Knowing that you're older and more experienced than your (much) younger partner should feel like a hidden weight of burden is placed on you. What might that be? Your younger partner looks UP to you BECAUSE of your maturity and experience. They're LEARNING from you, and willing to be taught things, and can be rather impressionable.

If you're constantly telling them what they're doing is wrong, you've broken them. They'll have insecurities now for years to come. If you instead approach and say "hey.. would you like me to show you another way this can be done?", they'll learn there's other ways to do things, they'll also pick up on being resourceful and using their resources to teach themselves.

If they have feelings and you tell them "Quit whining and grow up!", how do they grow up? Now they also know they can't talk about their feelings. This will take them years to recover from. "It sounds like a lot to consider. What do you think you want to do about these things?", now they think for themselves, developing problem solving skills, self confidence, self esteem, etc.

The younger partner secretly craves our positive guidance, and healthy nudges to teach them healthy coping skills, outlooks on life, realizations of what they actually have control over in their lives (themselves and only themselves), how to treat their partners gender regardless of age, and so much more.

As the older, you ARE a guide. Do you really want to be the reason someone lost their way in life for several years, or even lost their life because of you? We have a HUGE responsibility to treat these younger partners RIGHT, with dignity and respect. If you can't bear that responsibility, then tighten up your age gap and leave the younger ones to the more responsible older's who will do it right.

It breaks my heart to see a lot of youngers talk about past experiences with olders that devastated and crushed them when it shouldn't have happened to begin with (outside of normal relationship issues), including those preying on youngers just for short term sex flings disguised as long term relationship intentions . Being an older in an agr comes with great responsibility. Use it right. Do it right. Love right.

Carry on.