Why more people should consider age gap relationships

It's good at both the individual and the societal level

I have always been puzzled that age gaps in relationships aren’t more popular in society at large, because it seems pretty clear that there can be major advantages for both sides.

And there’s lots of prominent, high status examples - so it’s doubly curious that it’s not emulated more

Instead, age gap approval and age gap realities have been shrinking steadily - in 1950, back when people actually got married and had kids at 22-24, married age gaps were on average ~4-5 years.

After 7 decades of increased social and economic power for women, age gaps are currently at around 1.5 years on average, roughly a 3-fold decrease.

How verboten are age gaps today?

Not surprisingly, given what we’ve seen in the long term trends, age gaps are more disapproved-of among women than men.

This gender separation has clearly been reflected empirically with the real-world marriage / relationship age gaps being reduced by ~3x in real life, because women are generally the “choosers” when it comes to whether a given relationship happens.

However, this is an abstract and general disapproval, and people, women included, are okay with making individual exceptions for themselves:

A representative Ipsos poll (2022) found that 39% of Americans have dated someone with an age gap of 10 years or more. Further, 28% of women reported dating someone ten years older or more.

The overall approval by gap even demonstrates a pretty funny / interesting trend, with essentially everyone of both genders approving of 5 year gaps, then women alone steadily shifting towards increasing net-disapproval at 10, 15, and 20 years:

Data from n=648 online convenience survey: Link

In terms of age of respondents, men get more favorable to age gap relationships the older they are, and women stay pretty close on disapproval regardless of their own age.¹

But adopting this societal consensus is probably a mistake

I am here to make the case for why YOU, whether man or woman, should at least be open to considering an age gap relationship.

I’m going to argue that it’s better for both men and women, and probably for society overall, and that the risks and downsides are fully mitigable, while the advantages are in pretty important areas many people would appreciate a buff.

Age gaps are good for society

Societally, age gaps are probably a good idea.

During the baby boom years, average age at first marriage was ~22, and first kid was ~22-24, and age gaps were 4-5 years.

Today, that's 29 and 31. This alone explains most of the developed world fertility crisis.

Anyone who cares about having kids or mitigating the fertility crisis should want an age gap relationship, and should want age gap relationships to be more prevalent societally.

One of the biggest societal features of the baby boom years, was that men had good jobs that were noticeably higher paying than women (largely due to female discrimination and glass ceilings coupled with a booming economy).

As that gap closed, marriages went down (because women could make their own money, and women want a higher earning man, among other reasons), and fertility went down. In real-life relationships today, higher earning men who make significantly more than their wives have more children, with the endpoint high income men with stay at home wives.²

Particularly if you care about high human capital fertility, you should want more age gap relationships, because it's probably the single biggest lever you could pull to help close the "had" vs "wanted" number of kids gap among high human capital people, because that gap is higher in them. Age gap relationships directly reflect the Baby- Boom-years dynamic of higher earning, higher status men, and more children are likely to result.

It can help move marriage from “capstone” back to “foundation”

One of the biggest problems with fertility today is the mismatch between fertility windows and education and early career demands - but if we look at the larger picture of a human lifespan, there should BE no mismatch. Lifespans are long and getting longer, while fertility is fixed and front-loaded. And we could basically entirely fix this with a simple timing shift.

Age gap relationships allow us to encourage a dynamic where women marry younger and have some children while fully supported by their more established hubby, but while still planning on college / grad school themselves and shooting for beginning their own high powered careers around 35 when the kids are old enough.

One of the "carrots" for encouraging that scheme could be income tax reductions per-child that apply to the husband's income for the first ten years, then switch to the wife's income after that.

As a woman, if you start your career at 35 instead of 25, it should literally matter not at all - you have another ~50 years of life in expectation either way, and the ~30-40 years of effort put into careers before retiring fits neatly into either window.

Then we all get the best of both worlds! Nobody wastes their talents, but we still get a bunch of kids raised by talented, dual income parents. It's basically shifting "marriage and kids" from a capstone to a foundation, which is closer to what it was in the 60's - 80's.

But important advantages remain for individuals, too!

Age gaps are the smart thing to do for both sides

Now I want to preface here that I’m not a Manosphere guy - I’ve even written a post about why I believe the Manosphere is doomed, and on justifiable merits (as in, if it’s really a choice between men or women getting screwed, nuke the men, full stop). All of this is just the data as I understand it, and isn’t ideological at all.

For men:

I’m going to spend way less time on the advantages to men, because going by the already-discussed data, men already buy it, and believe it more the older they are.

But there are definitely strong advantages! You get 3x higher fertility,³ women in their early 20’s are objectively the most attractive according to ALL men, you can share all the experiences and things in life you love most with them and it will all be brand new for them and you can relive that freshness and joy, and much more.

