Remember the age gap article in The Cut that had people up in arms a few months ago? Well, there were two, but I’m thinking in particular about the one by the author who someone referred to as “this week’s main character on Twitter.” It was a viral blip, so I wouldn’t blame you for having some amnesia. I want to talk about it now. Here’s a brief refresher:
In “The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” 27-year-old Grazie Sophia Christie describes an idyllic relationship with her 37-year-old husband, which she reveals to be the result of her calculated pursuit of older men during her undergraduate years at Harvard. Grazie argues that any imbalances inherent within their relationship have actually created ease. They are not perfect fraternal equals as same-age couples might be, but they’ve achieved their own type of symbiosis. The main benefit of this relationship for Grazie is that she has ticked off the marriage box while still young and desirable, leaving her the rest of her days to focus on building her career. The alternative is bleak—the woman who climbs the corporate ladder while her biological clock ticks towards death, perhaps languishing in a few relationships with messy manchildren before winding up with limited marriage options once she gets around to wanting a family—but alas, the men her age have already taken up with the younger brood. For Grazie, building her writing career is actually a piece of cake now, seeing as the notoriously low-paying vocation is supported by her husband financially.
In flowed derision from all angles. First of all, her argument was offensive. What happened to it being 2024, and Feminism? It seemed sacrilege to say that sexual attractiveness is a more powerful tool for women than hard work. “Sad that she chose not to actualize her own potential as a person of worth rather than allow herself to be molded at will by someone else. What does she gain here—buying things and splendid vacations? Not all of us value ourselves through how men see us.” Tragic that she’s given up her autonomy. Women 35+ are inherently sexier and coming for your man and your job. Grow up, Grazie! Your husband will get sick of you, or you will get sick of your husband, once you grow up and get experience and learn boundaries. Either way, you’ll inevitably be spat back into the wild after you get pregnant. You don’t get off so easily.
Second of all, it was drivel. Many found her writing, with its Nabokov-esque flourish, completely unreadable. Although I found it refreshing to see anything that could be discussed as style whatsoever on The Cut, there was definitely a punchable smugness in her voice. Like, Harvard, Harvard, Harvard! (have you ever met anyone who’s gone to Harvard who doesn’t figure out a way to work that detail into everything they write and say?)….My high breasts and flush ponytail (boner alert)….I’m a little Bovarist (among many other examples of “I read” pick-meism throughout)….My marriage has its cons…how many times can I say thank you for splendid dinners, fine scenes? (in the full scope of tone-deaf bragging here, this may have been the worst).
So Grazie was wrong and a bad writer, and people were enraged. But did I need to explain the actual content or the exact tenor of the responses to convince you that it raised hackles? The article was meant to be sensationalist, because the subject itself is primed to splash.
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I know I’m late to the discourse, but I’ve been letting that piece turn over in my mind for months. In the meantime, I’ve made a brief dissection of the age-gap relationship as it stands in our cultural consciousness. I’ve arranged it into several overlapping categories that one could fall into, with associations in descending order of how much they make us writhe.
An AGR, at its worst, involves a minor and an adult—it’s a crime. Here we think of abuse that comes with abberations like pedophilia, incest, trafficking, etc., and deep societal ills are implicated.
Down from there, we might think of any AGR that involves an abusive relationship. The younger partner is naturally vulnerable, therefore it’s easy for the older partner to take advantage of or manipulate them. On the more passé flipside, maybe the unwitting older partner is significantly exploited by their gold-digging younger partner. Either way, it’s clearly unhealthy—perhaps we’ve been traumatized by this dynamic when we were younger, and we have personal reasons to disapprove.
Once we’re fully in the realm of a consensual relationship, we might consider the AGR more broadly as a reflection of certain embedded gender imbalances that could only permit the most superficial type of love. We can address the classic gold-digging issue on a more everyday level—materialistic, soulless younger woman is only with older man for his money or social status. Meanwhile, older man only feels attraction toward younger women because of his utter distaste for women his age. Double standards and sexist roots often piss off the masses, on both sides, in a somewhat abstract way.
