History, Biology and Changing Social Norms
They wed when she was 21 and he was 32. She claims they were not sexually involved initially and yet from the very start the relationship was a close relationship that looked like a dating relationship, so much so that reporters hounded her about his known sexual liaisons with female costars.
Loretta Lynn was born in 1932, three years before Elvis. Wikipedia indicates she married a 21 year old when she was fifteen. They remained together for life and he supported her singing career for which she became extremely famous and also wealthy.
My father was born in 1924. My mother was born in 1936. They had a twelve year age difference, their first child was born shortly after she turned twenty-two and in my life I never once heard a single person act like there was something bizarre about the age difference, her age when they got together or anything of the sort even though my mother looked young for her age, my father looked old for his age and I heard stories about people assuming he was her father, not her husband.
Dad drank hard for a lot of years and mom never cared. He was a good provider and was never a mean drunk. No one ever used the term "alcoholic" about his drinking. That's a modern concept we apply to anyone who drinks more than a little that wasn't used historically unless your drinking was just RUINING your life.
One family story is that one night while drunk, he kept asking her "And how old will you be when I am x age? And y age? And z age?" like he thought the age difference would go away when he got old enough.
When she was in her seventies, he would have a fit about her wearing bra and underwear in the house, like he was certain the neighbors desperately wanted to get a glimpse of his beautiful younger wife.
So I certainly was aware my father had his insecurities about his beautiful younger wife, but I saw ZERO evidence anyone thought he was a pedophile or pervert because of the age difference.
I was a history major for a time in college and eventually got an AA in Humanities. I don't remember when I had this epiphany but somewhere in my study of history I realized that historically brides were ROUTINELY between thirteen and sixteen years old and their husband was probably several years older in part because a thirteen year old boy was in no position to support a wife and the children that would almost certainly soon follow the union.
Modern Americans acting like it's weird and borderline pedophilia or actual pedophilia for there to be a teen bride and an older groom (in his twenties or thirties) are people suffering from tunnel vision who have no idea how recently that was extremely normal behavior that had nothing to do with being sexually attracted to literal children.
Biologically, humans develop an "adult" brain with executive function at about age twelve and it takes a year or two of using those abilities to get adequately good at executive decision making to really be capable of functioning like an adult.
"Coincidentally," many traditional cultures have coming of age ceremonies -- such as the bar mitzvah -- at around age thirteen or fourteen. That correlates to when people biologically become mental adults in practice.
As far as I know, it is legal across the US for a minor to marry with parental consent. It's just not common.
I mean ANYMORE. It was fairly common at one time.
This is a plot point in the movie Liar Liar where we ultimately learn the wife was only seventeen when she got married and details in the movie imply her mother knew and approved, so while the marriage was presumably legit, the prenup is proven to not be a legally enforcible contract. [1]
I'm not going to look up stats, but it's apparently still common in some parts of the US, like Utah where the Mormon church has a reputation for marrying off "child brides" to older husbands. The rest of the US acts like they are all perverts and essentially pedophiles and that's not necessarily true and not really based on real evidence.
It's based on social norms elsewhere in the US changing while this conservative enclave kept alive older social practices.
I'm not convinced that is really a big deal because women's rights and quality of life across the US pretty much sucks and, from where I sit, it looks like only a slight difference from what everyone else does.
Last I looked, average age difference between husband and wife in a first marriage is about 4.5 years and about 7 years or so in a second marriage and no matter how old they each are, the husband is typically older than she is and makes more money than her.
Most women have no hope of supporting themselves in the style to which they are accustomed as a wife. That's a polite way of saying women largely remain defacto chattel property with little to no meaningful ability to stand up for themselves if they disagree with their spouse and don't feel strongly enough about it to be willing to end up homeless or permanently trapped in poverty.
It may even be better in some ways in conservative communities where women are expected to be homemakers because the rest of America IMAGINES women have "rights" -- because they can now vote and hold a paid job etc -- when in reality they largely remain chattel property whereas conservative cultures still say "No, you aren't ditching her for a pretty, younger replacement. Til death do you part -- NO divorce --and YOUR income is not a big fat allowance for a boy and his toys. It's FAMILY money."
Almost all women across the US cannot really compete with men for careers and income in part because the mental framework for "a serious career" is based on older practices where men had paid careers, women were mostly homemakers and serious careers implicitly assume that you have a wife at home doing the cooking and cleaning and raising the children etc.
Our ideas about serious careers are exclusively male patterned serious careers and women who try to pursue such find it conflicts with having children AT ALL.
Historically, women with serious careers typically had NO children. A serious career woman I knew who had significant fertility issues and did extensive reading told me the evidence suggests that most historical career women had serious careers BECAUSE they were barren, not the other way around.
The life of female author Karen Blixen, best known for her autobiographical work Out of Africa, seems to support this hypothesis. As I understand it, she was treated for syphilis -- acquired from her philandering husband -- and the common treatment at that time (mercury) likely left her sterile.
