Relationships: Light My Fire

More in tune with their emotional and sexual needs, older women are seeking men younger than themselves, creating new age equations between the sexes.

You feed into their energy, that frisky energy of puppy love. And they feed on your power and experience," says Rano Sahgal, 48 going on 29, a successful corporate woman in Delhi, with sparklers for eyes and leotard-encased legs a teenybopper might envy.

Her husband is 53. And her lover, just 26. The "you" is the older woman, the "they" the younger man. And the tryst across the decades -- with a touch of the cannibalistic about it -- is no longer a singular affair.

Love, lust or whatever, is becoming age-blind. It's almost as if it were all a Midsummer Night's madness, with Puck going about sprinkling love potion indiscriminately. Men in the spring of their lives are falling in love, living with, and sometimes, marrying women in the late summer of theirs. Women of a certain age are drawn to younger men because they are more in tune with their emotional and sexual needs. And some, quite in a reversal of roles, are eyeing men in their strutful prime. The older man-younger woman couples have company: the older woman-younger man twosomes. And they are no longer exceptions to prove the rule. "When we first got married four years ago, people at parties would whisper, we were a curiosity item," says Ratna Malhotra. "Now, we are a stale couple." Ratna is 45 and her husband, Anil Singh, just 30.

Age, long a determining factor in calculations of eligibility -- conjugal or otherwise -- is obviously becoming almost incidental. "Women are entering into an era of economic independence and are more in charge of their lives," explains Vasantha Patri, psychologist and head of the department of psychology, Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi. "If they meet a man who is suitable, they can ignore his age."

Many have to. It's a question of simple numbers and an absence of choice. Women now stay single much longer, either being educated and trained -- or so caught up climbing the career ladder they don't even notice the number of eligible men rapidly dwindling.

Moreover, there are an increasing number of women who were married and are single again. Like Punita Sikand, a young 40 with two children, who lives in Delhi with a man 10 years younger than her. Age doesn't seem to matter now, largely because there's a dearth of men her age. "The institution of marriage is breaking down and there are many women who are well settled, outgoing, not past their prime and looking for a companion," says Punita. Divorced men also tend to remarry faster than divorced women, depleting the reservoir of suitable men even further and writing new age equations between the sexes.

Mumbai psychotherapist and counsellor Kalyani Kapur believes that such couples have become far more acceptable today because the taboos about younger men are gradually vanishing and the social conditioning of the past being questioned. "Today's woman needs a companion, not a protector. That is why they accept younger men who fit the bill," says Kapur.

But what does the younger man see in the older woman? It could be as simple as a mirror image of the younger woman falling for the more successful and established older man. It happens in reverse: nothing charms like success. The young man with aspirations but no means is likely to be attracted to a woman who is glamorous, worldly, established and well-to-do and can play the female Professor Higgins. Filmmaker Prita Singh, 50-something and attractive with a touch of class and the whiff of a bohemian about her, attracts men half her age like a magnet. "Young men are looking for adventure and for a man of 20, the woman in her 40s is notching it up. For him, she was there first. And she has the power to mould him."

Like dermatologist Veera Sanghvi, who was 40 and had a bad marriage behind her when she met the struggling Gurcharan Singh three years ago. He was 13 years younger than her, unhappy in his father's banking business, and only too ready to help Veera run her growing beauty business. "In love you don't think about age," says Gurcharan. "I have always been attracted to older women because you can drop your guard with them and you don't have to teach them anything."

They can teach you. Better still, why not marry the boss? Jayant ran away from his middle-class home in Madurai and after many hard knocks en route ended up working for Kavita -- now 45 and 12 years older than him -- in the hosiery business she had set up in Coimbatore. She groomed him for the job, adding finishing touches to his social manners and, finally, married him. "I had been married to a callous older man who never gave me any money to run the house and drank a lot. This way, I will always be in charge," says Kavita.

Like Roshini, 33, who has her own HRD agency in Mumbai, and tells Suraj, a 25-year-old writer who had run away from home in Calcutta and started working for her: "Call me Devi, not baby." He does, and the terms of endearment between them are of mutuality: she takes care of his material needs and gets him prestigious assignments, he does what she tells him. And likes it: "She would come on to me, and I liked her frank and direct approach. So we decided to live together."

It is ironic that in the age of the youth cult, fanned by satellite television and the fitness fever, an increasing number of men don't find women in their peer group stimulating. "I did try to have relationships with women in my own age group, but something was missing," admits polo player Anil Singh. "The mind has to be stimulated, and half the younger women don't read the papers, and cannot be part of a conversation."