When it comes to how men actually think and feel in private vs acting in public, men prize youth and beauty above much else, more or less. When it comes to actual behavior, they get more realistic - the first ones are literally how they feel, their own attractiveness ratings, the second one is age range specified in dating profile.

But that internal drive is for good reasons if you actually want kids (given the 3x fertility thing), and even if you didn’t want kids, it’s still a bone-deep drive in your evolutionary programming, because the ancestors who had that drive had a lot more kids!

For women:

Older men are richer, wiser, treat you better, are better in bed, know more about the world, have a bigger trove of “known awesome experiences” to introduce you to, and will appreciate you more than a guy your own age.

Run this thought experiment:

Everyone wants a high status mate, right? Let’s take two similar 9/10 status guys and maximize an age gap - one is 20, and one is 40. They’re both fit and smart and good looking and thoughtful, they both dress well and smell nice and have stylish haircuts.

The 40 year old would usually be richer and make more money, but let’s ignore even that for now, let’s make them both have a trust fund of roughly the same size. Now, which of these guys is going to treat a 20-24 year old woman better? The 20 year old guy is going to treat her much worse, is more likely to sleep around due to higher hormones and more opportunity and a more party-adjacent lifestyle, and is way less likely to marry her.

The 40 year old is going to appreciate her more and treat her better, and is way more likely to marry or have kids with her. I’d seriously actively recommend dating with an age gap to my own daughters because of these things (and of course, they’ll be growing up in an age gap household themselves).

But aren’t older men…kinda gross?

You’re worried that older people are noticeably fatter and uglier? Good news! You can choose only the silver-foxiest older men, who have taken care of themselves, and are still attractive and fit. Being fit and attractive even while older (contrary to the overwhelming norm) is also a direct and impossible-to-counterfeit sign of higher quality genes that will go into any kids you two have!

After all, would you really say no to this?

But I don’t want to be widowed for a long time

And isn’t that a higher risk if you marry a man 10-20 years older?

An understandable worry and sentiment, but this is something you may need to expect even with no age gap, because long “widow-gaps” are the norm.

Even with minimal age gaps (~2 years), if you predecease your husband (.63 probability), "if she is the surviving spouse, her survivor life expectancy is 12.5 years. If the husband is the surviving spouse, his survivor life expectancy is 9.5 years."⁴

This is just a simple function of survivorship and selection effects (ie the spouse that outlives is likelier to be healthier and longer-lived overall, regardless of gender).

Surely a larger widowed-interval would be more likely with a 10-20 year old older spouse!

Actually even here it’s not cut and dried, for two reasons - let’s consider a 20 year “worst case” gap again:

First, a man having lived to 40 is actually a non-trivial signal. From the Social Security 2021 Period Life table, you'd expect a current 20 year old to live another 54.4 years, and the 40 year old another 36.6 years. That's 74.4 and 76.6, a 2.2 year gap in favor of the 40 year old - the extra years are from avoiding various accidents, choices, and conditions that can still kill the 20 year old, and in expectation that average 40yo is healthier both mentally and physically.

Second, ideally you should have some quality lift above “average” when choosing the older mate. Being 40 and non-overweight or obese is *already* a top 15% or better signal,⁵ so they’re already strongly selected. But then you get all the other stuff!

• If they’re richer than average (and that’s up to you), the top decile vs the bottom decile represents a ~3.3x all cause mortality buff. Top quintile vs bottom quintile is ~2.5x.

• If they’re fit and active and eat well, this versus the average “sedentary and overweight” American with a 60-80% ultra processed food diet represents a 4-5.5x all cause mortality buff!⁶

Those are really huge effect sizes, each bigger than smoking itself (a 1.2 - 3x all cause mortality hazard).

You say your 20 year old alternate choice mate isn’t fat either? That’s the norm - but the odds are greater than 80% that they will become fat as they age! It happens to basically everybody. That 40 year old has empirically proven that they’re in a very selected minority, the top 15% or better.

The median male life expectancy is around 76 years - if being “top 15% or better” translates directly, and you take the top 15% by life expectancy, you reach 91 as their prospective life expectancy, adding 15 years. This argues any age gap up to 15 years is probably net positive to their life span as long as you choose well, due to selection effects. You might even be more likely to predecease them!

And if they’re 20 years older than your prospective alternate mate choice, they’ve still mitigated the average expected widow gap and normalized the expected-widowhood-between-husbands (because given the average 12 year widowed gap, all they would have to do against “average” is survive for 8-10 years longer, and we know that they’re likely to survive 10-15 years longer). And if the age gap were only 10 or 15 years between the two choices, you would actually expect your older-but-more-selected mate to outlast a marriage-until-death duration.

