What makes an age gap acceptable, or gross?
For me, it comes down to habit versus circumstance
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Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor. Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Cher and Alexander Edwards. Leonardo DiCaprio and…everyone he’s ever dated. In the world of celebrities, age-gap relationships are practically part and parcel of fame. And yet, how we feel about them seems to be changing all the time, from vehement disgust to outright fangirling. So, what makes an age gap relationship acceptable and what makes one gross?
The obvious answer is numbers. Not the number of years between the couple, but the number of years they’ve actually been alive. For example, it’s (mostly) agreed that forty-nine-year-old Sarah Paulson is mature enough to handle a relationship with eighty-one-year-old Holland Taylor because she’s a consenting, middle-aged woman. On the flip side, people (understandably) have much more of a problem with Sam Taylor-Johnson dating Aaron Taylor-Johnson, because he was eighteen to her forty-two years when they met.
In reality, though, the way we perceive acceptable and unacceptable age gaps is less black and white. In our chronically online world, it’s hard to keep up with what the general consensus is—one moment we seem to be shaming couples, the next, celebrating them. This month, The Idea of You - starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine - has once again shifted the discourse, with lifestyle titles like Cosmopolitan coming out against shaming age gaps. The film (which is apparently based on Harry Styles fanfiction!?) follows the story of a forty-year-old single mother who begins an unexpected romance with a twenty-four-year-old music star—a particularly interesting age gap in my opinion, as it’s divisive. Some people think it’s great. Some think it’s gross.
I do have my own theory about how we can categorise age-gap relationships into bad or good. I’m not saying it works every time, but it’s something I think can be helpful when examining, not just age gaps, but any kind of potential manipulation or fetishisation. It’s about habit versus circumstance. Forty-nine-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, for example, has a definite habit of dating women under twenty-five—a trait that’s become almost as famous as his films. Anne Hathaway’s character in The Idea of You, however, has never dated someone that young before. She is swept up in the circumstance of their affection. Aka, it’s “true love”.
I think we can use this theory with things like racial fetishisation, too. If a white man only ever dates Black women, for example, we might start to think that he doesn’t actually see them as individuals with unique personalities, but sees them only for their appearance, or what he thinks they ‘represent’. However, if a white man has a healthy, diverse dating history and then falls in love with a Black woman, we’re more inclined to believe he loves her for who she is and will treat her with care and respect.
Personally, I’ve not dated anyone significantly older or younger than myself, so I can’t pull from my own experiences, but I imagine that it could feel condescending to have people disapprove of your relationship or imply that you’ve been manipulated when you feel you haven’t. When Florence Pugh (28) dated Zach Braff (49), she quickly grew frustrated with how much of an opinion the public had on her choice, saying: “I've always found it funny how…I'm old enough to be an adult and pay taxes, but I'm not old enough to know who I should and should not have sex with.”
Nevertheless, in certain circumstances, we don’t always know how we truly feel about something until we’re older. With the clarity of hindsight, we realise (often when we reach the age of the people who once manipulated us) how strange and sinister it can be to want someone so much younger. Perhaps in a situation where anyone isn’t sure whether they’re being manipulated or not, it could be helpful to look back over the dating history of that particular person, to see whether you are the circumstance…or the habit.
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Regardless of the socially acceptable circumstance, the reality is that those two individuals lay down together alone. The major issues I see often is that whether we as a society has an opinion or not, it's not going to deter two individuals that want to be together. It ultimately comes back to, who and why do people care, when they do
I would opine that it’s the couple’s business.