BENGALURU: Often, in deciding on a relationship, even if we are terribly attracted to someone and really feeling drawn to them, we might tell ourselves and our friends that this is not quite relationship-material for some reason or the other, and age gaps is one such reason. It doesn’t need to be intergenerational – even a few years here and there can raise eyebrows. There’s so much social pressure to be around the same age as each other.
We see it happen around us all the time. Families and friends in movies and in real life question the couple going through a hormone-fuelled love fest on what they think will happen, how will society see such a relationship, that they are not compatible because of differences in ‘maturity’ and how they both think of family, finances and the ephemeral ‘future’. “You are having a great fun time,” they would say, “But getting married is something else altogether.”
This idea of ‘maturity’ whether about emotional maturity or otherwise, is touted as the key thing in deciding whether a relationship will mature into a long-term thing or just wither away. Sometimes, caste, class, and community differences are treated as if they were shorthand for these differences. Such-and-such people are unlikely to be emotionally mature, or such-and-such people are never serious about families. Things like that get infuriating for how they are discriminatory.
Even when it is not about how family or society would react, and you are with someone exactly the same chronological age as yourself, it is very likely that in how old one feels, thinks or behaves, age differences are significant in how different we are. In choosing to be with someone for a long-term relationship, do you look for people who are in a similar mental or emotional age as you, if not physical or spiritual? Or, do you disregard such differences and think of it as just another dimension in life?
It is one thing to generally look at personality traits in compatibility tests for relationships on whether one is an introvert or an extrovert, or a beach person or a hill person. It is quite another when there is a real and significant difference in the chronological age between partners, and life experiences are greatly different. Of course, sometimes it has little to do with chronological age as such. A 30-year-old can be a lot more concerned about safety, stability and security in general while their partner who is say 40-year-old, would be much more focused on fun and figuring things out as one goes along, but most times, there is a strong correlation between age and what’s important for the person.
Do you need to grow old together in the relationship? Or, can you grow younger with a more youthful partner, or can one catapult into a greater ‘maturity’ with an older partner?
If in a relationship that’s diverse in terms of age and maturity, the key to making it a great one for both is to acknowledge, respect and value this difference.