"Now he has to calculate what he can't see."
My late father was almost exactly twelve years older than my mom. I can never remember their birthdays because they never celebrated them.
She's like a late sign Libra and she debated whether he was really a Libra or really a Scorpio because my mom believes in astrology, which is how I ended up studying it in my youth. So that tells me her birthday was a few days before his sometime in October.
Libra: The most neurotic and annoying sun sign ever. Me and my mom don't really get along and I can't think of a single Libran friend I've ever had.
My dad retired from the army the summer I turned three. I grew up hearing tales of his legendary drinking but not witnessing it.
He swore off alcohol when I was seven but I think he really began tapering off as soon as he left the army. I remember him having a beer with dinner when I was like four. I don't remember ever seeing him soused.
My mom said she never cared how much he drank when drinking was a big thing with him "because he was never a mean drunk and there was always enough money." Instead of being a mean drunk, he did stupid stuff that turned into funny stories.
One of those funny stories is pertinent to this story: One night while very drunk, he kept asking her "And when I'm X age, how old will you be? And when I'm Y age, how old will you be? etc." as if he thought the age gap would close as they got older.
My dad had malaria while serving in Africa in his twenties. He lost all his hair to the 105 or 106 degree fever that caused, so he looked like an old man in his twenties and looked about the same for the next thirty years before he began to visibly age.
In contrast, my mother tends to get mistaken for being younger than she is. When some young punk was hitting on her though he knew she was married and she was trying to get away from him, she told him "I need to go pick up my daughter from college." meaning me.
He told her "You aren't old enough to have a daughter in college." and she told him "She's my youngest." to signal that she was even older-er than he thought without actually divulging her age. (Bonus points: It does double duty as bragging, which was a big thing with my mom.)
So I have heard that when my parents were first together, people sometimes assumed that he was her father, not her husband. That no doubt is a factor in his drunken mental math one night, hoping the age difference would somehow magically change.
Other than that, I really never heard that anyone cared about their age difference. Not him, not her and not other people.
My mom was one of twelve children and is very socially savvy. Her siblings are not all equally socially savvy, so it's not specifically a product of her environment. I think it's more like she was inclined a certain way and had lots of opportunity to practice.
Like my mother, I'm pretty socially observant. And I have a tendency to be attracted to men who are at least a decade older than me.
But because of personal baggage of various sorts, I initially believed my interest in older men was somehow a bad thing. At nineteen, I married another nineteen year old who had graduated high school with me and spent time in therapy and yadda before making my peace with liking older men and not feeling like that was somehow sick.
Long story short, I ultimately concluded that women tend to be a bit more socially savvy than men, which is one of the reasons men tend to be about four years or so older than their (hetero) partner. I think people are attracted to people who are of similar intelligence and similar social savvy and I think I tend to like men who are a decade or more older than me because most men need too much social schooling and it makes me feel like "I'm not your damn mother."
If I need to explain too much social stuff to you and start feeling like I need to raise your sorry ass, I don't want to sleep with you, thanks. I already raised two kids and I am not a pedophile.
People seem to default to assuming that men date younger women for their looks and women date older men for their money. Money was not really a part of my relationships to older men, so I'm clear that in my case that was not relevant.
There was only one younger man that was very important to me emotionally. His best friend was like twenty-two years older than him and he also had a history of dating older women.
I guess like me and my mom, he was probably very socially observant for his age and had trouble finding women his own age that he felt able to really relate to.
If you have a public life and any sense, you don't correct dumbasses who assume that you are into her because she's young and pretty and she is just after your money. You let them be oblivious to what really drives your relationship.
Besides, a relationship is rarely one dimensional. It can be both true that you like pretty, younger women and also that her level of social savvy is a better match for yours than someone more your own age.
Most serious relationships have something more holding them together than the superficial answer everyone else leaps to as an explanation for what brought them together. But there is usually no reason to clue people to what that might be and often very good reason to actively avoid cluing people as to what the real glue for the relationship is.