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[quote=Anonymous]8 years here. Right now, early 40s/early 50s, it doesn't seem like much of an age gap. DH has more energy than most guys his age and he looks as young or younger than I do (he has a lot more melanin). Perhaps it will be an issue again in 10 years, as others have said.

But we got together VERY young, and it was a big issue then. Another poster mentioned they were 21 and 30. We were younger than that.

DH is my soulmate and a fantastic match for me AND we worked hard on this-- otherwise there is no way we could have overcome the challenges that age difference presents. I would not recommend doing what I did. The problems caused by our age difference took 20+ years to undo and are still not fully resolved. Luckily there are/were personality, cultural/familial and circumstantial factors that mitigated the enormous power imbalance somewhat, even from the beginning. But... c'mon. In particular, I internalized all kinds of problematic ideas about myself because I had so little life experience and my brain was so far from fully formed when we met. Even though DH is fantastic in most ways, he's not perfect, and even if he were, just... being with a guy with that much more life experience was not healthy for my self-esteem. It was easy for me to get the idea that I was immature or poorer at certain skills because of some fundamental character trait, rather than the fact I was 17, 18, 19... And of course, there was a lot of rescuing/coddling of me, and that kind of problematic dynamic, too. Parentifying DH and so on.

You can't prove a counterfactual, so I can't say for sure all of this will have been worth it in the end-- even though our relationship is amazing in many, many ways. One thing we did do right-- and on purpose-- was wait a very very very long time (married 15 years) to have a kid. So we had worked through quite a bit of this before she came along.

I do worry about him passing away well before I do. He has more health issues and can be more neglectful about them, plus the age difference. Naturally, since we've been together my entire adult life (and well over half of my entire life), I can't imagine my world without him.[/quote]

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