Is that really a fair comparison?

Now maybe this comparison is too stacked on one side - the median American male is basically a bottom-tier pyramid of “boo lights” at 190 pounds, 5' 9," no college degree, sedentary, 60-80% UPF diet, and median income / wealth, so we've stacked all the lifestyle factors on the 40yo side.

But that's also reflective of the actual median American - it all depends how much the relative "quality bonus" is, over what you could get in a younger guy. But simply “not fat?” Sounds pretty attainable to me, and you can probably do even better, and stack even more all cause mortality bonuses on top of that.

I think this at least shows that it's not a ridiculous gap, and the positive selection effects can essentially wholly make up for the age gap in terms of longevity, depending on pretty reasonable upwards quality standards you can reach with the 40yo vs the 20yo.

There are other reasons it might be a good idea

Don't forget the quality of life advantages - say your relationship really were a choice between “lasting 30 years with a rich older guy” vs “50 years with a median younger guy.”

Some people would gladly make that trade, if it's “30 years of a great lifestyle with lower stress, lots of travel and nice experiences, higher quality kids raised with au pairs and nannies and greater ability to get those kids into good colleges and started in life.” vs “50 years of average.”

So we’ve stacked quite a lot of potential upsides in the “benefits” column overall:

1. Likely to be better in physical and mental health, and higher quality overall than a younger match, and the degree of that quality differential is up to you

2. A high status, non-fat 40 year old is already top decile or better on health, discipline, resources, capabilities, and more, and you’ll get all of those advantages in the relationship itself, as well as in any kids you decide to have

3. Lifestyle, quality of life, resources for your kids, and optionality are all greatly enhanced if you’re going for a wealth, income, and / or status buff over the 20yo, and honestly that should be the default expectation

So once again, pay attention to the “degree of quality gap possible” by looking older.

Overall, more optionality is almost always better

If the risks are relatively low and mitigable by choosing well, and the benefits are large and significant and in areas that really matter (higher quality kids, more kids, more resources, a nicer lifestyle, a partnership with a higher quality mate), this sounds like a slam dunk?

This argues that overall, the right move is to keep yourself at least open to an age gap relationship, and simply maintain high standards in your decision, so that you’re getting a relevant and valuable-enough quality differential to make up for the potential downsides, while getting those important upsides.

So get out there and expand your “age range” in those apps, and let’s see what happens.

1. N=346 convenience survey: Link

2. Insert footnote with analysis from CPS ASEC data

3. Why is this 3x differential notably higher than the usual fertility numbers you see? This graph is from Geruso et al, Age and Infertility Revisited (2023).

The reason it’s higher is because most fertility numbers are hot garbage, based on small samples and highly selected populations, and / or from old data. The majority are based on Menken et al’s Age and Infertility (1986), in which he surveys Hutterites in the 1920’s, Geneva bourgeoisie in 1600-49, Canadians 1700-30, Normandy 1760-90, Norway 1874-76, Iran 1940-50, and Americans in the 1930’s.

So, limited data from vastly different time periods than today, in a profoundly different environmental, pollution, and diet regime.

Many more recent (2000+) numbers are from the European Study of Daily Fecundability, in which 782 couples were tracked for a couple of years, and the resulting 487 pregnancies in the study period were used to build a statistical model with similar age curves as Menken et al created.

Why is Geruso Age and Infertility Revisited (2023) better? They combine nationally representative data from 62 low and middle income countries that span Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, with a 2.8M women sample size, and then use that to calculate a true “fecundability” curve using only women who are married, not on contraceptives, not currently pregnant or breastfeeding, and having periods.

Why is this better than the European study? The participants are a highly selected population (Europeans age 18-40 who specifically eschew contraception and never use condoms, and attend “Natural Family Planning” centers, from which they were recruited. Additionally people who were known to be infertile were specifically excluded, as well as anyone with any illness that might affect fertility. 66% of them had had a past pregnancy before study enrollment - a reasonable estimate of the amount of EU women who’d had a pregnancy by the average age in this study (28-30) is more like 50%.

In other words, they were specifically selected to be a known and higher fertility sub-population.

And honestly, even Geruso (2023) is likely under-estimating the differential in Western fertility, which is affected by obesity, diabetes, and metabolic diseases at a much higher rate than the developing world.

4. From: Compton et al, The life expectancy of older couples and surviving spouses (2021)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8121294/

5. Because a large part of the non-obese-or-overweight are children or people in their twenties, and people invariably get fatter with time.

If 75% of Americans in toto are overweight or obese, and children are ~30% of the population, and 18-29 year olds are another 12%, a 40 year old actually has 82-85% odds of being overweight or obese.

6. See footnote 9 here:

https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/processed-food-followup-ultra-processed#footnote-9-154137017