“She’s 26, tall, blonde, and gorgeous” is something I tapped into my Notes app about four years ago. I was talking about the girlfriend of a man I’d recently started sleeping with. In his mid-40s, he was older than us both. But at 22, I still had a (youthful) leg up on his girlfriend—the kind of woman with the looks and career I could only dream of (yes, I had done some Instagram snooping). “Of course,” I continued, typing away to no one as the subway screeched out of Astoria, “22 will always be younger than 26.”
According to my records, I am now 26. I am not tall, blonde, nor particularly gorgeous, although I like to think I grew into myself better than anyone who knew me in high school could have predicted.
From what I’ve gathered since my birthday in March, being 26 means a few things: It means I am officially past my last Leo year—that much-memed window of time during a woman’s early 20s when Leonardo DiCaprio would, theoretically, consider adding her name to the running gag that has become his dating history. It means I am old enough to have some friends my age who are married and expecting their first children in suburban towns not far from where we grew up and young enough to have others blacking out with me at bottomless brunch and stumbling home to roommate-laden apartments in the city. It means I am old enough for those friends to politely protest when I float the idea of Botox over mimosas—not because they can’t see the fine lines around my eyes graduating into full-fledged wrinkles, but because if I’m aging, then they are too. It means I am old enough to wonder when the tall, blonde woman’s now-fiancé said, “You look different,” outside the elevator in a discreet downtown hotel a few weeks ago if what he meant was, “You look older.”
That man was not the first nor the last significantly older guy with whom I’ve been romantically and/or sexually entangled. One thing anyone who knows me understands and is tired of hearing about is that I date up in age—although just how high I feel the need to go has shifted over time. When I was 21, a mere 16 years felt delightfully eyebrow-raising. One of the men I’m sleeping with these days was 30 when I first dropped anchor outside my mother’s womb. My age gaps have age gaps now.
One thing people who know me less well and who are less tired of hearing about this predilection of mine want to understand is why—why the older guy thing? I give different people different answers, but they are all true or part of a larger truth: Where there are power imbalances, there is power to harness—if you’re smart enough or desperate enough to buy in.
When the older men themselves ask, I know they are fishing for compliments—for reassurance that they are, in fact, still desirable to young women like me, and I give it to them. Because despite the societal cocktail of ageism and sexism that renders women invisible after age 40 while their male friends are just hitting their salt-and-pepper prime, men too are self-conscious about aging. It just takes them longer to get there. So I give them the more flattering reasons, the ones middle-aged men want to hear from the 20something woman sitting across from them in a Midtown restaurant.
These include the obvious: I like older men because they have better jobs, better homes, and, generally, better manners. Unlike the men of my generation, their fathers make actual plans to take you on actual dates. They also pay for those dates, and some of them might even call you an Uber home after. Men of a certain age love feeling superior to those of younger generations—even the ones they themselves raised.
Then there’s the simple fact that I like older men because I do. Call it a kink, call it a type, chalk it up to the often untraceable and unseen forces that influence the unique thumbprint of our sexual preferences. Either way, no one should have let me read Jane Eyre at such a young age.
Age gaps also present one thing to which I am perhaps unflatteringly drawn: the illicit. You don’t need me to tell you that age-gap relationships are, shall we say, divisive, particularly in our current cultural climate. This gives them a taboo quality that I, arguably self-destructive contrarian that I am, simply can’t help myself around. My willingness to admit this to the man across the table, to play both the temptress and the tempted, is as useful for these men as it is titillating. Establishing myself as a willing participant in the perceived power imbalance of Older Man, Younger Woman—a player who is not only aware of my position but who actually gets off on it—conveniently absolves these men of the bulk of the accusations they might face. If this dynamic is the reason I’m here, how can I possibly be exploited? If anything, I’m the one leveraging it to my own advantage—for now, anyway.
Then, of course, there’s the thing women are warned about (read: are told to put up with) as early as elementary school: “Girls mature faster than boys.” As children and teens desperately waiting for our male classmates to grow into the romantic partners of our adolescent fantasies, we assume they’ll catch up eventually. Spoiler alert: They won’t. Per my calculations, there’s about a 10-year maturity gap between most adult men and women. Women who were regularly called “wise beyond your years” (a euphemism for “reads a lot, is depressed”), “mature for your age” (hit puberty early), or “an old soul” (socially awkward), you should all go ahead and add another decade or two if you’re looking for a romantic partner of the male variety who will even begin to resemble an emotional or intellectual match.
