Seriously is that even a word?? well its my word, the Cougar effect is catching on even down to our male socially dominated old fashioned Africa, older women dating younger men are now on the increase, its time for me to give my own 2 cents on this trend.
First of all, even though i try not to make this blog about feminine issues there is no way that you can talk about the cougar effect and relate it to men, Men have been dating younger women since time immemorial, in the old African custom it was basically like a status thing. you make some good money by selling a handful of your harvested crops, turn older and marry some young pretty thing to complement, nobody raised any eyebrows, a lot of his peers would tap him on the back and look at his wife lustfully.
Now women want their own young stud as a status thing, look the tables have turned, my suspicion is that this practice started from the Elizabethan era but i am obsessed with that era so maybe i am biased.the whole idea of a woman depending on a man to protect her and her household changed when Queen Elizabeth decided not to marry and ruled the kingdom by herself, her love for the arts and new ideas labeled her a free woman fast forward to today the trend has caught on.
Most women now make enough money to be independent and have their own ideas of what they expect in a relationship and what they want in a partner.The idea of staying with some boring older man just for security reasons is gradually becoming extinct.
lets look at the statistics, studies have shown that a woman's libido does no longer disappear into oblivion when they hit their 40's times are changing .
what does this mean, well while a man picks up a younger lover to make himself feel young again and pump some new blood into his veins, women have discovered that they can actually do the same thing..yep Ivana Trump style.
Personally i have never been attracted to younger men, i literally thought like a 20 year old when i was only 11 years (translation i have an old soul), i am such a handful that i require a great deal of maturity from a partner to put me in check and yes i like being checked so the whole dropping your pants and letting your boxers show or wearing your face cap sideways never quite caught on with me.if you were a guy and you didn't know your left from your right..well it didn't strike gold with me.
so i have not fallen into the younger man circle , i am quite happy to be the baby in a relationship and let someone else do all the grown up adult decisions (sometimes) but still i must confess my heart skipped seriously when i watched the Twilight Saga Eclipse with Taylor lautner and don't get me started on Zac Efron so what does that mean ...
I met a guy who told me about this ex school mate of mine he had been dating, she was very pretty and quite the catch so when he referred to her as his EX i asked him what happened, apparently my darling friend had lied about her age, the guy was a year younger than we were and he was talking marriage her excuse was that she did not want him to get scared and run away, the poor guy found out and broke it off cos she lied, it was just one year so i didn't understand what she got so worked up about but maybe she had good cause.
I mean in africa the man likes to be respected by his woman, and they will probably feel an older woman might not show them the same level of respect, but fast forward in this time and age whats the big deal, i see it everywhere. since the whole Demi Moore and Ashton Tucker boom, why put an age limit on love.
maturity has nothing to do with the age of an person but everything to do with the individual, you meet someone that you click with , what does it matter if the person's birth certificate is minus a few years from yours.Apparently in my tradition (Ibo) it means a big deal, if a man brings a woman home to introduce to his parents this are the sequence of questions you can expect "what is your name?" "where are you from?" "what do you do" and of course "how old are you?" the questions about where are your parents from and what church do you go to are somewhat secondary,they come into play after the first set have been responded to positively, i can imagine if a 30 year old Ibo man brings a lady of 33 home and introduces her as his Fiancee to his parents, "what's three years ?" well it's quite a bit, at some point even 6 months might be an issue. As a "Gbegborun work no pay freelance reporter" i decided to query my male friends from all parts of the country on this issue and i discovered whilst basically all the guys from the west and Middle belt said that age was not an issue and guys from the northern and eastern parts swore that they would most likely not marry a woman even a year older than them only one out of this set of roughly 30 guys i asked was dating an older woman and he was from the east.
