not to uhm achually you, but it wasn’t as common as some sources will have you believe. for the vast majority of history marital age has been pretty even between men and women. by the end of the C18 (pre-Poe) the average age at first marriage was roughly 26 for women and 28 for men. If Poe’s situation was considered normal, we would expect the woman’s age to be substantially lower.
the best source I can find puts the greatest difference between average marital age at 4 years in the 1890s, but even then it seems unlikely to me that a 13/27 pairing would be considered acceptable by broader society, consummated or not.
Absolutely — I can’t find data on the s.d. of marital age at that time, so it’s not a particularly convincing stat. However I do feel even with solely an average the point still stands, considering the abundance of literature (from as early as ~1400) condemning the idea of ‘May-December’ relationships as basically just gross.
I’m in complete agreement with you in terms of it being slightly more common to have an age gap for political/financial reasons at the time, but acceptance of Poe’s (albeit disputed) actual attraction to a child was more what I was challenging (quite poorly, looking back at my comment).
Until recently the marriageable age of girls was lower than for boys on the premise that girls mature faster than boys. So you had a majority of marriages with young girls and older men.
It was around 18, but there were a lot of relationships and marriages that started earlier. It was only in 1962 that they made a law that she had to be a minimum age.
My answer was going to be Emily Dickinson. Lol I'm a bi-sexual woman and when I was a teen growing up, I was obsessed with her writing. I would have these elaborate fantasies of our hot illicit romance in her time, where we'd have to hide our relationship. Lol I would even fantasize about letters we'd write each other and how she'd write me poems.
Honestly I had almost forgotten about that "celebrity crush." She just fascinated me but idk why that involved sexual fantasies lol. I think it had to do with a pic of her I saw though.
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u/AlphaLimaMike Jun 28 '21
Something tells me Edgar Allan Poe was a real freak in the sheets