Interestingly, patience is the word which crops up when younger men talk about the qualities of older women they admire. "It's a question of compatibility, her age gives her maturity and the ability to adapt," says dance critic and author Ashish Kokkar, 39, who is married to Elizabeth, 51. "I didn't want a giggling girl, they have no patience and are unsettled."

Some young men shy away from the career-driven and focused young women on the fast track. "It creates unnecessary heat in a hot climate," says television filmmaker Ketan Chatterjee. "They are on a treadmill. One day it is television, the next marketing and the day after it could be real estate. They are always thinking of the next move." Several young men are more comfortable with older women because they feel they can drop all the masks of invulnerability they put on for women in their peer group. For women their age, they have to be like a Swiss army knife, a Mr Do-it-all: a good provider, a hero, an extrovert and entertaining. "There are many more expectations from a younger wife about the male role and behaviour which can make him feel inadequate," explains Patri.

The younger man does not have to play the role of the "complete man" for the older woman, many of whom may be divorcees and inclined to be more nurturing and indulgent in relationships. "The younger man also feels good if she takes on the initiating role, whether it is sex or organising a party and attending parent-teacher meetings," adds Patri.

Is he looking for mama? It would be simplistic to say that younger men are in search of a mother figure, or more poetically, in search of a childhood lost. But most of them, according to analysts and marriage counsellors, want a woman to guide and nurture them. "The younger man is usually looking for a woman who has the emotional capacity to nurture him and look after him in a way his mother did not," explains psychoanalyst Udayan Patel. But there's scepticism. Most such relationships, they say, become "duty-bound" after some time; for the husband, it's "well, I am there so I have to be there". Analysts insist there are no underlying patterns in younger men's attraction to older women. They just are. But there are cases of men who have been influenced by difficult marriages of their parents. "A small percentage have, in my experience, mothers were distant," says psychiatrist Achal Bhagat of Apollo Hospital, Delhi. Men like corporate executive Randhir Dave, 32, who had a practically non-existent childhood with a withdrawn mother and a weak father. He found a ready-made family and hearth when he married a mother of two, a decade older than him.

Sex has a lot to do with the new chemistry between the generations. "The younger man is often sexually insecure and can't bare his soul and body to women his own age: there is insecurity and fumbling," says Jungian psychotherapist Rasna Imhalsy. "The older woman is more mature and liberated, and the initiation is easier."

But for the younger man, the appeal of the older woman can be even more basic. "You don't have to go through the whole seduction saga," says savvy Rahul Das, a journalist who went out with a woman 11 years older. "When you go home with a woman in her 20s, making love is not the option. When she's in her late 30s, you know what is going to happen."

For men like Praful Mehta, a 33-year-old banker, affairs with older women have a different quality to them. "There is a fire in older women, the fire of experience: what they have seen and done. In younger women, there is a fire of exuberance."

What attracts women to younger men? Women have been coming into their own for some time now. But with it came a new sensuousness, and a quest for youth and the body beautiful. Dr Urvashi Jha, a Delhi gynaecologist, has noticed a marked change in the attitude of women towards their bodies and their sexual lives. In fact, a female patient in her late 40s, who was seeing a much younger man, came to her demanding surgery for the lower part of her abdomen. "She didn't want to be repulsive with all that fat hanging down when she took off her clothes," says Jha.

This emerging woman of the 90s is equally critical of men's physical attributes. "Who wants pot bellies?" asks Pamela Bordes Singh, the 35-year-old photographer who prefers the company of younger people. "Women want to party too, and if the woman is beautiful, there are young men to party with. Look at older women today: some of them are like live vibrators. Younger men flock to them," she says.

Women are becoming more sexually aware and demanding. Maithali Shankar, 38, unmarried and a successful advertising executive in Delhi, finds sex with younger men more fun because it is less inhibited. "You don't have the traditional active-passive combination. And it is not always the missionary position with younger men. They have grown up differently, you can sit, stand, make love under the bed, in the cupboard or in the shower."

Many women also have that heady feeling of being able to shed the masks of adulthood and responsibility and act out their fantasies with younger men. "Women never had the opportunity to tickle their fantasy that way with men their age," says Bina Ramani, who writes a column on relationships in a national daily. "With a younger man she becomes a teacher and can tell him where she wants to be tickled or whatever."

The cross-generational love story may sound rosy, but it's not always a Mills & Boon happily-ever-after. The conflicts set in gradually; the relationship becomes quieter and quieter. The two may acquire different world views. He may want to play football, she, mildly arthritic, may not allow him to do so. Says Reena Sharma, 16 years older than her 32-year-old sporty husband: "I want him to realise that my energy level is a little low now. I am wrung to the maximum, but he makes no allowance."

