From Leonardo DiCaprio to Brad Pitt or Russell Crowe: it’s not unusual to see a man in the public eye date a significantly younger woman. Yet, TOWIE star James Argent’s relationship with 18-year-old Italian actress Stella Turian has been the cause of furious debate on Twitter and now everyone is Googling: ‘How old is James Argent’ and ‘James Argent new girlfriend’.
Well, allow us to explain: James Argent is 34. So, there’s a 16-year difference between him and his 18-year-old girlfriend. But the public concern isn’t for the size of the age gap between him and his partner per se—but the chasm of maturity and life experience between someone who’s 18 and someone who’s in their mid 30s.
Taking to Twitter to speak from their own experience, one woman said: ‘I can understand why 18-year-olds find dating older exciting, you feel mature and it’s frankly all down to inexperience and sheer naivety. However, I absolutely cannot for the life of me understand what possesses a fully grown 30-something man to want to entertain that?!’
One horrifying study by the dating website OkCupid even found that ‘the median 30-year-old man spends as much time messaging teenage girls as he does women his own age’. To which the founder Christian Rudder responded: ‘From the time you’re twenty-two, you’ll be less hot than a twenty-year-old, based on [OKCupid’s] data. So that’s just a thing.’
Except, is it ‘just a thing’? or is men finding women decreasingly attractive as they age something we should be worried about?
According to psychologist Elinor Greenberg, men who feel this way are narcissistic. ‘A younger woman is more likely to be impressed by a narcissist than a woman his own age who has a full life of her own,’ she explained on **Psychology Today. ‘**For narcissistic men, attractive young women are often viewed as interchangeable commodities, not individuals.’
Greenberg notes that historically men felt a sense of superiority and control over women by being more educated and independent. But now that women from the same social class and age group as men are ‘likely to be equal with regard to education and life experience’ men instead look for younger women who will idealize them instead.
Obviously, this is misogynistic. And it works both ways—many 18-year-olds say they’re attracted to older men, too. And scientists Alice Early and Wendy Wood have found that, across 37 countries: ‘As gender equality increased, women expressed less preference for older men, men expressed less preference for younger women and consequently the sex difference in the preferred age of mates became smaller.’
Essentially, inequality and disparity appear to produce relationships where the age gap is larger and, therefore, the power dynamic is more greatly skewed.
But let’s return to Stella and Arg. According to the MailOnline’s sources: ‘Stella has her own career, her own ambitions and her own dreams and James loves that about her.’ And let’s not belittle the achievements of the young women dating older men: Numerous of DiCaprio’s, Pitt and Crowe’s younger girlfriends have been seriously accomplished. So, ultimately, what is the draw of young women (inexperienced or powerful) for grown men?
‘I think to some extent the power dynamic they’ve encountered in work and social circles ultimately filters down into their romantic relationships,’ psychologist Jacqui Manning told the Sydney Morning Herald.
‘Women begin their lives having to fight, more or less from teenagers we’re having to work to find our value. By our 40s, we adapt…I think the opposite happens for men, when they encounter their 40s, they begin to feel their virility is declining, their power is declining, and that’s when they (may) go out seeking a partner who can mirror back youth to them.’
So, whether vanity, misogyny or narcissism—the expert's reasons for older men wanting to date younger women aren’t looking like green flags to us.