A man in his fifties recently recounted his experience emotionally, in tears. He had been married for over fifteen years to his wife, with three children, all girls. As he thought he could live all his life with his wife, tragedy struck and he lost her while she was carrying the pregnancy of their expected fourth child.
For over two years he was devastated and did not intend to remarry, but the pressure became unbearable from those he wanted to protect and make happy. The children told him that they needed a mother figure in the house because the house was empty when there was none, and their father was always not at home.
Another wife, he asked himself. Which one would be suitable? He thought about a widow like him, with experience, but he could not shake off some ugly stories about a woman already trained or exposed to another man’s standard in the past, and how difficult it often proves to realign her with one’s own ways.
He thought about a divorcee, but some stories are also not pleasant, with kids or without kids, her ex, as long as he lives, could remain a permanent rival.
The man concluded that he wanted a new bride who would definitely be far younger in age. He had to build a relationship all over again. He thought it could be easy, since he had work, a job, a house, and children as vindication of his good character and happy family in the past.
But not so fast. Most girls detested him for much younger boys. The consistent insult he got was, please go and get your mate to marry, I cannot marry a man as old as my father.
Some would ask, are there no mates of your own? The chemistry was difficult, so was the understanding. It became clear to him that peers or contemporaries are more than just classmates, schoolmates or friends.
Contemporaries represent an opportunity, allies, and a critical aspect of the group we live our journey with in life that cannot abandon us. The German-American psychologist Erik Erikson captured this in his theory of psychosocial development, when he argued that human beings move through stages of intimacy versus isolation, and generativity versus stagnation, and that failure to build and keep intimate, generational bonds in midlife leads to loneliness and despair.
This man was not just looking for a wife, he was discovering, painfully, that he had lost his generation’s anchor, and no amount of money or maturity could buy it back.
He cast his mind back to when he went back to the village. It was only his contemporaries who knew him, who came calling, and whom he visited.
Even this becomes clear to unmarried women at a certain age who eventually lose their playmates and feel out of place, or out of generation, to mingle with in the circle of common interests of being single.
Sociologists call this homophily, the powerful human tendency to bond with those who share our age, language, memory and experience.
Research by McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook in 2001, in one of the most cited studies on social networks, found that similarity breeds connection, and that age is one of the strongest predictors of who we trust, marry and confide in. It is not snobbery, it is memory.
Contemporaries remember the same teachers, the same songs, the same hunger, the same village road before it was tarred. A younger bride can love you, but she cannot remember with you.
The story reveals that most people wait for their peer or mate to get power to be more accessible, wait for their mate to come over to marry them as widow or divorcee, and that should not be taken for granted, that contemporaries are a whole group to live life with in the journey on earth.
Those who play together as kids, sit together in the classroom, or run around in the neighbourhood will always share the memories, be among the first group of allies to rely on, and could easily find compatibility.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed lives for over eighty years, came to a startling conclusion that the single strongest predictor of a happy, healthy old age is not wealth or fame, but the quality of close relationships.
And those relationships are rarely built in a hurry with strangers. They are built slowly, in childhood playgrounds, in school corridors, in shared embarrassment and shared laughter. Your contemporaries are not just your mates, they are your witnesses, the only people who can say, I was there when you were nobody, and I am still here now that you are somebody.
While good chemistry or bond could still take place between people of different generations, the truth is that we cannot change the reality that same contemporaries, peers, would be more in number to keep calling, remember, check on us, and be suitable to share certain experiences, ambitions, plights and common interests or fate.
Laura Carstensen’s socioemotional selectivity theory explains why this becomes even sharper as we age. As time feels shorter, we do not chase novelty, we chase meaning, and meaning lives in familiar faces. That is why the widower in his fifties suddenly understood what he had ignored in his twenties, that marriage is not only about a wife, it is about a generation that will bury you, mourn you, laugh at your funeral, and tell your children stories you forgot.
A younger woman may give you excitement, but she cannot give you a generation. She belongs to another one, with other jokes, other music, other fears, and when you speak, she listens politely, but she does not feel it in her bones.
I could relate with the experience or plight of the man in the story, having noticed the suspicion that often occurs when an older man toasts a very young lady, or an older woman asks a young man out, young enough to be her student or child.
Society senses the mismatch instantly, not because love cannot cross age, but because contemporaries carry a silent language that strangers cannot learn overnight. So cherish your mates. Call them. Visit them. Marry among them if you can. Grow old with them if you must.
For in the end, when beauty fades and money finishes, when wives die and children travel, it is your contemporaries who will still know your name, knock on your door, and sit with you in the evening without needing a reason.
Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