And then there's the problem of acceptability. For example, Rajat Bhasin (late 20s) and Nalini Sengupta (late 40s) married six months ago: she's the director of an upmarket hotel and he a manager in the same place. The two had to contend with a great deal of cynicism. Friends can be a problem. Often, such couples start off to-ing and fro-ing between the two age groups. Later, most gravitate towards the older spouse's group. It can be tense for the younger husband. "He has to appear protective, it must not look as if she is baby-sitting," says J. Nagpal, consultant psychiatrist at the Vidyasagar Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Delhi. "He has to play the role of the male, the husband, keeping in mind the identity of the home which has a husband and a wife."

A tricky moment comes when the woman is menopausal -- or even pre-menopausal -- and the young man is at his prime. Menopause, explain gynaecologists, does not necessarily send a woman's libido on a nosedive, but emotionally more vulnerable and physically aware of the changes taking place in her body, she does tend to feel the age difference more acutely. Says Maithali: "I was conscious about being older, he was not. And the time I was most uncomfortable was when we were with his friends. It was only my mind at work."

The family can quite often upset the delicate balance a couple may have worked to achieve. As happened in the case of Rama Suri, 38, and Prashant Mathur, 25. Both are managers in multinational companies in Delhi: Rama higher up the ladder, and her husband, an IIM graduate, at middle level. But on the other side of the threshold of the extended nuclear Mathur family, Rama was expected to dump her work identity and play the dutiful daughter-in-law. Her late hours at work, at times working later than her husband, were frowned upon. Nothing direct was ever said but there were insinuations. "You did what you wanted," was a remark Prashant often had thrown at him. The couple eventually moved out.

Neera Grewal, a 50-something advertising executive, is uncomfortable in her relationship with a man almost half her age because she fears rejection: "Youth does have a headstart. I was afraid I would not be cherished: would he value my emotions or was he attracted to me only for the moment?"

Family therapists say that problems do arise when the much younger man wants children. But couples find a way out if everything else in their relationship is right. Gurcharan and Veera had a child within 15 months of their marriage. Meenakshi and Sudhir Rao -- she is 37 and he is 28 -- adopted a daughter even though she had a son from her previous marriage. And, many older women have children from their previous marriages.

Who the boss at home is can be an even more acute problem in these marriages. Gurcharan often feels that his wife is too dominating and she finds him childish. "She has become possessive and does not allow me to move around too much," he says.

"Why should I feel insecure?" she argues, "I am self-made and it's I who provided him with a shelter and gave him a family." It can get intolerable: sometimes he leaves home, sometimes she throws him out. But both of them love their daughter and so it is back to square one.

Another wiser, older wife is now complacent about her husband, and in control: "They may flirt with younger women, but they trust older women."

NEIGHBOURHOOD AUNTIES
CRADLE CRAZY

Mothers, lock up your sons. The neighbourhood aunty could be on the prowl. Surveys, helplines and agony aunt columns reveal that these "aunties", as they are called by young men, are helping schoolboys and college students through those critical rites of passage. "We get many calls from 18 or 19-year-old boys who have been sexually initiated by older women who live in the same locality," says Radhika Chandiramani, a clinical psychologist who runs the helpline tarshi (Talking about Reproductive and Sexual Health) in Delhi.

Most of the young men calling tarshi are from the middle or lower middle classes. The women are usually in their 30s: their husbands are away at work or on tour and their children have gone to school.

Nobody gives a second thought if a young boy goes over to visit Mrs So-and-So to fix the tap or a bulb. Dr J.S. Gill, who works at the Centre for Community Health, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, has also observed a similar trend in a survey, "Knowledge, Attitude and Behaviour of Schoolchildren", his centre conducted recently. In their focus groups, the boys would often talk about being initiated by "aunties". "I see this as the reverse of the phenomenon of elderly men exploiting young girls," says Gill.

The "aunties" are not limited to Delhi. From some of the letters sent to agony aunt columns, young men, it seems, are being seduced by their friends' mothers. Or, mother's friends: a 24-year-old recently married his mother's close friend in Delhi. Toy boys haven't yet begun to leave their calling cards in India -- even though rumour mills spin with stories about industrialist wives taking 20-something models off for a weekend on their yachts, or of actresses with a taste for progressively younger men. But the Kitty Party Boys have. Called thus because they are middle class, in their mid-20s and take up with an upper-class woman. "She does not pay him, but gives him presents like designer belts, watches, shoes, grooms him, teaches him the finer things of life and then passes him around the kitty party circuit," says Chandiramani.

For the men, it is a way of supplementing their income, a huge step up the social ladder, out of their middle-class tenements and an entry into a world they could only have at best peeped into.