Pop culture has arguably put age gap relationships on the map (think The Idea of You and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande).
The most recent example of this taboo story line is Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman’s A Family Affair on Netflix, which sees her character struggle with the judgement around being much older than her younger movie star love interest.
But, there’s still a lot of stigma surrounding these types of relationships – especially when the older person in the couple is a woman.
This is something 72-year-old Lis McDermott knows all too well.
At the age of 41, Lis met Conrad McDermott (who was 28 at the time) at a soul club in Cheltenham. She was out with a girlfriend who was also 10 years younger when she noticed him from across the dancefloor.
Having recently gotten divorced, Lis wasn’t necessarily looking for anything serious – and little did she know then that the handsome stranger would become her life partner of over 30 years.
‘I said to my friend, “Oh, he’s cute”. Then I went to the toilet and came back. I wasn’t aware, but she knew the guy he was with and she’d gone over and told him,’ she tells Metro.co.uk.
‘It was like we were all teenagers. It was ridiculous, really, but Conrad came over and said, “your girlfriend said you fancied me”.’
The pair shared a dance and then he disappeared. ‘I thought, “okay, he thinks I’m too old”,’ Lis adds.
At the end of the night, she came across him again at the bar. She took a chance and asked him for his name (a detail they hadn’t covered in their previous exchange), before he asked for her number in return.
Conrad, now 60, rang her the next day and, after a year of dating, he moved from Birmingham to Cheltenham to live with Lis.
For the next nine years, Lis worked as a school music advisor and Conrad worked renting cars, until one day they decided to take the next step.
‘He kept joking saying “I’ll marry you on your birthday”, and I brushed it off because he never wanted to get married,’ Lis says.
‘He said “you organise it and I’ll be there”. We got married on my 50th birthday… He’s not a romantic soul really.’
Their happy story hasn’t come without its fair share of judgement from others though, with age gap relationships always attracting unsolicited opinions.
‘People always expect the man to be older, but we met when he was 28 and I was 41. When we were first together, people would say “Oh, he’s a bit young”.
‘They just couldn’t see what we had in common. And I mean, we are just soulmates. We just hit it off straight away, and we just we listen to the same music, we make each other laugh.’
Lis’ mother probed the pair, commenting ‘what will people say?’
She also wanted someone who could ‘take care’ of Lis financially. ‘She said “How’s he going to look after you?”
‘My comment was “why does he need to look after me? I earn a good wage, so why should I need a man to look after me in that sense?”‘
‘My closest friends all think he’s wonderful; they didn’t bat an eye. But we still get stared at when we’re out – I wonder if they’re just looking at me thinking, “Well, what’s that old bird doing with that young lad?”, because he does look younger even now.’
For Lis, though, none of this matters. While she may be 12 years older, she ‘certainly doesn’t act it’.
‘We’re both really stupid, we make each other laugh, we do silly things,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I actually look 72 – I think most people would put me perhaps in my sort of mid- to early-to-mid-60s. But the trouble is that a lot of people think he’s a lot younger than he is.’
What’s most important to Lis is that Conrad doesn’t think she looks old. ‘I get worried people think “you shouldn’t be wearing that”, but Conrad will say to me, “you look fab, and you look great” – he doesn’t think I look old.’
He also supports her work as an author, and it’s paid off because Lis has just published her second novel, Echoes of Drowning.
Lis also notes how different Conrad is to her first husband, whom she was with for 18 years.
The pair got married at 22 after meeting at an end of year party at Manchester University in 1974.
‘My ex was an engineer. He’d been to university, but I couldn’t take him anywhere new because he just would cling on to me and he couldn’t talk to people,’ she recalls.
‘Whereas Conrad, the pair of us love people and we enjoy going out and meeting them.’
Lis’ first marriage ended because she and her ex-husband ‘grew apart’. ‘We were friends and that was all it was – I wasn’t in love with him anymore,’ she says.
‘I found myself being attracted to somebody else and I thought, well, if I’m really happy, I shouldn’t be feeling this, so I decided I wanted to be out of the relationship.’
Despite the 12-year age gap with Conrad, however, the romance is still very much alive 31 years later.
‘He’s recently made me a playlist for my car and it’s great. When he’s in the car with me I sing along to the instruments, I sing the parts, I sing everything, because I’ve trained as a musician,’ she says.
‘He’s always killing himself laughing because I’m singing all these extra bits… We just make each other laugh.’
The pair even renewed their vows in 2022 on their 20th wedding anniversary and they’re happier than ever.
For those who judge age gap relationships, Lis says this: ‘It doesn’t have to be a big thing. You love who you love. You love that person.
‘You don’t tend to look at them and think “they’re “I’m going to be old in a few years.”
‘We’ve had 31 years of great fun; we’ve been abroad a lot together, we’ve been to places, we’ve done things. You just do what everybody else does.
‘I just think go for it. Providing they’re an adult, if somebody younger asks you out; do it. Why not?’
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