I believe odds are good she became a writer out of necessity when being older and infertile left her in no position to marry well a second time after her marriage ended.
These days, women ROUTINELY marry later and have children later in order to pursue serious careers. The result is a shocking and very problematic rise in infertility -- fertility drops significantly after age thirty for a woman, especially for trying to have a first child -- use of medical fertility treatments that can have significant negative health impacts, scheduled C sections for the convenience of the mother's career which negatively impacts her health and her child's health and birth defects due to all of the above including simply having children later.
This is not a path forward on a better future for all of humanity. I'm increasingly seeing articles suggesting we don't need to worry about overpopulation ruining the planet because we are on track for a population bust so bad we could die out as a species in relatively short order.
Then the descendants of the Mormons may live on, laugh at the extinction of the rest of us badly behaved fools and they shall inherit the Earth.
All joking aside -- and I'm not sure how silly that remark is -- what we are doing currently really doesn't work well for making sure our citizens are healthy and have healthy children that can become productive citizens in the future. It has all the markings of a quiet form of unrecognized genocide.
We need a female pattern of career success if we wish to escape this mess and actually establish women's lib without crippling most of our future children with various birth defects and other problems.
I think a lot of social expectations concerning age difference in relationships are likely rooted in not wanting to accidentally reproduce with an immediate blood relative you may not know is related to you. If you don't know who your father is and you don't date anyone old enough to be your father, you aren't going to be accidentally inbreeding.
Our heteronormative social practices and expectations go a lot of weird and problematic places, not just the bizarre assumption that "only a pedophile would marry a fourteen year old, so THOSE people are perverts but nothing wrong with me marrying a younger woman I vastly outearn which is somehow COMPLETELY different!"
The default assumption that men are going to be older leaves us failing to find other patterns that might work better because "it's just not normal" or something.
If a primary impetus for being critical of a large age difference is to avoid accidentally having children with your own parent, this really largely shouldn't apply to an older woman and younger man.
People shouldn't much care if she's twenty or more years older than him because, unlike men, it's rather hard for a woman to have a kid she doesn't know about and vastly easier for a woman to account for any "stray" children and just not date anyone born the same year she secretly gave up a baby for adoption when she was sixteen or whatever.
And yet society is generally more harshly critical of such relationships than of older men with much younger women. Cher once pointedly complained when the press was giving her shit about her relationship to a younger man and she told them roughly "What sucks is if I were male and he were female, no one would care."
If we want a better world where relationships are based on things like a meeting of the minds and shared interests and values, we desperately need other rubrics for judging relationships and deciding which ones are somehow "probably a pervert!" and which are healthy.[2]
Some men don't want children and even if they do, it's common for men to want children LATER. Yet you're some weirdo if you find post menopausal women attractive while waiting to hit whatever age will work for you for starting a family.[3]
And you're also a weirdo -- a "pedophile and pervert" -- if you wait to be ready to be a father and then get with a woman young enough to still be fertile and have a low risk of birth defects and other serious problems that can cause lifelong impairment for the children.
I am strongly against child molestation. I am not trying to encourage the world to marry off little girls to grown men.
But biologically, a thirteen or fourteen year old is mentally an adult, our current practices pretty much cripple MOST women career wise and subtly make them into defacto chattel property no matter what age they marry AND we are actively promoting an epidemic of birth defects.
If I were architect of the world, I would like to see Mormons trying to establish a female pattern of career success rooted in sending young mothers to college part-time and figuring out how to make sure they can have a serious career and adequately support themselves when they are older and potentially relatively young widows.
Then they probably slam dunk outcompete the rest of us idiots.
Well, YOU idiots. Because I married at nineteen -- to another nineteen year old -- and like my mother before me I had my first child shortly after I turned twenty-two.
My older sister with a serious career and serious fertility problems once told me I did it the right way and it makes more sense to have children first, pursue a career later as a woman.
The only problem with that theory is I still don't have a "real career" and that's partly because it's not a social norm to do that, so we don't have any established practices to help me make that happen.
Footnotes
[1] The movie Liar Liar could have handled the legal details better and leaves room for the audience to go "Wait a minute, shouldn't the marriage be nullified too??" but it's a ridiculous comedy, so whatevs. But it bugs ME.
[2] I previously wrote about Age Differences in Relationships and posited that Middle Eastern cultures may have a higher tolerance for a large age difference in part because they expect more of a REAL relationship between spouses.
Unlike Americans, they seem to not use age difference as a proxy for "who seems like a pervert" because they still have relationships and more easily recognize when two people don't really talk and things like that. It's Americans who seem unable to figure out who just bought her younger ass, and never mind she's technically an adult, and who has a more substantive interpersonal relationship than that.
[3] Richard Dean Anderson was like fifty or early fifties when his first child was born and made some humorous remark to a reporter about it being the perfect age for him to start a family because he wasn't ready any sooner.