Women Are Drawn to Older Men

A twenty-year age gap is rarely an accident. How a woman's relationship with her own father shapes the kind of men she chooses in adult life.

Why are young women sometimes drawn to much older men? I mean an age gap of twenty years or more.

I don’t want to talk here about gold diggers, because I doubt many women like that follow me, and besides, we all understand the real motivation of a twenty-year-old sleeping with a fifty-five-year-old millionaire.

Let’s talk about the cases where people genuinely build a romantic relationship across a large age gap.

Every case is individual, but very often a woman’s choice has to do with her biological father.

I’ll simply highlight a few patterns I run into when I counsel women who are in a relationship with a man much older than they are.

Most often, that woman’s father may have:

1. Paid no attention to his daughter in childhood. He showed her that work and other matters mattered more than time with her.

   The girl developed a feeling of rejection as a baseline emotion.

   That’s when a woman later, subconsciously, seeks out relationships where she does the loving while she comes second for the man, and she feels the rejection that has been familiar to her since childhood.

   Baseline emotions are far stronger than common sense.

2. Or the situation where the father was so protective and controlling that he gave his daughter a “daddy’s girl” complex. That’s when the whole world revolves around a little “princess”.

   Any healthy relationship is then hard for her to build, because she starts from the subconscious premise: “you’re a man, you owe me!”

3. Or the father wasn’t present in his daughter’s life at all. He left the family, say, and an emptiness and a sense of not being wanted stayed in the girl’s heart.

   In that situation, in adult life, any male attention becomes an object of longing. Her greatest fear is that the man will leave her.

There are many other possible scenarios for how a father shapes his daughter’s psyche, but I’m illustrating just a few here to show how the mechanism can work.

When a girl reaches adolescence, she often notices that boys her own age seem boring, predictable and not very sure of themselves, while older guys behave differently.

It’s no surprise that if, later in life, she doesn’t find worthy candidates among her peers, her eye falls (sometimes subconsciously) on older men.

And if that older man is also ready to love her exactly the way she wishes her biological father had loved her, the choice becomes very easy.

What we didn’t get in childhood, or what we did get (the “daddy’s girl” treatment, for example), can become a subconscious trigger in adult life.

This can be worked through, and you can free yourself from that pattern, if you understand what happened in childhood and why.

As they say in the East, “a demon named is a demon half as strong”. When we understand the real reasons for our behaviour, it becomes easier to manage it.

I’ll add that, in my subjective view, a relationship with an age gap of more than ten years is very hard to build. I see it in my clients.

Of course there are plenty of different examples and even happy couples, but I’m talking about the majority of cases.

And you, as grown, conscious people, can decide for yourselves what exactly to do with your own life.