I mentioned on the Wednesday watching post that I’ve recently hit a string of podcasts about messy relationships between young women and older men, which often end in violence. As I listen to them, it’s making me rethink a lot of assumptions I’ve had about these relationships and sort of unpack how I feel about them.
I think, as I get older, it’s the age dynamic that is most alarming for me in these situations. Me at almost 40 has so much more life skills and confidence and experience than me at 24 had. I’m more comfortable talking to strangers, more comfortable talking to authority figures, more comfortable BEING an authority figure, better able to make decisions and anticipate consequences, so many MANY skills. And I can remember being 24 and thinking I already knew everything.
And then I listen to a story of a beautiful 24 year old who meets a 40 year old and moves in with him a week later. On the one hand, she is benefiting from this relationship, she gets a free place to live, she gets expensive presents, she gets to meet fabulous people and go to fabulous parties. And her only qualifications are that she is beautiful and young. And he isn’t hurting her, he isn’t forcing her to stay, she is definitely an adult.
Is that a golddigger? Maybe? But golddigger would make her the active one in the relationship. And the older I get, the less I think a 24 year old can control a 40 year old. I don’t know where the cut off is, how old she would have to be and how old he would have to be to make it equitable. But I know that 24-40 is not it. And 19 to 27 is not it. And 21 to 60 is definitely not it.
I guess all of the elements of the relationship are similar to the age thing. I don’t know where the financial inequity becomes a major issue, but I know a receptionist and a trust fund millionaire is not equitable. I don’t know where the life experience crosses that line, but a recent high school grad with someone who’s lived alone in multiple major cities is not it. I don’t know where power crosses that line, but someone who can skate out of trouble for drug charges versus someone whose been jailed for drugs is not it.
But wait, I actually know multiple couples in real like that I would consider good couples that fall into most of these categories. So it’s not guaranteed that a relationship is unhealthy just because of an age difference or a financial difference or a lived experience difference or whatever. Maybe it is just that it’s a warning sign? Something a healthy couple would be aware of and talk about and negotiate openly?
Oh! That’s the difference! It’s if a couple is presenting themselves to the world as if the younger one/poorer one/less experienced one is in Control, that’s where I start to worry. Well, I start to worry as of this week. Previously, I have to say, I kind of bought into that idea.
A beautiful young woman pursues a wealthy older man. He gives her presents, a fabulous life, marries her. She has everything she wanted. She is a successful golddigger. This is the narrative.
When I try to put that narrative on my lived experience, it just doesn’t work. Surely a young person would have dreams beyond just having presents and a mansion, surely that isn’t “everything she wanted”. And surely the wealthy older man can’t be “trapped”? Really? A guy with his money and power and life experience was helpless in front of this very young inexperienced person?
Even if, let’s say, a beautiful young woman says “oh wow, he’s so rich! I love this life! This is great!” does that make her The Worst Person Ever? Or just, human? How many young women consciously set out thinking “I will lie and scheme and trick my way into marrying a rich man” versus having a rich person show up in front of them and, maybe, decide to start or continue a relationship partly because of his wealth? From the other side of things, how is it considered worse for a woman to date a man for his money versus a man dating a woman for her beauty? Both things are superficial, both things are possibly temporary, yet saying “she was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, I had to date her” is a normal complimentary thing to say while saying “he was the richest man I ever met, I had to date him” is not?
I’m talking men versus women, because this is a male versus female dynamic. A rich man “gets” to have a young beautiful woman. A young beautiful woman “gets” to marry rich. That’s her reward. We see photos of Leonardo DiCaprio with his latest girlfriend, and go “yeah, of course, that makes sense”. And yet if I saw that exact same relationship with one of my friends in real life, I would be VERY concerned for her. I just don’t see Leo’s girlfriends as people, I’ve been taught to see them as sort of another race somehow?
I think that’s the most impactful part of what I’ve been listening to lately, the thing that has made me turn inward and ask myself why I think like this. Hearing a friend, a sister, a parent talk about these women suddenly they aren’t “Beautiful Women” who sprung forth fully formed into the world, they are humans. That woman who moved into a penthouse with her boyfriend, struggled with mental health and addiction issues, she was an artist and a martial arts athlete, she had a best friend since middle-school that she talked to every day, she was a PERSON. And that whole person got lost in the narrative of “rich so-and-so’s latest girlfriend”.