After that, let’s say the AGR is “healthy enough,” but we can’t help but pick up on some weird Freudian vibes. Daddy issues and mommy issues galore. We assume that the age gap drives their attraction in the first place and actively affects their sexual dynamic. If we try not to worry too much about the older partner being attracted to someone younger (we go right back to pedophilia and misogyny), we’re still thinking about the habit of the younger partner to gravitate towards older partners. They must be broken in some way. We’re not enraged, but we’re still uncomfortable.
From there, we might become a little more forgiving. Maybe our parents are in an AGR and it’s not that weird because they’re older now and they’ve been happily married for years. The rest—maybe people we actually know, whose relationships we witness in real-time with their up-close complexities—fall into this last gray miscellaneous category.
The reception of a particular age-gap relationship depends on its obviousness, Grazie writes. The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one? Would I take it?
The age gap relationship involves all parties—witness included—in an uncomfortable type of mental math. Grazie shares that in the beginning of her relationship, people seemed to take us very, very personally. She received a caustic gold-digger accusation from a male friend of her husband. From women, she received gossipy concern wielded like a bludgeon. I’d say that the judgement she describes might fall into categories 2-3: her article comes up against an unbalanced set of advantages and disadvantages predicted to occur in a relationship between a 20 year old and a 30 year old. Even with her extensive plea, are we able to believe her now, seven years out? What type of explanation does it take to disperse the cynical, obscene feelings we have around age gap relationships? Does it make it better to engage with a sense of transaction more directly?
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Here’s where I admit that I’ve been living a similar experience to Grazie’s—one that’s more extreme on paper, but perhaps more pedestrian beneath the surface. I met my current boyfriend when I was 21 and he was 37, which gives us a sixteen-sometimes-seventeen year age gap.
The scene of our introduction was less glamorous than a Harvard graduate-student party. I mean, it was a very exclusive and extravagant corporate fine dining restaurant in the Village. Except that I hadn’t snuck in there hoping to meet a Forbes-ranked billionaire dining among Rhianna’s entourage. I was just a hostess who’d lied extensively on her resume, who spent a lot of time on the floor of the bathroom trying to press the cramps out of her feet, who happened to sometimes chat with a waiter who was developing terrible bunions in his dress shoes.
Our first interaction had confused and mildly offended me. I was brand new, fresh to the city from a lifetime of Southern pleasantries, walking past him in the server pass when I heard him ask me, in his horribly abrasive Long Island accent, what, you don’t say hello?
It wasn’t an environment where we had much of a chance to learn the quick and dirty about each other. In fact, this was early 2021: we were waving our hands and calling out behind from the moist muffle of our black surgical masks. I caught a glimpse of his face, once, as he pulled his mask down to his chin to take a bite of a sandwich. But by that time I was already interested: he was the only non-geriatric, non-obese waiter there, with a strong upright posture and dark thick hair that cowlicked over the right side of his forehead. We’d been walking past one another without breaking eye contact, catching playful snatches of conversation here and there, par for the course restaurant flirtation. Sometimes he’d linger by the stand in between reading out the desserts to the last tables of the night. Once, right before I was cut, he asked me when I had a day off, and then wrote his number in pen on the restaurant’s business card.
I hadn’t been looking for anything, really, drifting idly through app-arranged hookups for the past few months, but I felt I’d been thrown into the deep end. I’d never felt so consumed with desire for a person I barely knew, and so unprimed for the beginning of a serious relationship. His reciprocated interest took me by surprise. I showed up to meet him at a bar with blue jeans and a lot of underarm hair.
As stupid as it sounds, the fact of his age hadn’t crossed my mind. It apparently never crossed his. We were both surprised once the topic arose, inspecting one another’s mouths for the first time across the leather booth.
Caught off-guard, we were already totally done for. Within a short time, I left the job for another restaurant. A few months later, I left my rat-infested sublease and moved into his one-bedroom in the interim and never left. A year later, we moved to another apartment, where we’ve lived since. Last year, he turned the corner on 40 as I turned 24.
That may have sounded like a sweet, generic love story if not for our disgustingly large age gap. He could have been your teen dad! Here is where I have to begin my own Grazie-esque defense of my relationship with an older man.
