‘I was the younger woman, then I was the older one. Does that make me a creep?!’

My ex-husband was almost a decade older than me and I joked he would never need to trade me in for a younger woman, because to him, I would always be one.

On one of my favourite podcasts, the entire premise is that the host unpicks Reddit stories along with two or three guests. And it is brilliant. If you’ve not heard of Reddit, it is described as a social news website and forum where content is socially curated and promoted by site members through voting. The site name is a play on the words "I read it."

There are different sections on the Reddit site where users can post comments, start conversations and ask questions of the community. Most of the content discussed on aforementioned favourite podcast comes from a section called, AITA (Am I The Asshole) and honestly, the things people get up to are wild!

However, I’m not here to advertise for this podcast so to get to my point, on a recent episode they were discussing a relationship story that features a woman in her early 20s and a man in his mid to late 30s. The host was saying with a lot of the Reddit stories he sees a pattern with the men in their 30s dating younger women showing controlling behaviour. He also commented that this age gap seems particularly common atm and referenced an apparently trending Tweet that said something like, ‘Dudes in their 30s love films so much they date A 24 year old.’ Lol. (For context, A24 is a small but popular film studio with Oscar wins.)

This made me laugh and the 33-year-old guy in the story they went on to discuss, was proven to be cheating on his 24-year-old wife with a 20-year-old college student which no one on the podcast was on board with – both the adultery and a man in his 30s sleeping with a teenager.

While listening, something bugged me about the ages of the main characters in the story and then I realised that they are the same ages my now ex-husband and I were, when we first started dating. I was 24, a year out of a heartbreak and he was 33, and also not super long out of a relationship (not, as much as I could see, so heartbroken). I was the younger woman. Is that weird? I admit, at first when he showed interest it wasn’t reciprocated but it wasn’t because I was bothered about his age. We live in a society where men date younger women all the time almost as an expectation. Is it coz women live longer than men? Not sure.

Up until then I had never been with anyone more than a couple of year’s difference in age and they were always older. (Actually this isn’t quite true. My boyfriend at uni was definitely in 20s when I was 18 but he was evasive about exactly how old he was so who knows…) I recently heard a scientist on a podcast say that our brains aren’t even fully developed until 24/25 years old so in retrospect it does feel a little odd however, I never felt gross about it and we actually didn’t get married until I was 26 and I felt ready.

But this got me thinking, are relationship age gaps like that healthy? What does a man in his 30s have in common with a woman in her early 20s? And more importantly for me, for selfish reasons you will see later on in this post, why don’t we accept this the other way around?

Recently we published an opinion post on the platform I edit (womanalive.co.uk) about whether age-gap relationships where the woman is older than the man, is the solution to the lack of men in the Church. And here are some examples in the public eye:

·         Model Sienna Miller is fourteen years older than her partner Oli Green (and here is a spectacular photo of her pregnant during LFW last Sept)

·         Actor Priyanka Chopra is ten years older than her husband Nick Jonas

·         Director Sam Taylor-Johnson and her younger husband Aaron have an age difference of 23 years.

What do we think about this? Is it weird or is it time women stop being given the far from complimentary label of cougar while men get called silver foxes? Also, not to get into a battle of the genders or anything but in a war of the jungle, cougars trump foxes every time.

My first partner after my ex and I divorced was four years younger than me and even that was troubling for me. But he was super fit, super confident and had no qualms about the age difference.

My ‘Young Stag’

Fast forward to my most recent partner, when I found out he was TEN YEARS younger than me, I was aghast. He wasn’t. My friends told me to calm down. Lol. And actually though it ended, it was one of the best relationships I’ve been in and he mostly treated me like the queen I undoubtedly am. There’s also an interesting thing about younger men being more conscious of the crap women face, more emotionally intelligent and more sensitive to our needs. Tick, tick, tick. My ex-boyfriend and I are technically in the same generation and have similar pop culture references although it will never stop being wild to me that my ex-husband and ex-boyfriend were born 20 years apart.

So my cougar experience hasn’t put me off younger men although I do stand by the half your age plus seven rule. But I’m curious, what’s your experience in this area of dating? Is it creepy? Oh my gosh, am I a CREEP??*

Tola x

I’m  the editor and creative director at Premier Woman Alive and co-host of the YouTube show Sisterhood. In 2019, I delivered a TEDx Talk on Debunking the Myth of Success and my first book, 'Still Standing:100 Lessons From An 'Unsuccessful' Life' (SPCK) is out now.

*I will ask him but I’m pretty sure he won’t get the TLC reference which does kinda make me sad.