The age thing definitely freaks people out. Like, relationships are hard enough without your friends warning that your younger boyfriend is “using you.” Chelsea recalled, “In my previous relationship, when I had to tell my parents that I was dating someone nearly 30 years older than me, that was obviously stressful. Age-gap relationships come with a certain amount of stigma, and that external skepticism can start to infiltrate your couple. Often younger people have less queer trauma.”Īnd then you have to deal with all the haters. If you’re in your 50s, you remember all your friends dying of AIDS. If you’re a gay person in your 20s, Ellen was out for your whole life. “Sometimes I definitely feel old, like when my girlfriend says, ‘Who’s Fiona Apple?’ And for queer people specifically, the difference in dating people of different generations is huge, because we’ve had drastically different experiences of growing up. She also keeps me in the know about who the new cool rapper or cool model is, which I no longer have the energy to figure out by myself.”īut then sometimes an age gap can make you feel like you’re from different planets. When you date someone from a generation that doesn’t remember dial-up, they just fix all of that Internet stuff for you. “One thing that’s cool about dating someone younger is that I don’t have to deal with, like, DVRs and shit.
“Everyone thinks that some sort of power imbalance in a relationship is hot, even if they don’t admit it,” Chelsea said. I wonder: What do we gain and lose from dating someone of a different generation?īut Chelsea says there are benefits to a generational gap. And while sharing parallel life experiences with someone has its clear comforts, it’s not exactly jerk-off material. In an age-gap relationship, you’re trading in different currencies, but each holds its own value. But there’s also an undeniable eroticism to youth (duh), hence why the schoolgirl/boy gets its own chapter in the book of pervy cliches. And yet, it’s not an accident that the teacher is a sexual archetype: Power, and the transmission of knowledge, are inherently erotic. People raise their eyebrows at relationships with a significant age gap: If you’re the older guy, you’re creepy and exploitative if you’re the older woman, you’re both of those things plus delusional about your shelf life. The Older Man was also my editor, which added a power imbalance to the mix-a dynamic we all know can be equal parts problematic and irresistible.
Before the Older Man, I’d never been in a relationship with someone of a significantly different age-older or younger-but I had spent my adolescence fantasizing about my teachers bending me over my lab station, so in a way this felt long overdue. When I was 25, I spent a year dating a man 20 years older than me.
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