As a professional matchmaker with over a decade of practical experience in introducing singles, I can tell you that relationships with an age difference are definitely not for everyone. The majority of singles will not manage to build and maintain a healthy romantic relationship because of the age gap.
But who are these older guys who manage to attract a younger woman and actually build a relationship that leads to marriage – and not just an arrangement, but a happy, healthy marriage?
As a professional matchmaker, I have introduced couples with an age difference of 10–15 years. We even have several exceptional couples with age differences of 15–20 years. All are still happily married for 10+ years.
Let’s start with the obvious – money. If you have money, you can get the attention of many women, including much younger women. But what kind of attention is that? Purely transactional – pretty much you pay for her time, buy her gifts, cover her expenses, take her places she can’t afford. Can it work long-term? In exceptional cases yes, but usually no. People forget that there is always the flip side. A woman can increase her financial demands and become greedier with time, or she might think she can find someone just as rich and generous but much younger. Or a man grows tired of this purely transactional relationship. More often, a woman realizes that the gifts come with the territory. She can’t get all the gifts without spending time with the man. Many decide that they don’t want that purse that badly after all – it is not worth it.
But what if we are talking about two singles who actually want to build something serious, lasting, healthy, and not purely transactional?
All my male clients who managed to date and marry younger women (10+ years younger) possessed these 5 qualities and did 2 important things right.
The Qualities
1) They all looked good for their age.
It is a myth that only men are visual. Women are visual as well. They also want to feel attracted to their partner. Of course, if we are talking about some girl who just wants to get earrings – she won’t care who buys her those earrings or what the buyer looks like. She doesn’t plan to spend much time with him after she gets the earrings. But if we are talking about a woman who is looking for a life partner – a husband – she will pay attention to the man’s looks.
2) They were professionally very successful: CEOs, surgeons, entrepreneurs, producers, TV personalities, etc.
Once we represented a college professor. One might say it is not a super-successful position. Well, this professor taught in the US, France, UK, and Belgium. He also did financial research, won several grants, and published several books that became bestsellers on Amazon. You can find his name on Wikipedia. He married a beautiful woman who is 16 years younger and has a PhD. She teaches biology in three languages.
3) They were financially very comfortable.
We are talking about people who have already achieved all the important milestones: built careers or businesses, bought property, saved for a rainy day. They felt ready to start a family and to buy help – a nanny, a cleaning crew, etc. They were also ready to support their partners if they decided to be stay-at-home moms and housewives. Many actually preferred to date and marry a woman who wanted to be a housewife.
4) They were ready to settle down and were not playing games.
They hired a matchmaker to find a woman to marry – not to go on hundreds of first dates. These men were very open about their intentions. From the first date they told the women what their long-term goals were. So from the very beginning, it felt like something serious and special.
5) They were real gentlemen and knew how to court a woman.
None of our male clients who married much younger women showered them with gifts from day one. Instead, they invested time, effort, and yes, money into courtship. They chose romantic settings for dates – nice restaurants and beautiful locations. They wowed women with interesting conversations, compliments, and gallant behavior. And of course, flowers. Flowers were the only tangible gifts women got at the early stage of relationships. Flowers are an emotional gift – the bouquet won’t last long, but the moment a woman gets flowers she feels very special.
One of our clients, who owns several high-end restaurants, sent the woman he was courting new flowers to her office and her home every week. She was a chief accountant at a big IT company, and before Covid she was in the office every day. Our client made a clever move – by sending flowers to her office he made a bold statement: this is my woman, and I am courting her. They got engaged 7 months into their relationship and married a year later. They have a 16-year age difference. The woman left her job to relocate to her fiancé’s country. They now have two kids.
All these beautiful couples with significant age differences built their relationships not because of the age gap, but despite it. Their long-term goals, vision of relationships, gender roles in the family, marriage, and kids aligned – despite the difference in age.
The Two Important Things They Did Right
1) They were looking for the right woman.
They were not looking for someone simply much younger and attractive, but for someone with similar values, long-term goals, common interests, and lifestyle. These were not couples in which a man had to play the knight in shining armor to save a struggling younger woman in a bad situation. All the women whom our clients ended up marrying had education, jobs, friends, happy lives – just without a beloved partner yet.
2) They hired a professional matchmaker to get the right introductions.
They didn’t want to waste time on Tinder and go through gold-diggers. They wanted to meet someone likeminded – and yes, younger.