Have we all been brainwashed, as a society, to think of a woman who reaches a certain level of beauty as no longer human? No longer the same as “us”? The biggest hit-me-in-the-face moment was when I was watching a documentary about a very rich and powerful man who almost certainly killed his wife. All the headlines at the time and later, most of the people talking about her, even he himself, referred to her as his “beautiful wife”. Nice, tidy, beautiful woman marries rich man. But she was IN MED SCHOOL!!!! If she had been married to someone less wealthy, if she hadn’t been married at all, the headline would have been “Med Student disappears”. But no, if a younger woman is married to a wealthy man, she MUST be described as “beautiful” because that is how we dehumanize her, that is how society stops thinking about this relationship as messy and wrong and unhealthy and instead just as “oh yeah, that’s how it always happens.”
There’s two ways these stories end, that is, the public narratives. Either she is “hard” and “smart” and “tough” and divorces him and “takes” his money. Or, she is “troubled” and “sad” and “sick” and ends up dead. What an odd thing. If the wife of a regular person divorced him and asked for a settlement and child support, if she was average looking, we would say “good for her” or even “yeah, makes sense”. But if she is beautiful, suddenly it turns into a scam, a theft, a con. If an average looking woman married to a regular person overdoses or suicides or is murdered, we would say “was there something going on in her marriage? Did her partner try to help with her addiction? Was he enabling? Were there other life problems that could have lead to it?” But a beautiful woman married to a rich man, suddenly she’s just “troubled” for no particular reason and obviously her partner wouldn’t be responsible for helping her.
Even if, let’s say, there is the one in a million person who really did set out to use her beauty to catch a rich husband. When she ends up being abused, all of a sudden we say “well, fair’s fair”. I think society has accepted (and again, I include myself in this) a very extreme punishment for a very minor crime. Young woman marries for money. Young woman is emotionally and physically abused for years, comes out of it broken in many ways. Society says “well, what did she expect?” Her crime is that she pretended to feel feelings she didn’t. His crime is that he destroyed a person’s inner soul. And society thinks of them as equal? Not only that, is angry with her when she asks for justice because, after all, she is the criminal.
This is a lot of very confused thoughts. Mostly it has made me question my own perceptions. In Indian society and other places with arranged marriages, in some ways it is an easier moral judgement to make. The woman didn’t decide to join this relationship, didn’t lie her way in, has no culpability when it goes poorly. Even if she is beautiful, she still had no choice. But with love marriages, then suddenly I seem to have a perception that a beautiful woman and a rich man is a relationship of convenience on both sides and anything that happens to her doesn’t matter.
dontcallitbollywood 
Suchitra Krishnamurthy was thirty years younger than her ex boyfriend Shekhar Kapoor. Obviously it would never work out. But she was 20 and genuinely didn’t know what she was getting herself into. She was in loooooove.
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*ex husband
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Maybe times have changed too. In olden days a 24 year was considered fully grown up woman. Rekha, for instance was only 24 years when she played tawaif in Muqaddar ka Sikandar. She was completely believable as a powerful seductive experienced woman, equal to Amitabh who is good 12 years older than her. Suhana khan will soon turn 24 , can you believe her in a role in which she’s playing a wife/ mother/ courtesan?
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Absolutely! I don’t know if it is the extended life times or what, but it seems universal that young woman are considered younger now than they were decades ago, everywhere int he world.
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I briefly skimmed through the post but I also agree with anonymous that the world has largely changed so we can’t say that what is acceptable a few decades ago is acceptable now. However, what I often realise when I read these podcasts or watch videos on characters who fit into stereotypes(poor,oppressed,gold digger,etc) is that they’re human. So we can’t expect them to fit into these neat little boxes that people have built for them. This is mostly just a repetition of what you have said in your post but I think the whole dynamics of these stereotyped and much talked about characters are as to what I said above.
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Yes! Exactly! little boxes and labels for people are dangerous, because we stop thinking of them as human and then we lose our empathy or them. I hadn’t realized what I blindspot I myself had for this particular kind of label and it alarms me to discover it. I wonder how many other blindspots I have without knowing it?
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I think we have trouble as a society just acknowledging that abuse and violence and treating others like trash is not ok, regardless of the context of the relationship or why / how the relationship came about. Then we seem to start to find justifications of awful behavior that seem to relieve powerful people of responsibility. It reminds me of this thing I heard on Dr Ramani’s YouTube videos that narcissists are rewarded in business and society.
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To me power is defined by how many options someone has. An older wealthy man has definitely way more options than a younger beautiful woman IMO.
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Yes. And yet there is also a commonly socially accepted truism that a Beautiful Woman can do Anything. All of those songs about walking into the room and time stopped, or I can’t say no to her, etc. etc. etc. Yes, beautiful women are desired, but that doesn’t give them real power. Hmm. If I think about it from your choice perspective. a Beautiful woman is offered many things, but she has no more ability to go out and make her own choices and build her own life than any other young woman. Versus a wealthy older person who doesn’t have to wait to be given something and can just take it.
