Older women? Well, why not?

A classmate and sometime close friend (we've drifted, since then) got married recently. I got to know about this when I was in India. The question is, why am I writing about it?

Well, firstly he married someone I know. Someone 17 years older than him. She's a professor (was our professor); he's a fledgling specialist. Secondly, the possibility that they were having a relationship was something that was suggested to me throughout college. Since I was a close friend, many of these suggestions were actually point-blank queries directed my way. I would earnestly deny this, since I knew they were neighbours, that the families were very close, that he called her 'aunt', and that this was why he picked her up every day. I was on that car on many occasions, as I was at her place, and had noticed nothing to suggest otherwise. I was, of course, probably being kept a little less than well informed, but this fills me with nothing but utter, subversive delight. Bully for them.

Thirdly, both families are Muslim. Muslim society being somewhat more conservative than many others, this May-October romance and it's culmination must have been conducted under tremendous tension.

Finally, I was informed of this by another professor, a very hip, ostensibly liberal ex-Miss Calcutta, who presented it with an air of mild distaste, simultaneously saying that she was happy for them but that she believed ' it's not sensible to have such an age gap, especially if it's the woman who's older'. Her husband, by the way, is about 12 years older than her. Du-uh? And this was the tack most of my old accquaintances appeared to adopt (to varying degrees) in conversations over the ensuing week.

Another Indian friend, well into her thirties, married someone 8 years younger than her. This did raise eyebrows, but didn't appear to provoke all that much discomfort. The fact that both came from liberal, highly educated backgrounds perhaps had something to do with this. Which leads me to wonder, is there some sort of unspoken age-gap cut-off which determines whether such relationships are okay or not?

The reason why all this has come together in my head is because someone in the UK (a child psychiatrist, no less) had a baby a few weeks ago. This, and specifically the fact that she was older than the average norm for maternity, provoked a storm of protest, with everyone from the British Fertility Society to evangelical christians jumping onto a finger-wagging, disapproving bandwagon. And funnily enough, an overwhelming majority of the people calling up the BBC Radio London talk-shows in indignant outrage were women. Why?

It would be easy to dismiss this as simple ageism, but I suspect there are a lot more isms (and non-isms) involved here. The old fertility argument, whatever it's validity, is being, of course, demolished by the remarkable advances in fertility treatment.

So why is it okay, and even worthy of fawning media appreciation, when a Shashi Tharoor or a Rupert Murdoch (and umpteen other men of all races, creeds and political persuasions) marry and/or mate with some young babe when they are well into senile dotage and sire children, but not when my friends in India and Dr. Rashbrook do the same?

And why are so many women so deeply uncomfortable with this?

P.S. And now I'm thinking of Nafisa Ali, Arundhati Roy, Diane Keaton (who's been spoken for by a certain Mr. Reeves), Catherine Deneuve, Michelle Yeoh, J. K Rowling, Deepti Naval, Jane Fonda, Monica Ali, Tina Turner et al. All so utterly gorgeous, dateable and desirable......but then I digress, however pleasantly.