Why we can’t stop talking about age gaps

From The Idea of You to viral essays, the discourse is rarely about the people inside the relationships.

There’s something about age gaps right now. They’re all over the place.

The Idea of You, out on Amazon Prime this week, features Anne Hathaway as a 39-year-old mom falling in love with a 24-year-old boy band star, only to be haunted by tabloid covers calling her a cougar. It’s based on a novel of the same title by Robinne Lee, dubbed by Vogue “the sleeper hit of the pandemic.”

Meanwhile, over the past few months, the Cut has twice gone viral with articles about age gaps. In December, it published a reported article by Lila Shapiro interviewing multiple couples with significant age gaps. In March came a personal essay by Grazie Sophia Christie about her relationship with her husband, who’s 10 years older. On social media, Shapiro’s report was largely met with fascination and Christie’s with recriminations; both were widely distributed and discussed.

In her new memoir Consent, writer Jill Ciment revisits her celebrated memoir of 20 years ago, Half a Life, about her marriage to the man she met when she was 17 and he was her 47-year-old art professor.

“Should I refer to him in the language of today — sexual offender, transgressor, abuser of power?” Ciment asks, referring to her late husband, as she describes their first kiss. “Or do I refer to him in the language of 1970, at the apex of the sexual revolution, when the kiss took place — Casanova, silver fox?”

The ways we talk about age-gap relationships have changed so completely so fast. They’ve come to be a stand-in for the way the Me Too movement changed our whole erotic vocabulary: Before, titillating; after, abusive. When Taylor Swift first releases “All Too Well” in 2012, it’s received as a tragic breakup song about Swift’s relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal, who she dated when she was 20 and he was 29. When she rereleases it in 2021, it’s received as an account of predatory behavior.

Age-gap relationships in the abstract have become a place of talking through our newly heightened societal awareness of power dynamics and the potential therein for abuse — especially when the standard gender roles flip. Frequently, the discourse has almost nothing to do with the people actually in the relationships in question.

Historically, men were expected to be older than their wives. The reasons why are as gross as you think.

“Haven’t you ever heard that the girl is supposed to be half the man’s age, plus seven?” asks Patty O’Neill in the 1951 play turned 1953 film The Moon Is Blue. Patty, 22, is wooing a 30-year-old man at the time, and she is delighted to find that the math “just works out.”

Today, the rule “half your age plus seven years” is popularly held to tell you the youngest possible person you can date without being creepy. A 30-year-old, the idea is, can just about get away with dating a 22-year-old of any gender, but get down to 21 and things start to feel weird.

Historically, however, the equation was supposed to dictate the ideal age gap between a man and a woman. It seems to have been fairly common around the midcentury. In 2014, the New Republic found the idea turning up in sources as disparate as The Moon Is Blue (1951) and quotes from Elijah Muhammad in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). American newspapers of the 1930s ascribed the rule to Maurice Chevalier, or, more vaguely, to the French.

The ideology that considers this age-gap ideal is profoundly misogynistic. Part of the reason the husband is supposed to be the older figure (twice his wife’s age minus seven years) is to increase his status. Wiser than his wife, the husband could have his own established source of income and his own established adult life before he entered into marriage. The wife would rely on her husband for all of the above.

In exchange, the wife would grant her husband her youthful beauty, and the common wisdom held that this exchange was equal. The tricky thing, though, was that the wife’s youth is by its nature fleeting, while the husband’s wealth would with any luck only increase with time. The wife had a ticking clock placed on her social value, and it was up to her to make a good marriage before the clock struck midnight and her social value disappeared.

This is a worldview in which a woman’s access to adulthood depends upon her erotic value. Her beauty is all she has to trade to the world in order to be granted the status of full personhood — and even that personhood is contingent, because the wife can only ever access it through her husband.

