Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how age-dissimilar couples in Australia imagine their futures together. It shows how notions of love and age endure and are being revolutionised. For instance, love was thought to transcend age differences for some but not others, to be focused on the present yet long-lasting.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how people in age-dissimilar relationships—older-man and older-woman couplings with large age differences—imagine or ignore their joint futures in terms of old age and love. While median age differences in marriages have decreased in Australia and much of the world in recent decades, there has been a rise in relationships with large age differences. In such relationships, one partner will reach old age markedly earlier than the other. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with women and men in heterosexual, age-dissimilar relationships in Australia, this paper explores couples’ imagined futures.

Couples conceived of their ages as meaningless or relative, and argued that chronology did not determine their or their partners’ ages. Rather, appearance, experience, personality, and how old they felt took precedence, making them relatively ‘mature’ or ‘young’ for their age. They thus argued that their relationships were actually age similar. Yet conversations about what would happen when one partner reached old age exposed problems in this discourse, and anxieties about old age and care in their future love lives.

These discussions about the future highlighted tensions in their understandings of age and love. Love was thought to transcend differences in age for some but not others, to be focused on the present yet long-lasting. This complicates popular conceptions wherein age is seen as relative and malleable, and relationships as fulfilling, temporary, and utilitarian. It shows how notions of love and age both endure and are being revolutionised in contemporary Australian relationships.