Stereotype of trophy wife not borne out by census
May-December couples likelier to be poor as age gap widens, latest data show

By ERIN ANDERSSEN
SOCIAL TRENDS REPORTER
Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - Globe and Mail

           Ron and Dixi Chorlton  (click picture to enlarge)

Kelly Howard's husband can't keep his hands off her, she boasts. He still calls her twice a day -- 30 years after he first showed up on her doorstep trying to woo her with flowers and poetry. On their
first dinner date, she nervously made sure to invite a girlfriend "so he wouldn't get any romantic ideas."
But he had plenty, and was persistent. They were married within the year: the 24-year-old architecture graduate and the recent divorcee 12 years his senior with two pre-teen boys. Ms. Howard would rather you do your own math to calculate where they are now. But this is all you need to know: When a former friend -- herself married to an older man -- showed up one Saturday with a bottle of wine and the knowledge that Ms. Howard was away, her husband, Dan, firmly shut the door on her.
"[He's] the best thing that ever happened to me," she gushed on the telephone from San Francisco, where the two Canadians are now planning a move to Vancouver. "We have a very loving, very romantic and very sexual relationship. I don't even think you get that with couples who are closer in age. It's just rare."
More than she knows: Snagging a significantly younger man -- à la former prime minister Kim Campbell, who is more than 20 years older than the man she's been with since 1996, Hershey Felder -- remains rare. According to new data from the 2001 census, the number of Canadian couples in which the woman is more than 10 years older than her partner accounts for less than 1 per cent of the nation's pairings. Most involve women under 50.
The numbers also bust the myth of the wealthy older man and his young trophy wife -- the more years between partners, the study says, the more likely they are poor."If you want to go looking for your fortune this way, the success rate is pretty slim," offered Monica Boyd, a sociologist at the
University of Toronto, who co-authored the Statistics Canada study.According to the census, six of 10 couples in Canada fall within three years of each other in age. When a gap occurs, men are far
more often the older partners. The trend shows up more among foreign-born Canadians or visible minorities, the result, the study says, of cultural differences and a limited marriage pool within
certain ethnic groups. There are also differences by gender: unions with older women are more likely to be common-law, possibly because, Dr. Boyd suggested, divorced women may be less willing to take another walk down the aisle.
Rather than being the most prosperous relationships in Canada, May-December romances are more likely than other marriages to fall below low-income cut-offs -- a sign, Dr. Boyd said, that people of limited means may be trying to "pool their resources."
They more likely include a partner with less than Grade 10 education, with women more often marrying less-educated older men than vice versa. The average combined income of couples separated by less than three years of age is about 5 per cent higher than the average for all unions.
Dr. Boyd blames a combination of factors, such as lower earning power, for the older and youngest partners, and more traditional men who prefer that their younger wives don't work.
But then, like Kelly and Dan Howard, there are the fairy-tale romances. At 40 years old, working as a public servant in Ottawa, Dixi Chorlton -- who then went by her maiden name of Lambert -- had just about given up on love. Then, at a neighbour's party, she met Ron Chorlton, recently widowed at 58. They went out to dinner, which led to a weekend in New York by corporate jet, with separate rooms
at the swank Pierre hotel, a gala at the Lincoln Centre and a walk in the snow. Two decades later, they are happily married in Montreal, and making the most, Ms. Chorlton says, of the days they
have. "You do live with a slightly greater intensity, because you are not sure you have as much time."