I was sitting in my friend’s kitchen, on one of those hard wooden Eames chairs, hearing about the slow unspooling of her relationship with a man in his mid-30s. As she told it, he didn’t seem to give much of a fuck about her; in a recent argument, he’d admitted that couldn’t fake his feelings—a wild thing to say to someone you’re dating. Ultimately, what had once seemed like a “rough patch” clearly wasn’t ending any time soon.
My friend and I had been here many times before. While the details changed, the story was more or less the same: a small slight, then a larger one, then a period of uneasy quiet, followed by some brief reconciliation that erased nothing. It had almost become a ritual—listening to her version of events and then offering a few gentle suggestions that she wouldn’t take, both of us dimly aware that we were participating in something pointless.
After a few months of this, however, my sympathy had worn thin. As I watched her from across the kitchen table, waiting to deliver my line, I found I suddenly had very little interest in repeating myself.
So I changed my tack. “Maybe,” I said, after a long pause, “it’s time to try dating someone older.”
My own boyfriend is more than twice my age, which is either alarming or impressive, depending on who you ask. It’s my first time dating someone significantly older, and sometimes I joke with friends that I’ve been missing out my whole life.
There is something to be said for a man who’s simply had more time to get his shit together, and my much older boyfriend seems genuinely excited to be with me—not like he’s biding his time before he can swipe for someone better. He is fully aware that he’s one lucky bastard.
We met at a birthday party. I sat down next to him at a long table and started talking, as I tend to do when left unsupervised. I had just returned from a solo trip to Hawaii, where I’d rented a tiny cottage on the beach in a town so small most people have never heard of it. It turns out he has owned a house there for more than 20 years. It was a place I’d been returning to for the better part of a decade, and he had been there the whole time, just down the road. We joked about whether we’d ever passed each other on the same stretch of sand, or stood in line next to each other at the same health food store. As we kept talking, we quickly realized our lives had crossed in other ways too, an invisible string connecting us.
The age gap didn’t register at first. I had met someone interesting and magnetic; if anything, I assumed we’d just become friends. But when we exchanged numbers and made plans to get coffee, I called my best friend, the only person I knew who had dated much older.
“Should I go on this date?” I asked.
“How old?”
“In his 60s.”
A pause, then: “Oh my God. He’s a spring chicken.”
***
I’ve noticed how differently people respond to age-gap relationships based on who occupies which side of the gap. Take Cher, who is dating someone decades younger than she is. Broadly speaking, the reaction is: Good for her. A 79-year-old pop icon has earned the right to enjoy herself. The inverse arrangement produces a different kind of commentary. An older man is reflexively labeled “creepy” and “gross,” while the woman “must have daddy issues” or must be a gold-digger. Is it really so difficult to imagine that connection can exist across generations, and that two people of different ages can find something real in each other?
Evidently, for a lot of people, it is—and I’ve been among them. I’ve talked at great length about my own biases around age-gap relationships with my boyfriend, who has been in several.
The less generous assumptions exist for a reason. A difference in years often means a difference in experience, yes, but also in independence—and a relationship where one person provides the conditions for the other’s stability (financial, emotional, or otherwise) can set up a dangerous dynamic.
Since dating my boyfriend, I’ve become friends with a successful fashion designer and a film producer in similarly significant age-gap relationships—two smart, capable, fully formed women whom no one would mistake for victims. And like them, I have my own money, my own career, and I have my own home. I love my boyfriend, but I’m not at risk of losing everything if we break up. It’s hard not to see that distance between needing and wanting as part of the balance that makes the relationship possible. If I were 18, or even 21, the scales would be weighted far differently.
Power is annoyingly slippery. There’s the obvious kind: money, whose name is on the lease. And then there’s emotional intelligence. Knowing exactly when to offer an apology and when to withhold one. The ability to steer a conversation so smoothly the other person doesn’t realize it’s happened. All of these things can create an imbalance that isn’t exclusive to relationships with large age gaps, but is easier to identify there.
In reality, power within a relationship is rarely fixed. It shifts, it recalibrates, and it doesn’t arrive on a fixed schedule. All of which is to say: it’s a nuanced issue. But that, unfortunately, doesn’t stop people from having extremely simple opinions about it.
One of the more shocking aspects of being in an age-gap relationship has been the unsolicited commentary in public. It happens in passing. A question: “Is that your dad?” Or, directed at him, with a performative smile: “Your daughter is so beautiful.” The remarks come with a cheerful bluntness, suggesting a certain satisfaction at having correctly identified the matter at hand, and it’s incredibly awkward every time. There is no sense that anything has been overstepped. If anything, it’s the opposite: a pride in just saying the thing that others were probably thinking. And it hasn’t only been strangers: When I FaceTimed a friend to tell her about my relationship, she was visibly disappointed, as if I had violated some shared understanding of what my life was supposed to look like. We speak less now.
Thinking back to my friend in her kitchen, I realize her relationship has escaped the kind of scrutiny mine invites. There is no dramatic age gap, and yet it contains its own set of imbalances. We have a tendency to interrogate the unusual and excuse or explain away everything else.
For some, age-gap relationships inevitably function as a site onto which their broader anxieties—about power, aging, desirability and its perceived limits—can be projected. What people assume about me, about him, about the structure of our relationship, often reveals more about them than anything that exists between my boyfriend and me. The relationship itself becomes secondary to what it represents.
But the reality is comparatively unremarkable. From the inside, we’re mostly just two people doing the ongoing, unremarkable work of moving through life together.