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Yes exactly!!
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It may just come down to the fact that many narratives are still predominantly influenced by the male view. For me that comes back to my guilty discovery when we were talking about Zeenat Aman: I realized that my brain doesn’t really want to bother with the facts and accomplishment of her life, being busy salivating “Oh yeah, I wanna tap that”. Worst kind of dehumanization! And if half the population is feeling that way about the victim of a crime, that’s definitely going to color the narrative, consciously or not.
Which has also made me realize: It may be even more dangerous for a beautiful woman to enter a relationship too young. Because if she hasn’t yet experienced or considered those dehumanizing reactions, why wouldn’t she play up her beauty to get favors? I do still assume that it can work that way. But I’m becoming more and more aware of the risks for those gorgeous women. The guy might really feel taken advantage of. And if he doesn’t care about her as a person at all, that spells trouble.
Actually, the real power differential may be in the fact that you can’t separate her beauty from her as a person, but you can separate him from his money – in the case of a “successful divorcing golddigger”, for example. So he may be running higher risks for his assets, but she lives with the higher risk to her person.
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That goes back to a quote that I heard referenced in one of this stories about a beautiful young woman from Margaret Atwood, ” ‘Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.'” So if a beautiful woman turns out to have “used” her beauty in some way, the man may feel a little sad and a little humiliated. But that doesn’t give him the right to kill her! Or hurt her, or destroy her life and livelihood, or any of that. There are so many stories in society of the man getting “revenge” on the Bad Woman, and we don’t question that that is okay. That he has a right to that sense of anger and injustice.
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Most relationships where there is a vast age difference make me wildly uncomfortable because of the control and power dynamic. Bringing it to the Hindi film industry, this is why the Shahid/Mira marriage really bothered me. He was 32 and had been working forever, and in very public relationships with actresses. She was 19, still in school. It feels like she was picked because she could be molded to his needs and that makes me feel icky! And of course they get the women pregnant right away, which also feels like another layer of control. It’s the same issue I have with Dimple/Rajesh (or even the movie Lucky – No Time for Love). It’s adult men who have had life experiences and relationships, picking young in their 20’s who are ripe for motherhood. EWWW! UGH!
At the same time, I never felt that way when Kareena and Saif got together. She was 29 and he was almost 40 but it didn’t feel like the power dynamic was imbalanced there. Maybe because Kareena had been working for years and had public relationships and knew what she wanted. It felt like she had agency the whole time. And yet, the facts seem similar for Alia/Ranbir, and yet, I would out their relationship in the same category as Dimple/Rajesh, Shahid/Mira.
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Somewhere I read the metric that it’s OK if the younger partner is at least half the holder’s age plus seven years. That seems to mesh with our feelings surprisingly often.
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Yes! Although still with the “life experience” issues. I think Shahid’s wife Mira BARELY passed that test. But a 32 year old movie star has no business marrying a 19 year old college student.
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One thing I really notice with Saif and Kareena is that he already had a family and did all that stuff. He didn’t need her to “settle down” and be his arm candy and the perfect mother. He didn’t need her to fit within a certain mold in order for his life to play out, his life had already broken the mold. Does that make sense? I feel the same with Saif and Amrita, big age gap there too, but they weren’t together because of some social role play, they don’t fit in any roles, which makes me more likely to believe it was equal choice on both parts.
Versus your other examples where it is very much what society expected of both of them and there were hobbles around her feet from the beginning of the relationship.
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I think you nailed it on the head. Said had already broken the mold and married an older woman. He also had kids. It never felt like he wanted to marry a younger woman and get her pregnant to assert some form of control.
And Kareena had also broken the mold. She dated publicly. She never felt like an ingenue who worshipped this super star and was enthralled by his public persona.
As I am writing this, I just realized that Kareena was also the bigger star in their relationships and continues to be so. Maybe that was also the difference.
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Yes! Kareena had enough life experience to distinguish between being trashed (Shahid) and finding respect (from Saif)
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Completely agree!!! I am unabashedly a fan of Kareena. I think she’s amazing. The only time I questioned her choices when she was dating Shahid and all of a sudden, she gave up all non-veg food and alcohol and started spouting stuff about being a teetotaler and vegetarian.
Again, nothing wrong with not consuming alcohol or non-vegetarian food but it wasn’t her. And importantly, it was a pattern with all the women who dated Shahid. They all changed for him and then he decided to marry a 19 year old who was still in school.
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