Later i discovered i had made a very unprofessional error (since i was not a journalist i couldn't have known) but apparently most men who are dating older woman will not tell you, most of this women are somewhere in the corridors of power or rich beautiful divorcees who were frankly more adventurous than younger women who were too busy trying to present a cultured approach so they could land a husband, this young men as a matter of preference went after this women and why not, they were liberated, payed their own bills and did not strangle them with their presence because of their insecurities. hmnn i don't know that trend seems a little bit selfish, so older women were just good to have some fun with , what happens when (as in most of the cases) these women fall in love with these younger men, that is the dimension i was interested in, moving away from the friends with benefits group i wanted to find out if a relationship with mutual respect and love bla bla bla could survive the older woman status .
That revelation eventually proved impossible to do, most women do not reveal their ages to you and even if they do there is no guarantee that it's their real age, the whole idea of guessing a woman's age in this part of the world is quite difficult because no one looks their age, and women after child birth look older than their husbands , so i met a lot of young guys and women who could talk the talk but i know of less than four married couples where the woman is older, so at the end of the day the cougarismn effect is catching on but apparently it is yet to reflect strongly in the marriage bracket.
Personally i don't see the big deal but that's just typical me being a hypocritical idealist when in reality i am quite satisfied playing the little one in a relationship. Truth be told a relationship between two people should be just that between two people,if He/She makes you happy why should you care what others think, they are not going to be the ones stuck with your partner for the rest of your years together, it's your life right??? yes that makes a very good mirror talk when you go to explain yourself to your family members. At the end of the day my advise is to do what pleases God and yourself , maybe that person who will make you laugh might be the one who was still in kindergarten when you read your first love letter entering high school as for me i am just grateful i don't have to make that choice i don't think my heart at 70 could take a heart break of my much younger husband fooling around with my grand daughter's friends but i am who i am maybe you are stronger...
First of all, even though i try not to make this blog about feminine issues there is no way that you can talk about the cougar effect and relate it to men, Men have been dating younger women since time immemorial, in the old African custom it was basically like a status thing. you make some good money by selling a handful of your harvested crops, turn older and marry some young pretty thing to complement, nobody raised any eyebrows, a lot of his peers would tap him on the back and look at his wife lustfully.
Now women want their own young stud as a status thing, look the tables have turned, my suspicion is that this practice started from the Elizabethan era but i am obsessed with that era so maybe i am biased.the whole idea of a woman depending on a man to protect her and her household changed when Queen Elizabeth decided not to marry and ruled the kingdom by herself, her love for the arts and new ideas labeled her a free woman fast forward to today the trend has caught on.
Most women now make enough money to be independent and have their own ideas of what they expect in a relationship and what they want in a partner.The idea of staying with some boring older man just for security reasons is gradually becoming extinct.
lets look at the statistics, studies have shown that a woman's libido does no longer disappear into oblivion when they hit their 40's times are changing .
what does this mean, well while a man picks up a younger lover to make himself feel young again and pump some new blood into his veins, women have discovered that they can actually do the same thing..yep Ivana Trump style.
Personally i have never been attracted to younger men, i literally thought like a 20 year old when i was only 11 years (translation i have an old soul), i am such a handful that i require a great deal of maturity from a partner to put me in check and yes i like being checked so the whole dropping your pants and letting your boxers show or wearing your face cap sideways never quite caught on with me.if you were a guy and you didn't know your left from your right..well it didn't strike gold with me.
so i have not fallen into the younger man circle , i am quite happy to be the baby in a relationship and let someone else do all the grown up adult decisions (sometimes) but still i must confess my heart skipped seriously when i watched the Twilight Saga Eclipse with Taylor lautner and don't get me started on Zac Efron so what does that mean ...
I met a guy who told me about this ex school mate of mine he had been dating, she was very pretty and quite the catch so when he referred to her as his EX i asked him what happened, apparently my darling friend had lied about her age, the guy was a year younger than we were and he was talking marriage her excuse was that she did not want him to get scared and run away, the poor guy found out and broke it off cos she lied, it was just one year so i didn't understand what she got so worked up about but maybe she had good cause.
