Growing up, I thought that the husband was always older than the wife. After all, my dad was older than my mom. It made sense.
I wised up as an early teen, when my dad’s youngest sister met the man who would become her husband. I’m not sure how much younger he is than my aunt, but it’s a few years. She is not ashamed of this and says it is the best thing ever.
I’m not exactly in a position to disagree anymore.
I was not sure how old my husband was when we started dating in November 2019, but I knew he was a fair bit younger than me. One of his older sisters is my age, and there’s another sister four years younger than me between us. On my flight home for Christmas, I amused myself by calculating the lowest acceptable age he could be. I was thirty at the time, so the bare minimum for him was twenty-two or twenty-three. (The rule is half your age plus seven. I preferred using a more conservative eight.) As it turns out, he was twenty-two. He turned twenty-three in January.
I’ve had time to get used to it, but contemplating the age gap hasn’t lost its power to astonish me. When I first met my husband, I was twenty-eight and he was twenty. (At that point in our lives, the age gap would have been unacceptable according to my calculations.) I’d graduated college before he started high school. I was driving independently when he was six. At our wedding, my sister joked during her maid of honor speech that she used to pray that God would find me a husband, but “God was just waiting for your relationship to be legal!” I still feel the urge to blush when I have to disclose our birthdates to someone we don’t know.
Fortunately for me, my husband doesn’t mind. His mother is older than his father, so he’s used to the concept. And, truly, it doesn’t seem to make a difference most of the time. There are life experiences I’ve had, living independently, that he hasn’t – I think the influences some of his disinterest in money. He’s emotionally mature and level-headed. The other day I made a juvenile joke and he said it’s hard to believe I’m older than him sometimes.
One of my more superficial but nevertheless very real fears is how we are going to look as we get older. People say we look similar in age now, or even that my husband looks older. (It’s probably the mustache.) But as they say, “Black don’t crack.” They don’t say that about white people. About a year ago, I cared for a late middle-aged (but still suave) Black gentleman. With him were three lovely young adult children and his white wife. Sadly for me, she looked old. White cracks. She didn’t seem to mind.
Maybe I won’t then, either.
SDG