In Christie’s Cut essay, she positions her own marriage as being part of this very legacy. Christie consciously set out to choose an older husband, she writes, because she wanted to benefit from the financial security of an older and wealthier partner, and she thought her best bet was to use the currency of her youth and beauty before they became devalued by age. “I had, like all women, a calculator in my head,” she writes. “I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we [Christie and her fellow female classmates at Harvard] really ought to have been preparing.”

The asymmetry in power between Christie and her husband, she writes, benefits her so much that she feels no real need to right it. “Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself?” she asks rhetorically. “I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.”

It’s only fair to take Christie at her word that she’s happy in her marriage. Yet the exchange she describes sits oddly in the modern era, particularly in the post-Me Too era’s heightened awareness of sexual power dynamics. You run across the same dilemma in all the age-gap think pieces.

“It’s perfectly possible for two consenting adults to have a healthy and equitable relationship despite a significant age gap,” mused a Guardian article from 2020 on Leonardo DiCaprio’s habit of dating only 25-year-olds. However, the article continued, “​It feels like a major flag if a man consistently dates women half his age. One suspects that person isn’t actually looking for a partner, but an admirer.”

In her Cut article, Shapiro outlines the basic problem. The anti-age-gap discourse, she writes, emerged from the Me Too movement’s “concern with power differentials and with coercion and consent.” On the other hand: “It also sits at odds with Me Too’s core ethos — ‘Believe women’ — by raising an outcry on behalf of women who, by all available public accounts, have no complaints about their relationships. Even if they say they are happy, the age-gap critics don’t believe them.”

In the wake of the new discourse, even the people involved in the relationships can’t always believe themselves or the things they say. Much of the tension of Consent comes from Ciment’s anguished and untrusting analysis of her old memoir, the one where she told the story of her marriage as a straight love story.

In her first memoir, 1996’s Half a Life, Ciment consistently describes herself as the sexual aggressor in her early encounters with her future husband, Arnold. Yet looking back over the manuscript 25 years later in Consent, she feels her old account cannot be trusted. “Am I as delusional as Humbert Humbert when he narrates (Lolita is twelve at the time), ‘It was she who seduced me’?” Ciment writes. “When I wrote this, was I protecting Arnold? The statute of limitations had long ago passed. Was I protecting my marriage? We had just celebrated our twenty-seventh anniversary.”

Ciment and Arnold were married until Arnold’s death in 2016, and according to Ciment, their marriage was a happy one. Still, she keeps interrogating herself. “Had Arnold experienced the sea change of the MeToo era, would he have come to believe that he crossed a line when he first kissed me?” she writes. “Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning? … Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?”

Things get even more complicated when we reverse the gender roles.

Is there a gender swap exception?

Discussions about age-gap relationships in which the woman is older than the man tend, on average, to be less about whether or not the woman is a predator and more about whether or not she should be humiliated for dating a younger man. Her detractors might dismiss her as a desperate cougar; her supporters might frame her dating decisions as a feminist triumph.

That’s the tension at the heart of The Idea of You, both the Hathaway film and the novel it’s based on by Robinne Lee. The story centers around Solène, a 39-year-old whose ex-husband is dating a younger woman. Solène grits her teeth at his choices, but she’s not surprised by them: “Because that’s what divorced men in their forties did,” she narrates. “His stock was still rising. His power still intact. Daniel had become more desirable, and I somehow less so. As if time were paced differently for each of us.”

Shortly thereafter, Solène finds herself entangled in a love affair with the much younger Hayes Campbell, lead singer of her daughter’s favorite boy band. In the book, Hayes is 20. In the movie, he’s 24. Either way, he’s a lot younger than Solène. When she suggests that the age gap might become a problem, however, Hayes scoffs.

“If our ages were reversed, no one would bat an eyelash. Am I right?” says Hayes in Lee’s novel. “So now it’s just some sexist, patriarchal crap, and you don’t strike me as the kind of woman who’s going to let that dictate her happiness. All right? Next issue.”