I mean in africa the man likes to be respected by his woman, and they will probably feel an older woman might not show them the same level of respect, but fast forward in this time and age whats the big deal, i see it everywhere. since the whole Demi Moore and Ashton Tucker boom, why put an age limit on love.
maturity has nothing to do with the age of an person but everything to do with the individual, you meet someone that you click with , what does it matter if the person's birth certificate is minus a few years from yours.Apparently in my tradition (Ibo) it means a big deal, if a man brings a woman home to introduce to his parents this are the sequence of questions you can expect "what is your name?" "where are you from?" "what do you do" and of course "how old are you?" the questions about where are your parents from and what church do you go to are somewhat secondary,they come into play after the first set have been responded to positively, i can imagine if a 30 year old Ibo man brings a lady of 33 home and introduces her as his Fiancee to his parents, "what's three years ?" well it's quite a bit, at some point even 6 months might be an issue. As a "Gbegborun work no pay freelance reporter" i decided to query my male friends from all parts of the country on this issue and i discovered whilst basically all the guys from the west and Middle belt said that age was not an issue and guys from the northern and eastern parts swore that they would most likely not marry a woman even a year older than them only one out of this set of roughly 30 guys i asked was dating an older woman and he was from the east.
Later i discovered i had made a very unprofessional error (since i was not a journalist i couldn't have known) but apparently most men who are dating older woman will not tell you, most of this women are somewhere in the corridors of power or rich beautiful divorcees who were frankly more adventurous than younger women who were too busy trying to present a cultured approach so they could land a husband, this young men as a matter of preference went after this women and why not, they were liberated, payed their own bills and did not strangle them with their presence because of their insecurities. hmnn i don't know that trend seems a little bit selfish, so older women were just good to have some fun with , what happens when (as in most of the cases) these women fall in love with these younger men, that is the dimension i was interested in, moving away from the friends with benefits group i wanted to find out if a relationship with mutual respect and love bla bla bla could survive the older woman status .
That revelation eventually proved impossible to do, most women do not reveal their ages to you and even if they do there is no guarantee that it's their real age, the whole idea of guessing a woman's age in this part of the world is quite difficult because no one looks their age, and women after child birth look older than their husbands , so i met a lot of young guys and women who could talk the talk but i know of less than four married couples where the woman is older, so at the end of the day the cougarismn effect is catching on but apparently it is yet to reflect strongly in the marriage bracket.
Personally i don't see the big deal but that's just typical me being a hypocritical idealist when in reality i am quite satisfied playing the little one in a relationship. Truth be told a relationship between two people should be just that between two people,if He/She makes you happy why should you care what others think, they are not going to be the ones stuck with your partner for the rest of your years together, it's your life right??? yes that makes a very good mirror talk when you go to explain yourself to your family members. At the end of the day my advise is to do what pleases God and yourself , maybe that person who will make you laugh might be the one who was still in kindergarten when you read your first love letter entering high school as for me i am just grateful i don't have to make that choice i don't think my heart at 70 could take a heart break of my much younger husband fooling around with my grand daughter's friends but i am who i am maybe you are stronger...
nice write up.
ReplyDeleteto me, i dont actually see that as a prob (well maybe bc i have dated a much younger guy) and i must confess that was the longest and best relation ship i ever had. i was like 2years older than him but he was physically matured than me. he blow me off, did things i never knew existed while dating an older person. I think life just has a way of doing things, we didn't break up but due to distance(i am abroad) and some other constrains, i guess it 'IS' dieing out. No calls or messaging nowadays. I guess it is settling down time. I am presently dating an older person who is 4years and we are engaged.
Moral: younger guys are just for a flink and nothing more(with exception) I got into that relationship when i was desperate, heartbroken, frustrated etc. the guy still get many years to think about marrying and again the 70year/granddaughter tale dey scare me bc the bobo fine wella! i dont regret it anyway.
Peace!!!
hmnn i appreciate your honesty, maybe because you,re abroad most Nigerian ladies would front about the whole thing and yeah my last conclusion still makes sense most cougar relationships don't end up at the altar which is kind of sad cos if age doesn't matter then why can't forever last with a younger man..oh well
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