If I take a woman from a palace back to my house, she's going to be unimpressed, hard to please and difficult to live with.

Unless she was confined to that palace with no freedom and facing a marriage she didn't want, then you can still be her knight in shining armour. 😉 I would also add that women also want to be saved and taken to a better life.

You and @ryivhnn have reminded me of a recent discussion/argument. The post was something along the lines of: when someone is celebrating their 5 year anniversary, he's 25 and she's 21 and you do the math. For those of us doing the maths who are from places where 16 is the age of consent we're wondering what the issue is, but the Americans from states with an age of consent of 18, they're calling him a paedophile. When people point out that it's perfectly legal in a lot of places those people respond that they don't care, if you're older than 20 and are interested in someone under 18 you're still a pedo. My reaction was defensive, because the age gap is the same as mine and Shaun's, I just met him at 17 instead, which would still be seen as wrong by some. However, I also know of a couple who met at 16 and 22 and he did go on to sexually abuse his daughters, so I can't argue that their fears are unfounded.

It's so hard to draw lines in this regard, because the reality is that women do have a fertility window so it's only natural that men are going to be less attracted to them as they get older with that breeding instinct driving them. Men attracted to women older than themselves are unusual rather than the norm. Centuries ago a women in her 20s who wasn't married was considered to be leaving it late and becoming a less desirable prospect as a wife. I've often thought that the higher child sexual abuse rate with girls compared to boys might be less to do with paedophile preferences than the fact that when girls develop they are still classed as children until a certain age, but they will then catch the eye of men are attracted to fully developed, but young women. At puberty both genders will move out of the range of what attracts a paedophile, which gets most boys out of their zone, but puts girls in a new zone. At this point if a 14 year old girl ends up sleeping with a boy 16-19 years old you can probably forgive it as the boy not realising if she looks mature for her age and lies about her age, which happens a lot if we're honest, but as they get older we would expect them to be more cautious and are less likely to let it slide. I think what makes us so uncomfortable about a big age gap between consenting adults is when we subtract back to a point where it puts them in the range of it being an adult with a child. My mum's parents had a 13 year age gap, which wasn't as surprising as it was after the war, my grandmother was nearly 30 and the dating pool wasn't exactly going to be large at that point. Her mother (my great grandmother) was 14 years younger than her husband too, so I don't think her marrying a much older man would have fazed her. My dad's mum was 4 years older than his dad and had a child from a relationship with an American soldier stationed in the UK, so he was probably her knight in shining armour. I think we overthink this kind of thing more now than we ever used to.