COULD YOU SAY 'YES' TO A YOUNGER MAN?

Parul Karn gets the lowdown on the uptick in the trend of women dating younger men

- Paul Karn

Dorothea coloured with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the speaker,” George Eliot writes in Middlemarch, a novel about 19thcentury society. “Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life, and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could illuminate principle with the widest knowledge: a man whose learning almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!”

From then on, it seems as if the world of men and women and their coexistence carried on largely unchanged – women almost exclusively sought relationships with older men. The idea, as suggested in the excerpt from Middlemarch, was to find a man who could take care of everything – a figure to whom a woman could look up and from whom she could learn the ways of life. Historically, since women were often limited by societal norms that excluded them from opportunities such as formal education and careers requiring participation in the outside world, marrying an older man with worldly experience might have seemed like the only viable option.

The world has since shifted. Today, more women choose for themselves. They can select a partner based on a sense of personal security and selfsufficiency, where a man is a want rather than a need. This new sense of companionship creates less pressure for men as well, fostering a more balanced and fulfilling dynamic in relationships.