A marriage counsellor has declared that matrimony between men and older women are short-lived, often with such unions having a span of five years.

Mr George Lutterodt said the union of older women and their boy lovers travels a peculiar course of an initial three years of bliss, plateauing at five years and requiring immediate divorce thereafter, failing which such couples endure a decade of unhappiness while projecting a sense of happiness to others to belie their marital troubles.

“Even if you are older than the person by just an hour, if you marry, the union will collapse. Look, any woman, who has married anyone older than her; I give her a minimum of three years, a maximum of five; they will dissolve the marriage or keep pretending to be married, keeping up appearances for ten years,” predicted Mr Lutterodt, who spoke with Accra News Saturday February 20, 2016.

He added that the breakdown of marriages involving cougars could not be blamed on the devil, as such unions went against the convention of men needing to be the older of the couple to take decisions, saying: “It is not the devil; the devil has never been married so he can’t be against marriage. The devil has never married and can never marry. The devil is only happy with dating.”

He called on Ghanaians to keep to the tradition of men marrying women they are older than, in order to be able to play their roles as household heads, as being younger than their wives could result in intimidation. According to him, marriage between men and older women belonged to foreign cultures, which Ghanaians were blindly copying. He lamented thus: “Those, who started it have stopped; we are now importing it.”

Mr Lutterodt advised that “the age difference between a man and a woman in a union should be at least three years, and seven at most. Anything more, anything less, the marriage will collapse.”