Part of the fantasy of The Idea of You is the idea of a woman whose social currency increases as she ages in the same way that her husband’s does. Solène’s beauty and sophistication are so potent that she does not need to be young to be a catch. Her social value is confirmed by her attractiveness to a man who is not only youthful and beautiful himself but also bears the traditional markers of male power: Young Hayes is richer than Solène’s middle-aged ex-husband will ever be, so that he can fulfill both sides of the old age-gap bargain at once.

The fantasy here is not a world in which women’s social power doesn’t depend on their sexual currency. The fantasy here is that a woman’s sexual currency might not depreciate over the course of her 30s — particularly if the woman in question is played by Anne Hathaway, long celebrated for her eternal youthfulness. The result is a sort of mirrorverse version of Christie’s worldview: These are the rules, so let’s maximize our power within them.

For some readers, this fantasy is intensely potent and affirming. “It teaches that women remain desirable, strong, and sexually viable as they age: there is no end date,” wrote one reader on Goodreads. “It calls out gender-based double standards. It empowers women to block out all the patriarchal noise and build the life they want. When we change our thoughts, we change our world. This. This is what I needed.”

For other readers, the fact of Solène’s gender doesn’t change what they see as the fundamental problem with an age-gap romance: the age part.

“idk who lied to this woman,” wrote another Goodreads reviewer, “but f*cking some kid 20 years younger than you is not the feminist slay you think it is.”

What happens in the end?

There is a question neither The Idea of You nor Christie engages with, which is: What happens as time and age come for all of us? The problem of aging rarely appears in the stories about age-gap relationships, but it is central to the people living in those relationships.

“It’s only when the two people actually love each other and want to build a life together that the age gap, as an age gap, not as a gap that stands in for various inequities, actually matters,” says the writer B.D. McClay in an essay on Substack responding to Shapiro’s Cut piece. “If you want to get married and have kids, then you have to deal with what I think of as the sad math: how long the older partner is likely to see your mutual children get to become. Any parent can die, but what makes this different is that the absolute best case scenario might involve, for some, not seeing your kids ever graduate from college.”

The problem of aging fills the final pages of Consent, which sees Ciment caring for Arnold toward the end of his life. These scenes are not, she feels, literary.

“Who would believe a scene in which Lolita takes Humbert Humbert for cataract surgery?” she writes. “Or worries about his prostate? How would I compose the scene where Lolita arranges hospice care for the man who supposedly stole her childhood? Wouldn’t I have to include the day Lolita is at Humbert Humbert’s bedside when he dies? Isn’t that what happily ever after means? A love that lasts long enough that one lover is there to close the other lover’s eyelids?”

Ciment is able to come to a resolution of sorts on her questions in her description of the day of Arnold’s death. She sees him lying in their bed, in “the same position he was in when I went to seduce him forty-five years before,” she writes. As she goes to kiss him, she knows that for all her fretful wondering about their first kiss and what it signifies, “there could be none about our last.” Their final kiss is for the pair of them alone, as individuals and as a couple, and what it signifies is them and their long marriage. It is separate from the asymmetry of power from which they began.

The fantasy of The Idea of You, however, cannot quite stand up to such realism. It cringes away from the idea of a Solène who might be past middle age and into old age, who might require caregiving or who might even look significantly older than her boyfriend when they’re lounging by a European poolside together. In Lee’s novel, Hayes and Solène split up at the end of the book and don’t reunite, with Solène explaining that the public scrutiny of their relationship is too difficult for her 12-year-old daughter. The film mostly preserves this ending while tacking on a brief epilogue that suggests Hayes and Solène might reunite after her daughter is off at college. In either case, the relationship presented to the audience is preserved in amber, crystallized at the moment in which the age gap is sexy and not potentially tragic.

That age-gap fiction and discourse tends to avoid those tragedies is one of the tells that that age-gap discourse is never about individual people, or even individual couples. It is about the whole history of misogynistic ideology from which our age-gap expectations emerge, and how drastically the way we think about sex and power changed in the space of a few years. The age-gap discourse is a metaphor for the way Me Too changed the world — even if the people in age-gap relationships would rather that it weren’t.