How Not To Marry a Welshman (and Other Success Stories) — Chapter 4: The Older Woman (Non-Cougar Variety)

[embed]

Den Mum had great patience. She had once, in junior high, ripped out a water bottle project over ten times and completed it in the end — she got that from her great-grandfather, along with his eyes. Which was probably why she appreciated both, because they were both somewhat unusual qualities; but also, she did not think much about them in general. When you have patience, you do not think about it or the lack of it, and when your eyes are blue cerulean, you do not really think about them either, because you are looking out of them into the world, not into them from the world.

She only really thought about her patience or her eyes when someone commented on them. She would shrug off the patience compliment with a mutter, and the eye compliments with a blunt, “They are my grampa’s.” This invariably seemed to leave people confused and bewildered — as if, instead of genetically inheriting them, she had gone up and absconded them from him, taking them for herself. Humans were weird, Den Mum concluded.

Den Mum thought humans were weird about a lot of things, like, for example, age gaps. Living in Thailand for a while, as she had, she had seen a great many age gaps, and she was none too impressed by them — very “White-Lotusy.”

When an older man selects a significantly younger woman, it doesn’t balance any survival statistics — it drastically skews them further. It ensures that the younger partner will most likely spend a massive portion of her later years running a caregiver script or navigating a solitary fortress. Therefore, Den Mum recognized that with most older men, the motivation likely stems from standard public square ego scripts rather than a logical optimization of their shared albeit limited time with their much younger partner.

However, Den Mum was not entirely against age gaps, as she believed in wildcards. Her primary ones in the age-gap formula consisted of two distinct types: The Older Woman (Non-Cougar Variety) and The Muffin Man Leprechaun with Emotional Merit.

The Older Woman (Non-Cougar Variety), to be honest, Den Mum assumed she might someday be this type. Not because she set out to be at all, but because it was what seemed most statistically likely given the cold facts. The Older Woman (Non-Cougar Variety) is simply a woman who ends up with a much younger male partner.

Women tend to live much longer than men, outliving their partners by an average of five to eight years. Running a hard actuarial diagnostic loop on human relationships instead of standard societal gossip risk, it made perfect sense to want to even out the odds of your relationship lasting with someone as long as possible.

Den Mum had lost her parents before the global pandemic of Covid-19 had swept the world. Even before losing them, her dad had walked out on all but primarily monetary influence when she was around ten. When her mother fell ill when Den Mum was fourteen, it led Den Mum to spend her life from then until thirty caring for her mother and helping to raise her much younger sibling.

Then, Den Mum’s sibling was tragically lost at the start of the pandemic, never having had a strong constitution and being lost not to the virus, but to addiction exacerbated by the lockdowns, which was not only difficult to weather; but hard for Den Mum to compute, since she had never drank or done drugs in her life, and when she lost her brilliant sibling and who she thought was her friend for life, ride and live, because of ride and die to things she did not understand or prepare for, it broke her in a way she could not explain, and which she did heal from, that left her changed forever in its wake.

Thus, by the time Den Mum was thirty-one, she found herself alone in the world, having weathered more than most people twice her age in loss — not to mention the chaos before those losses.

However, Den Mum was made of different mettle than most; she had to be programmed to survive like a thoughtful, independently powered robot. This was probably why she had loved Spock and Data in Star Trek, and Elinor Dashwood in Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility. While the public square busybody ran dramatic, low-integrity scripts about the aesthetics or social expectations of age gaps, her mind bypassed the noise entirely. She looked directly at the baseline survival data. If she was going to love, darn it, she did not want someone else to die on her down the road.

When a woman pairs with a younger man, she is essentially leveling the demographic playing field. Den Mum understood leveling the playing field. Her brain looked at that configuration and deduced: optimizing timelines, when possible, seems a good plan. If you do select a partner, rather than just leaving it up to fate, selecting a partner whose biological warranty matches so you can comfortably flop on the couch together for the maximum number of years seems dead-level practical.

In addition, being in her mid-thirties, Den Mum found her peers stuck in the “Tedious Baseline,” caught in the absolute thick of the high-stimulus, hyper-transactional mainstream matrix. They consumed their days with arbitrary competitions, or complaining about their lives without doing the basic infrastructure work to fix them.

To a Hobbit-Elf who just wants to listen, create things in peace, and avoid performative noise, watching adults in their thirties and forties chase those exhausting, low-integrity scripts was the definition of tedious. It was just bad software running on a loop. They were mostly deeply bogged down by corporate ego preservation, keeping up appearances for the neighbors, and running superficial parenting scripts. Frankly, Den Mum had zero patience for it. This was precisely why most of her friends were children, in their twenties, or in their fifties, long past the stages of Tedious Mayhem.

In the case of the Older Woman (Non-Cougar Variety), it seemed to Den Mum a pure decision of high-fidelity long-term planning. Nothing more, and nothing less.