When people talk about older men dating younger women, they are usually referring to a man of one generation dating a woman of a different generation.

Yeah, probably. I tend to think of "younger women" being just what most people would call "young" women though, as opposed to middle aged or old. Maybe I'm thinking about it in those terms now because I'm forty five myself, or maybe I always thought about it like that. If it's relative to my age though, I'm thinking twenties and thirties and I suppose that I would have thought of thirty year old women as "older" when I was twenty because they were.

Saying that, I was with a woman that was in her forties that was seven years older than me when I was in my thirties and I definetely thought of her as an older woman, both in the sense that she wasn't a spring chicken and that she was older than me. Also, she was older than women that I had been with before, so it was a case of going against my previous preferences and "settling" for someone that didn't match my preconceived ideas about what I wanted.

I suppose that it didn't feel so much like there was a generation gap with her and we could talk about what it was like in the "olden days" when we were growing up and we had that in common but if I met some foreign woman my age we would have little of that cultural background stuff in common and I would have more in common then with a girl in her twenties or thirties from my own culture. To a certain extent I think that it's more lifestyle and interests that matter. There are certain things that I think of as being for old farts that lots of middle aged women are into and if a younger woman had those interests I might find her a bit boring. Most of the television that I watch, for instance, is aimed at a younger audience and it's "youth culture".

I agree,
Sure...habit dictates form...If you spend long enough been mentality stimulated by another man with limited contact in stale or strained times with the one you love then feelings can easily shift
to another.Then your form will follow your function.
Exposer, pressure and finely time will bring mountains down.
We are just mere castles of sand and Jimmy said it best....
"And so castles made of sand.. slip into the sea...EEventually"