Thread: Happy AGR Stories: Men 18-25 Years Old

Thanks summer Bob, Redhead and Miss muffins ! No one was more dissapointed than I when these three handsome, 40 somethings turned out to be 1) was a stalker 2) had a long term GF he neglected to mention and the 3rd) well, he was so flakey he either had mental issues or was married ! lol

I've seen a lot more bad crap in my life, met more bad people than Frank has merely by being alive longer, so I am the one who has to guard against being too jaded: I don't want to skew his world view, let him find out how crappy things and people can be on his own !

PS. I believe I placed a pic of us in my album but for the life of me I can't figure out how to make it appear in my posts, as many of yours do, any help ???

I cannot believe I never posted in this thread. It may be because in 2008 things were iffy between us.

Are you married, engaged, living together or dating?
Married

How long have you been together?
Soon to be 10 years

How old were you both when you met?
He was 23, I was 44

How did you meet?
We met in a chatroom, and 5 months later we met in real life.

What adversities have you faced or expect to face in the future?
In the past:
Different cultures
Different values
Migration issues
Financial issues
Anger management issues on his part

At present:
Different cultures and values (we are still different but getting used to it)
Financial issues (slowly being resolved)


To what do you attribute your successful relationship?
Our love
His perseverance and faith
My patience and stubborness
Pain. It is more painful to break up than to be together.
Good sex
In that order.

Hey guys!

It's great to see so many happy stories about people in the AGRs.

I'm a writer for the women's magazines in the UK. I would love to chat to some of you with the aim of putting together a really positive piece to appear in one of the magazines.

The article would be sensitively written, exploring the hurdles you have overcome in order to make your relationship work, and you would get a full read-back to ensure you were happy with everything written. You'd also be paid a fee.

The featured couple would ideally be based in the UK.

If anyone wants to get in touch with any questions or for more info please email me - faye[at]catersnews[dot]com. I would be more than happy to address any concerns you may have, without there being any pressure to go ahead with the story.

Hopefully hear from you soon.

Thanks!
Faye

Faye

I take it you want to write a human interest story about a single AG couple ("the featured couple") who have experienced dramatic problems which were due to their age gap ("hurdles you have overcome").

I suggest that this is wholly the wrong approach. First, as AGR couples vary just as much as other people do, a story about one couple will tell the readers nothing useful about AGR's in general. Second, deliberately focusing on a couple who have experienced dramatic relationship-related problems will tend to create the false impression that AGR's inherently involve such problems, when the reality is that they do not, any more than any other relationships. Most people in AGR's built those relationships and live their lives with no more or less drama than anyone else. (Here, at least: AG couples in the UK seem to experience much less of the hysterical hostile reactions which seem to sometimes happen in the USA).

E.g. the relationship between my wife and I began and carried on much like any other woman-meets-man story: fascinating to us but probably not unusual or dramatic enough to interest your readers. People who have commented on our relationship are usually interested in the way we have good relationships with ex's on both sides, not our age gap.

The increasing frequency and acceptance of OW/YM AGR's is indeed an interesting sociological topic, but would require a quite different kind of article to the one you seem to propose. There is probably a lack of data for the frequency of non-coresident AGR's and I suspect there has been no proper analysis of available raw data concerning coresident ones. While there are some obvious possible factors (e.g. divorce, secularity, falling birth rates, growing gender equality) as far as I know none of these have been tested by research.

I suspect that as AGR's became more frequent there has become a positive-feedback loop resulting in AG couples becoming increasingly normal in character. Arguably exactly the same has occurred in the gay community over the past 50 years. In the 1960's rejection by conventional society led to British gay subculture being closely politically linked to the left (and the hedonistic disco scene, despite the two being somewhat incompatible). Gay but otherwise conventional individuals then found themselves drawn in that direction. Since then the wider acceptance of being gay has weakened those links to the point where we now have a Conservative prime minister arguing for gay marriage and openly gay tory activists (to the dismay of older gay leftist activists who did not really want that kind of normalisation).

The real news story then is probably that AGR's are becoming both more frequent and more normal (i.e. more like other people's relationships), and so an article presenting one couple who have a 'we-fought-for-our-love-against-a-hostile-world' story would not really be the "positive piece" you are suggesting.

SW

My view, Pia