About Male and Female Maturity

An anonymous reader commented, on my article “An Anecdote on Female Intere$t” that younger women may date older men because they view men their own age to be “kids”. The topic of maturity comes up some times, so it seemed appropriate to share my thoughts on it. In short, I don’t think people mature a whole lot after a certain age. If anything, your life experiences lead you to refine your personality, but not fundamentally change it.


Arguably, girls mature much faster than guys, which might have to do with them entering puberty earlier. From my interactions with women, in many contexts, though, I simply can’t subscribe to the notion that there is much maturation going on after a certain point. Of course, what does change is that a lot of women turn rather bitter with age, but that hardly makes them more mature.

I’ve met absolutely childish women in their 40s, which I tend to refer to as 14-year old 40-year olds. Just the other day I had to deal with a public servant — I’d say she was in her 50s, so she probably was about 40 — who acted like a teenager: bubbly, scatterbrained and, seemingly, obsessed with her appearance, which was comical if not tragic. On the other hand, I’ve met teenage girls who were very focussed and, believe it or not, even had personal interests, and a rather unusual degree of mental maturity.

Likewise, I’ve met quite a few older guys who were inherently children: irresponsible with money, or their own possessions, easily distracted, and impossible to have a conversation with. What does happen, though, is that some people learn to put up a facade, but if you meet them in their private life, then suddenly their whole immaturity spills out of them. Most of you have probably seen “mature, older guys” get wasted like teenagers on occasion.

Related to dating, this leads to two myths: First, no, older women generally are not more mature than younger ones. If she is older and mentally mature, then she arguably was much more mature than her peers in her teenage years as well. Likewise, there are a lot of guys, and most certainly a lot of ‘geeks’, who were very mature from an early age onwards. However, girls didn’t pay much attention to them. So, take a girl who is looking for a safer choice after she realised that the bad boys don’t want to settle down. If she then goes for an older geek who seems more easily controllable, and remarks that guys her age are “kids” it only shows that she is comparing the older, mature guy to the young, immature guys who either fucked her or whom she gets wet for, and not for the young, mature guys without money whom she ignores.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!
(Also, if you’ve got a comment that is off-topic or only tangentially related to this article, then please post in the most recent Open Thread. Thank you.)