major contributor to the popularity of the modern health food movement, Davis was an early public advocate of regular exercise and balanced nutrition. In 1946, Adelle Davis married her first husband, George Edward Leisey, ten years her junior.
Dorothy Katherine Wright Liebes, a textile designer and businesswoman, has been called “the mother of modern weaving.” Director of the Decorative Arts Exhibition of the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair, Liebes was the winner of numerous design awards for her revolutionary approach to woven textile designs. Hugely successful, Liebes’ designs were used for everything from industrial application to upholstery, clothing and furnishings for homes, hotels, ocean liners, airplanes and theaters. In 1948, Dorothy Liebes married Relman Morin, an author and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. He was ten years her junior.
These past examples attest to the fact that older women and younger men have been pairing up for a very long time, well before such relationships came to be perceived as modern. The women we have told of in this chapter have in some large or small way made history or achieved a certain level of fame, whereas many of the women we have interviewed for this book have no particular claim to fame. Few are especially wealthy or powerful. Sometimes they are not even physically very attractive. The voices that speak in this book are those of homemakers, policewomen, secretaries, insurance saleswomen, therapists and others. They lead normal lives, surviving both happy and not-so-happy relationships with their mates as well as their families, neighbors and employers. They come from every socio-economic level and every part of the world.
What has changed, however, and in some quarters, radically, is the status of women overall in our society. Whereas prior to the modern women’s movement, empowered women were the exceptions—the anomalies among the general population—today they are becoming the norm. No longer does a woman have to be a movie star, a high-powered artist or artisan or ruler of an empire to qualify as being empowered and independent. Today, it is the woman in Arizona who runs her ranch after her husband’s death, and it is the woman in Pennsylvania who, having left a long-term dead marriage, has gone back to school, completed her education and is working for an accounting firm, supporting herself and helping to put her son through college, or it is the woman in rural Texas who owns her own beauty shop, or the woman in northern California who operates her own consulting business, or the woman in Michigan who teaches in her local school system—having already raised her children and paid off the mortgage on her house—who fits the description.
Nor are these women out looking for—or accepting—a man who is not capable of meeting anything other than their sexual needs. These are not women looking for boy-toys. They are not swingers and they are not seekers of cheap thrills. Today’s mature, empowered woman has worked very hard to develop her professional skills so that she and her children—and often her parents as well—can enjoy the comfort and security that thirty years ago she looked to a husband to provide. These are women who have learned later in life about being self-sufficient and solely responsible for their own and their children’s well-being. These are women who have had to work on themselves, develop themselves and work harder than they ever expected to, just to survive. Unlike most of the men of their generation, they have had to develop extra inner as well as outer resources in order to be competitive in today’s marketplace. Their jobs are not just additional paychecks to help cover the costs of luxuries, but instead provide incomes that can house and feed their families.
Today’s independent and empowered woman wants a substantive relationship with a man. She is frequently an active participant in her community and sensitive to the general standards of behavior within society. She may have very traditional values and is not out looking for an opportunity to rebel and flaunt her freedom in any way that might antagonize her community. She would, in most cases, have preferred to find a mate in later life from among the pool of so-called “age appropriate” men—men who share her cultural references, men she feels she can “relate to.” But a societal shift has occurred which makes that option simply not available for many, many older women.
No longer the sole province of the rich and beautiful, the recognition that new and different choices can be made is moving into the minds of women in the modern mainstream of life. The history that is repeating itself is the fact that women—with the confidence, wisdom, insight and sensitivity that accrue with age—remain as attractive and desirable to younger men as they always have been.
Approximately 85 percent of the women we interviewed had been previously involved in marriages or relationships with men who were, to some degree, emotionally and/or physically abusive. Having experienced neglect and unloving behavior, these women had the insight to recognize and appreciate a good thing when they found it. Interestingly, however, virtually all of them stated that they had initially resisted the overtures of their younger mates in the belief that relationships with them could never last. Patriarchal society may be responsible for this perception, but women have certainly bought into it. Older women/younger men couplings are much mistrusted and misunderstood—many people believe these relationships cannot possibly be anything more than sexual flings, for why on earth would young men (who could attract more nubile young women) choose women who have lost their only valuable attributes, those of youth and beauty? It’s a mystery, but only until one finds the key with which to unlock this puzzle. Could it be that perhaps mature women have something to offer that is even better than youth and beauty? It’s a hard notion to swallow for those of us raised under Madison Avenue’s value-shaping influence.
And we all have, to greater or lesser extents, bought into such myths. We, too, came to our subject in the belief that long-term, loving, successful marriages and relationships between older women and younger men probably existed because the women in these unions had worked to maintain well preserved outer appearances. Sure, a woman who dieted religiously, dyed her hair, worked out with a trainer, invested in a nip here and a tuck there and endured ongoing injections of everything from her own body fat to substances derived from food-poisoning botulism, cows and human remains, could perhaps attract and hold a younger man, one of the prerequisites being she looked really great for her age. So, we have to admit, it was startling to us when we came across older women who looked their age, did not possess the most toned and athletic bodies and often went no further than having occasional haircuts to alter their natural appearance…AND were happily married or in committed relationships with significantly younger (and often very cute) men. What does this mean, we wondered?
What we learned was that it was about love, respect, appreciation and devotion, which these women were fortunate enough to find in younger men who recognized their more enduring attributes. It was the men in these relationships who felt lucky to have found such special women and they were perfectly comfortable showing this in a multitude of ways. Lou Ellen, a hardworking, forty-two-year-old police detective, told us about her thirty-year-old husband, Jay:
There are days that I come home from work so tired I can hardly stand up, and my husband will just lift my legs up on his lap and sit there rubbing my feet until I feel like I’m back among the living. Then he’ll go out and bring home Chinese food so I don’t have to cook or do anything. In the six years that we’ve been married, he has never once not brought me flowers every week. He just treats me like a queen, something no one else has ever done for me before. How did I get so lucky? I don’t know, but I say a prayer of thanks every day for us having found each other.
What exactly is it that these older women embody which keeps their young men attracted, passionate and devoted? From celebrities and queens to computer programmers and sales representatives, the older women we’ve observed have one thing in common—they know who they are and are comfortable with themselves.
Knowing one’s self, having