Relationships – why are they so complicated or do we unnecessarily complicate them ourselves? I’m talking about relationships with the opposite sex.
In my world view created for me by my parents, it was socially acceptable for the man to be a year or two older than the woman – even up to five years older. On the other hand, when the woman was older than the man, it was questioned immediately. “What does she want from him?”, “she has a hidden agenda”, “she wants to corrupt the poor guy” etc.
You see, it was socially acceptable for the man to be older because this would usually mean that he was “wiser” than the woman (because of his age, he has more life experience and possibly even had one or more sexual encounters so he could teach her all she needs to know about life and what to do when it came to sexual relations). It was not acceptable for the woman to be older in age because this would mean that she must have had at least one (if not more) sexual encounter which meant that she could teach him a thing or two and this was totally taboo (socially, I mean).
In my world view constructed for me, when a man is 15 years older than the woman, she should run like mad in the opposite direction and get as far away from him as possible because all he is interested in is getting her into bed and “corrupting” her – making her sexually wise before her time. The woman (or girl as she would be referred to) would be forbidden from seeing this man to the point of being “kicked out of her parents’ house” if she dared to disobey the parents (usually the father) and continued to see this guy “without her parents’ permission. The father would threaten to disown her – cut off her right to inheritance from the parents’ Estate if she dared continue having a relationship with this man.
Having a woman 15 years older than the man was almost unheard of. If this happened, it was not spoken about in public – everything was kept behind closed doors.
Parents whispered about this when the children were all safely tucked in bed so they did not overhear the conversation.
Was this woman also made to suffer the same fate as the woman involved with an older man, or did they have different rules?
Mmmm . . . I wonder!
africandream01 