Although I haven’t had much practice. I don’t parade around the gap number, of course, but in three years I’ve never heard an insult spoken against my relationship to my face, even from those who are aware of it. Never have I clocked a judgemental expression. Never have I noticed looks in public, or felt the uncrossable gulf of our age gap warped in the eyes of others. A few factors in the mix being that my boyfriend has the air of someone much younger (after all, he fooled me), maybe I’m not incredibly attuned to judgment, perhaps plain dumb luck. Also, we live in New York. (We all know that no one would bat an eye at Grazie and her husband’s ten year difference in fucking New York.)
But for the sake of a defense in the eyes of Internet strangers, I’ll argue that 1-4 from the dissection have no place in my AGR. I’d never been with an older partner before, and I’d never thought of purposefully seeking one out, and I’ve always managed a good relationship with my father. My boyfriend has no wealth or power for me to exploit (no summer home in France, unfortunately). He’s only dated women his age in the past. No type of age-play has ever entered our sex life. In this way, our gap feels entirely incidental, perhaps even accidental. It doesn’t feel like it affects our relationship, ours doesn’t feel significantly different from my past relationships with men my age. After all, he’s not a member of the ivy-leaguing landed gentry—so I still have to pick up towels off of household surfaces sometimes, even if he does know a lot about wine.
Wait, but before I lose you, let me take the desperate blinders off. Of course it affects my relationship.
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Reading Grazie’s unbridled bragging, I admit I felt a slight sense of redemption. She does mention things that I appreciate about my boyfriend that are a direct result of him being older. He has always been a more secure and fully-realized person than me, and that came as a welcome foil to the mess I was (and am) in my early twenties. Similarly, I initiate adventure, risk, and a more receptive approach to living, which I think is a salve for his mid-life burnouts and ruts. By nature, we are extremely different people, and have taught one another a lot in our ecstatic urge to understand one another better. Within limits—I’ll probably never give a fuck about 90s TV references, but I really don’t need him to be fluent in Twitter slang.
Grazie is right that all relationships are trades. That you can fall in love for any reason, in any context. That the modern dynamic of same-age partnerships may have some drawbacks for women (that men often have unfair advantages in them, mostly having lower stakes at all stages, etc). I’ll admit, even to Grazie’s most contested point, that I have met a few people—men and women alike—who are successful enough by their mid-30s that they feel ready to do the whole family thing but have little real relationship experience and find themselves totally stitled, fishing around in a rather limited pool. And unfortunately I’m not idealistic enough to think that being a girlboss is any more attractive than high breasts and a flush ponytail. Youth is currency, and I actually don’t find that any more base than the power that comes from…what? Careerist bloodlust?
I appreciate Grazie’s willingness to be bluntly realistic about these conditions for women. I appreciate her opening up a more positive view of an age gap relationship, but I think her ultimate pitfall is prescription.
Let’s remember that “The Case for Marrying An Older Man” was published in a column by The Cut titled THE GOOD LIFE, described as a series about ways to take life off “hard mode,” from changing careers to gaming the stock market, moving back home, or simply marrying wisely.
Which is probably why the article reads so much like a life hack. You’re unhappy, aren’t you? Just try this instead! The Good Life! Not on hard mode anymore! The lonely, heartbroken, fucked-up masses arrive frothing at the mouth, desperate to be told how to find a nice relationship. This is how so many articles on just about any topic of life are written—and also what fuels influencers on social media—a perfected model of life we can imitate. Fine, if it’s a product I can buy in an attempt to have “glass hair.” With relationships, I’m much more skeptical of the illusion of a methodical, one-size-fits-all approach to romance.
It’s very important to note the thiny-veiled subtext of money in the article. Summering in the south of France is mentioned first and foremost, the masses gush—how compelling! On Grazie’s end of the transaction (after putting in dancing at restaurants, making grocery shopping an adventure, and folding some clothes), she receives the freedom to write full-time and a rather luxurious lifestyle. I don’t see any reason to criticize someone for wanting to read, walk around, think in delicious circles—however American, I don’t get off on the idea that people should have to suffer in that deadening spreadsheet job she mentioned to make their lives meaningful. If one can avoid that, they’re lucky.
