In an interview with the Italian magazine "Chi", Elisabetta Canalis describes her relationship with her former boyfriend George Clooney as "a father-and-daughter relationship".Marriage and children were therefore never discussed.Whether the relationship between the 30-year-old model and the 20-year-old actor broke down because of the age gap is still an open question.Yet the problems Canalis reports are far from untypical for the pairing of young women and older men.
So what is it that attracts women to men with grey at the temples? Love, trust and safety are what young women look for in men considerably older than themselves.But an arrangement like that does not always work, precisely because of the age gap.
Do you like older men? Is it a father complex?
There is nothing new about mature men often being drawn to young women.Celebrities such as the politician Franz Müntefering (41 years older than Ms Michelle) or the actor Til Schweiger (23 years between him and his girlfriend Francesca Dutton) have already demonstrated it plainly enough.Judgements and prejudices spring to mind quickly, because: he is old and rich, she is young and sexy.Together, a fine and convenient partnership. On the other hand, the idea that young women should seriously desire mature men of their fathers' and grandfathers' age raises doubts — as does the idea that older men can genuinely believe they are living through a second youth with a far younger partner.And it is not only celebrities who illustrate the pattern.So what is so attractive about an age gap?And above all: is a relationship like that fit for a long shared future?
Life is not always easy for couples with a big age gap.Friends and relatives are often critical of the relationship and confront the couple with the usual clichés: he is after a young beauty for the sake of his ego, she is after material security and suffers from a father complex.In fact, it is not love alone that brings such couples together.Psychologists know that women who are drawn to a much older man usually have a strong need for security, and this is often bound up with an unresolved relationship with their father.The women who suffer most are those whose fathers were hard to reach for them, or who were separated from their father.Such women usually see men of their own age not as men but rather as boys who are not to be taken seriously, say the psychologists who describe this phenomenon.
Turning down the moral outrage
The Cologne psychologist Ulrich Schmitz insists that moral condemnation should be left out of it entirely these days. There are, of course, a great many kinds of "Games" by which people find their place in human society.
"That includes attraction between people with a very large age gap," says Schmitz. For him it would be presumptuous "to pathologise everything that is unfamiliar to the eye at first". If two people have an equal relationship, even a purely sexual one, in which neither is unfairly exploited, then it is simply one of the variations our life allows. Though it is, of course, rather unusual."
In the view of the psychologist Schmitz, a relationship between partners with a big age gap becomes pathological when people start overplaying the "games": "When young women make themselves even smaller and the men, for their part, dominate and play the mature and experienced one, an element comes in that to my mind has overtones of incest." Such patterns of behaviour, he says, come far too close to a father-and-daughter relationship.
Forms like these are by no means automatic in partnerships with a big age gap.
Looks play a large part
The Berlin psychotherapist Wolfgang Krüger likewise sees no reason to sound the alarm straight away when a young woman becomes involved with a man who could be older than her father: "We now have a great deal of tolerance for every kind of relationship that is possible."
Krüger cannot quite hide the fact, though, that the thought of purely sexual attraction between a 20-year-old and a 60-year-old puzzles him. "At 20, looks naturally play a large part. For young women, an attractive man usually has to be slim and strong," Krüger says. According to the psychotherapist, the fact that women then choose a much older man who simply carries the marks of a life lived falls outside the usual pattern: "The woman is coming into bloom, the old man sees the end of life ahead. That carries a great danger of becoming and remaining a stranger to oneself." So there is no chance of a happy ending? At least not if physical love alone is in the foreground.
Young men are often thought too childish
Both experts find a partnership built on love, trust and safety far easier to understand than a mainly sexual relationship.Older men are often marked by a balance of self-esteem, polish and standing.That is clearly popular with young women.All the more so because, psychologically speaking, young men are often vain, self-centred and jealous — traits that women of their own age often see as childish.
A big age gap usually works well as long as the older man is healthy and strong. According to Krüger, illness and the farewell to active working life are usually the stumbling block on which many relationships come to grief. For then the focus shifts to what both partners often used to suppress: virility gives way to physical weakness, the self-assured businessman is sent into retirement — and either he grows bored or he plunges into hobbies and travel that his partner cannot share or enjoy, because she is still busy with work and career.
So the differences between young and old grow sharper. Both of them find it hard to find a common rhythm. That carries a great danger of estrangement. It is rather like Andreas Bourani's song "Auf anderen Wegen". It says: "My heart beats faster than yours. / They no longer beat as one." And that, as researchers have found, is exactly what is decisive for a long-term partnership.
What age gap is ideal?
Krüger points to two thresholds here: in a partnership with an age gap of nine years, the risk of separation rises considerably.With an age gap of 20 years, the risk of separation is 95 per cent.This is borne out by a study of the ideal age gap carried out by Emory University in the American state of Atlanta: reduced to figures, a relationship in fact has the best chance of lasting if the two lovers are the same age, or if there are at most four years between them, seven at the very most, as the researchers found.That has a great deal to do with a way of life that changes at the same pace and, above all, with sexuality.
"Our whole life experience walks in step with our sexuality," Krüger explains. "And that is why it is good when the person I sleep with is the same age.It is not only the physical that matters here, but our whole personality — what I think, what I feel, who I am, how far along I am.People of the same age waver in the same way and share the same insecurities.And that is a good thing, because the two of them speak the same language — in life and in bed."
Age does matter, in love at least.