If this sounds like something men would be offended by, think again. Older men who date younger women love to remind us that they “feel younger” than they are, that they’re practically a 20-year-old trapped in a 50-year-old’s body. Trust me, gentlemen, we’re aware.
These explanations I give to the middle-aged man who takes me to dinner and wants to know what someone like me sees in someone like him are true, but they’re not the whole truth. There’s another reason I date these men, one I don’t usually tell them about: I date them because I’m scared. My attraction to them is, in part—as so many of the desires and behaviors we accept and even parade as inherent to our personalities are, on some level—a defense mechanism.
Because for all our progress, for all the rights women have won and spaces we’ve taken up, the uncomfortable truth remains that in the eyes of society, we age faster than men and are punished for doing so. While we barrel toward obscurity, our decline gaining speed with each passing year, our male counterparts gracefully cruise into middle age where society hands them the keys to a sports car. As a 35-year-old friend of mine who I occasionally fuck recently joked, lying naked together in his bed: “In 10 years, I’ll be younger than you are.” I laughed along, because he wasn’t wrong and there wasn’t anything else I could do about it.
That’s the thing—there’s not much we, as women, can do about any of this. We can ignore it, we can joke about it, we can rail against it. I’ve chosen to play into it—to milk the shit out of the few scraps of privilege and power society briefly throws women’s way before it weaponizes them against us. It’s a bullshit dynamic, a game I’m not going to win. But it’s my bullshit dynamic, my horrifying patriarchal hellscape, and I’ll leverage it to my advantage if I want to—even if that means I’m complicit in perpetuating it.
Because honestly, it’s a distraction from aging as much as it is a reminder. Dating someone twice your age or more can’t help but exaggerate your youth, however rapidly it might be fading. Like the eye creams I desperately slather on my increasingly less-fine lines, it can’t actually reverse time, its efficacy is dubious at best, and it comes at a price. But I’m convinced I need to pay up.
I tell myself that if I date older men now, if I maximize the power of my youth while I have it, I can somehow ward off aging altogether…or at least take some of the sting out of it when it inevitably catches up to me. Maybe I won’t turn into the women in their 40s and 50s who look sideways at me and question whether my relationships with their male friends, coworkers, brothers, and ex-husbands are really “appropriate.” Maybe I can at least avoid becoming bitter.
I try to explain this to a 40something man who slid into my DMs a few months ago. He had recently read another article I’d written on this topic and wanted to ask me some questions about it. (This is a euphemism for “I hear you like older guys and I want to have sex with you.”) He tells me his female peers haven’t taken too kindly to his post-divorce foray into the 20something dating pool.
I tell him I can’t blame them—that there’s always been an extent to which my own adventures in age-gap dating have been driven by a fear of becoming those very women, by a desire to exercise the power of my youth while I still have it in the hopes of assuaging some of that middle-aged jealousy and resentment when my time comes. Maybe if I know that I made the most of what I had while I had it, it won’t hurt so much when it’s gone.
“Haha. Trust me,” he writes. “It doesn’t work that way.”
I assure him that I do, in fact, know this. That I’ve always known this. What I don’t tell him is that I’m already becoming these women, that I’ve already caught myself quietly congratulating men on dating apps who have their age range set above 25. And for what, exactly? For arbitrarily drawing a line between “young enough” and “too young”? For doing what I mocked those men for in my own Tinder bio four years ago: The last 22-year-old you’ll fuck before you decide to settle down and get serious with a mature, sophisticated 26-year-old.
Back then, when I was running my mouth about my illicit lover’s 26-year-old girlfriend, I was arrogant and insecure, yes, but I wasn’t stupid. I was under no illusion that I would be 22 forever. The reason I clung so hard, so viciously, so fearfully to my relative youth, to those four years I “had on her,” was because I was all too terrifyingly aware that one day, not so very long from then at all, I would be her. After all, you are only on one side of 25 until you are on the other.
Kayla Kibbe (she/her) is the Associate Sex and Relationships Editor at Cosmopolitan US, where she covers all things sex, love, dating and relationships. She lives in Astoria, Queens and probably won’t stop talking about how great it is if you bring it up. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