But as several feisty commenters point out, the specific dynamic she describes with her husband sounds awfully familiar. As a woman, marrying someoneone who can provide—especially someone who has a secure career and generational wealth—is nothing new. It’s the oldest rule in the book. The article would be even more of a joke if it presented itself more plainly in that light, if Grazie simply wrote, if you’re a struggling writer, just become a trad wife to a rich man! When your husband is a Harvard graduate with assets in Europe, age doesn’t have to be a factor at all. The idea at the heart of the ease Grazie describes has more to do with money than with age. It’s a different conversation entirely.
Even in my blue-collar version, it’d be dishonest for me to pretend that money doesn’t affect my relationship. Even in tips from the rich, my boyfriend makes a significant more than I ever have or could for a long time, in an office or at a bar. He doesn’t support me entirely, but we do split our rent, and he pays more—a massive factor in allowing me to stay in the city, especially during my periods of shaky employment. I’m lucky for that. But I’ve observed this dynamic in many relationships, completely regardless of age. The world is not fair enough to ensure that the longer you work, the more resources you have. That the poorer party might be younger doesn’t necessarily transform them into a Sugar Baby. Most couples co-habitating in areas with a high cost of living have to navigate income disparities, and it’s too simple to say that marrying older or richer is the key to hoisting yourself out of debt.
At the same time, I’m not sure if I romanticize ease any more than I do suffering. The drudgery that Grazie describes of her friend’s same-age relationship: both savagely ambitious, hyperclose and entwined in each other’s projects…too much was happening at the same time: both learning to please a boss; to forge more adult relationships with their families; to pay bills and taxes and hang prints on the wall. Neither had any advice to give and certainly no stability. I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling toward every milestone. In my own store of witnessed relationships between young people, I can see how the pressures of becoming a Person at the same time can lead to a relationship’s end. But I also see an incredible beauty in the spirit of blind fumbling in the face of real, challenging life with another person by your side. I see my own relationship, and I see everyone else’s too. There’s no serious love between people without a struggle to encounter both one other and new things. There’s no relationship that doesn’t run that risk.
My skepticism of Grazie’s “easy life” extends to the way I’ve witnessed other people (and myself) approach dating. Like it’s a game to win—as if the whole thing isn’t just stumbling around in the dark, hoping you won’t get killed. People protect themselves with prefab ideas of maximally-compatible partners, and of course there’s a fine logic in coming up with a list of what one wants and doesn’t want. But I sense people have been so overstuffed with relationship advice media that no room is left for what makes good romance happen. Under the harsh light of scrutiny, a person becomes a composite of green and red flags. There are tallies, calculations. Any sense of natural chemistry is put on the back burner. This is trying to fall in love without any of the falling. There isn’t any risk. Perhaps Grazie’s relationship is so easy to doubt is because she contrived it—although she compares it to winning the lottery in the first paragraph, there’s little sense of rarity. She chose her partner with intention, and she’s here to tell you why you should find your carbon copy. Yeah, right.
I wish “The Case For Marrying An Older Man” was packaged less as direct advice and more as personal anecdote speaking to the complicated life of one individual. I, too, have fallen in love with an older man. My relationship is one of the best things that has ever happened to me, but I would never advise any lonely heart to seek out an AGR. My relationship is not a model worth replicating. No one’s is.
Don’t go seeking out an older partner, but be open to it as you should be any other relationship that doesn’t fit your predetermined ideal. I at least know that my life would be very different—I think very much emptier—if either of us had left that bar in the time it took us to do some basic mental math. ==
loved this a lot. i've (mostly incidentally, except perhaps in my early 20s) been in mostly age-gap relationships, and while i'm not interested in pathologizing myself, i do think there are pros/cons, as in any relationship. sometimes when people discuss age gaps they do so under the assumption that the older partner has financial power to wield, which has never been the case for me, and perhaps that's why i've never felt an imbalance. sorry for the word vom, but this really resonated!