Member-only story
Age-Appropriate Relationships
Why this concept is misguided
It’s fashionable in some circles to decry relationships in which the man is significantly older than the woman. It’s “woke” for some to claim that all relationships must be “age appropriate” otherwise something is wrong. Yet how solid is the ground upon which such facile notions stand?
Like all group species, we humans practice co-opetition. In other words, we cooperate with each other because our survival depends on it, but we also compete with each other to enhance our position in the group hierarchy. Most of what we do in unconscious so we’re rarely aware of our true motivations, but by standing back and asking the question cui bono? we can usually get to the heart of the matter.
Our most compulsive behaviors are, naturally, those associated with raw survival but in our modern world of relative safety and superabundance these behaviors are rarely activated. Much more commonly activated, however, are the hardwired behaviors associated with obtaining and retaining the benefits of having a mate. As we’re hardwired by hundreds of thousands of years of selection pressures that resulted in our brains being adapted to deal with the conditions that pertained in our ancestral environments, these behaviors control us without us being aware of them. Our conscious minds simply invent “reasons” post-hoc…
