Mind the gap!
Is age really nothing but a number? Dorothy Black shares her experience with The Intern and their age gap.
Image: Getty Images
So, there I was lying in his arms, in that post-coital fuzz that leaves you about as cognisant as a hibernating bear, feeling warm and sexually sated and was just about ready to drift off into an Egyptian-like sleep of the dead, when he opened his mouth.
He opened his mouth and said, 'You know, this is really something else. (Yes, yes it is...) I feel so comfortable with you... (Hmm, yeees...) It’s just that it’s so weird you know (It is? Um. Ok...) It just confuses me… (Say what?) Because you know, it's just that my ex… (Fuck.)
His mouth was still moving, forming words that included ‘work through’, ‘ex-girlfriend’ and ‘problems’, while I scrambled out of his bed frantically rummaging through the covers to find my clothes and get the hell out dodge. Ex issues are my kryptonite.
At the Fat the next night, Bean tossed back the tequila while I whined into my margarita about having to jump ship early. But I wasn’t getting any loving from him. ‘Well you know Dot,’ he reminded me with a raise of the eyebrow, ‘the boy was only 25.’
And yes, there it was.
The Intern (for that is what we will call him) was indeed a very young 25-year-old. Shouldn’t I have expected inexperience to bumble about and mess moments up with bad timing and overshare? Should I have made allowances for it? Was it his age that made him say something stupid or was he just stupid?
It got me thinking about age gaps in relationships. I’m not talking about the potbellied middle-aged men and the dollied up cougars looking to catch some pretty piece of flesh to validate their sexuality, I’m talking about that whole ‘age is just a number’ actual relationship thing.
Most of my girlfriends have played with younger men – in your thirties it’s easy to swing a decade or so either way – but only one has indulged in a long-term relationship with a man seven years her junior. But then, he also has the mind of a 40-year-old.
And that’s maybe the catch – no amount of sex (which younger men generally provide in the buckets loads) can really override life experience.
Unless you’re Bean of course.
Bean’s all for significant age gaps. At 40+ he only dates women in their 20s. He says the appeal is that their minds are still open and that they haven’t yet calcified into products of their past. In his opinion, the less experienced – and therefore 'jaded' – they are in the ways of the world, the better. Whatever. I think it’s because only less experienced girls will put up with his crap. But hey, each to his own.
When I met The Intern I wasn't particularly phased by his age. Over the course of the past few years I've had flings with boys as young 19 and men as old as 50. When they had to run off to math class or run after their kids it never really bothered me.
But then I had to run out on the The Intern, and that bothered me.
You see, he might've been a bit rough around the edges on the pillow talk and that might very well have been due to a lack of experience and his age, but what made me run out was my age and the experience I've gathered up with it.
It was clear that he still had to make the mistakes that I've made many times over. It might only have been a seven-year gap, but in that moment it may as well have been seventy.
Was Bean right I wondered as raced home. Is getting older making me jaded? Or is it just making me smarter?
Bean thinks I should've told The Intern to shut up and get back to work. Maybe I should've. I know there are men and women that somehow make magnificent relationships out of magnificent age differences. Or at least they just enjoy magnificent sex.
I don't think I've suddenly become an ageist. Maybe one day I'll be swept up by a young man with the libido of a beast and the mind of Mr Darcy. But until then I'll be a little more cautious about man boys that wear old sweaters and begin too many of their sentences with 'my mom'.
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