Age‐dissimilar couple relationships: 25 years in review

Abstract

This review explores research over the past quarter century on couples with age differences. I present recent global trends in age-dissimilar couplings, illustrating a shift away from statistical marriage studies focusing on relationships' motivations, inequalities, and challenges, and largely underpinned by biological, economic, or demographic outlooks. Since the last review of age-dissimilar couples in 1993, there have been substantive qualitative developments. Scholarship looking beyond Euro-American contexts is increasingly common, as are approaches examining class, race, sexuality, culture, religion, and nationality, as well as age, marital status, education, and employment. This transformation informs new perspectives on power and partner choice. I argue that research now needs more fluid definitions of age differences, greater range in qualitative studies' geographies and methodologies, and continued consideration of the life course and intersecting differences. Examinations of age-dissimilar couples should thus focus on these relationships' varied configurations, explored through a range of social analyses. K E Y W O R D S age, age-dissimilar relationships, intergenerational relationships, marriage, romantic love, sexResearch on couples with age differences, both now and in the past, provides an important means of exploring the changing and varied norms and realities of relationships. These couplings, variously known as age-dissimilar, age-discrepant, intergenerational, age-gap, or age-heterogamous relationships, 1 have received much popular attention and growing scholarly consideration in recent decades. The emphasis is largely on heterosexual couples, 2 and a recent global study found that, on average, women are 4.2 years younger than their cohabiting male partners (Pew Research Center, 2019, p. 89). Although patterns of age dissimilarities vary substantially by age, social position, sexuality, and cultural context, scholarship suggests that average age differences have declined, but with a simultaneous increase in older woman couplings and partnerships with very large differences, especially in the global North

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