The Truth About Dating a Younger Man After Divorce
It’s 6 a.m. on the last day of Miami Music Week, one of the world’s biggest EDM conferences, and Z and I are still at Factory Town, the after-hours center of it all. We’ve been here since 11 p.m. and the night/morning is a potent cocktail of DJs, elaborate LED screens, and people-watching. The nearly 5,000 attendees wear outfits ranging from spaceman costumes to plain T-shirts to fishnets and thongs. Thanks to the thrift store sweatshirt I’ve just purchased from one of the marketplace vendors, I’m no longer shivering in the late/early air.
I have, however, been yawning since 4 a.m., but Z isn’t ready to leave. Nor does he understand the gripping fear of needing a couple hours of sleep before one or both of your children come hurtling into your bedroom, asking when the big Sephora sale goes live or requesting homemade waffles for breakfast. But then again, I don’t have that worry either—not today, anyway. It’s my ex’s weekend, so Z and I stay to watch the sun rise.
He is seven years younger than me, which isn’t an eternity, but we are in completely different life stages. We are also completely on trend. In case you haven’t heard, age gap relationships are buzzy right now, with an extra fascination towards the almost subversive nature of the older woman/younger man pairing.
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In The Idea of You, the highly anticipated new movie starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine, 40-year-old single mother Soléne meets and starts a romance (at Coachella!) with Hayes Campbell, a gorgeous and wildly famous 24-year-old musician. Infuriatingly, no matter how emphatically Hayes pursues her, Soléne can’t get comfortable with the idea of them together, thinking there’s no way their relationship would last.
As much as I wanted Soléne to hop into bed with Hayes the second he made eye contact with her, I have to admit, she wasn’t all wrong to hold back. My own age-gap coupling with Z is both fiery and, admittedly, doomed. Still, all potential regrets considered, I’m confident I’ll walk away with few to none.
I was once married to an older man (I am his junior by 14 years). We spent 13 years together and had a loving, successful marriage—until we didn’t. And now, thankfully, we have a warm, respectful co-parenting arrangement and close friendship. Our age gap wasn’t a key factor in our demise but, if I’m being honest, it did matter.
The ex and I met when I was 25 and he was 39. He was a successful businessman and I was still nursing hangovers with greasy slices of pizza after long nights out with friends. We fell in love, truly. But being together meant growing up faster than I was ready to. I don’t regret letting go of little pieces of youth before my time, but I have felt their absence over the years, nonetheless. Maybe that’s why, like a child who is deprived of sugar and then left alone at a dessert table, when my marriage ended, I wanted to binge on everything I’d been missing.
But I was a mom. I had responsibilities. Also, my capacity for hangovers had diminished significantly compared to what it was in my 20s. Still, I started dipping my toe into singlehood with girls’ nights out when my ex had the kids. My friends and I would have dinner and drinks, maybe even dance for a bit, and make it home at a wild eleven thirty to midnight. It awakened at least a small part of me that had been lost, but I still wondered if I’d ever be able to date again. That part of my brain had been turned off for so many years. And on top of that, I’d stopped thinking of myself as a sexual being pretty much as soon as I had my first child (Lord knows how I made the second).
I assumed prospective dates would think of me as “too old” with “too much baggage,” or be turned off by my rapidly expiring eggs. But I was wrong. In fact, the thing that really surprised me was that the men who seemed the most interested in me were five to 15 years younger.
It wasn’t just me, either. It seemed like all my newly single, middle-aged girlfriends were either dating or being coveted by the youngins. Was it a weird epidemic of Oedipus complexes? Or maybe it’s just that older women are, as Hayes Campbell puts it, “smart and hot. Or whatever.” Either way, the concept seemed alarmingly foreign to me, especially after more than a decade with an older man. I avoided the trend and started casually dating people my own age instead.
What happened next is embarrassingly cliché. It started with a fantasy—the young, hot guy at my gym with the sparkling eyes and the body of a chiseled god ripped straight from the cover of a ’90s romance novel. Z was fun to look at, but I knew he didn’t see me the same way. We rarely spoke, and when we did, he’d say things like, “Wow, you look so good for your age,” which is more or less what you say to your friend’s mom.
There was no way he was interested in me; I’d convinced myself of it. But I did notice that he was quick to respond to me (privately) on our Fit305 group chat every time I started a new collection for coaches’ gifts (I’m a perpetual room mom, even at the gym). Then he started texting me more and more with an evolution of inside jokes. Eventually, I got it. Some part of me woke up and realized I was still a fully sexual being and that turning 40 didn’t suddenly make me invisible to the opposite sex. Z was into me.
Chances are you’ve read or at least heard about Grazie Sophia Christie’s viral essay, “The Case for Marrying an Older Man.” In the controversial piece, Christie explains that a woman’s worth is fleeting and that it’s therefore wise to capitalize on our youth by securing an older man, because how else would we be able to lead comfortable and fulfilling lives? Women, she theorizes, come equipped with an invisible calculator that we use to determine how much time we have left in some sad balance of youth and beauty against fertility and desirability.
There is a lot of uncomfortable truth to that last point. Being a woman does sometimes feel like a race against the clock. I’m in my 40s, the dreaded decade of transition, but so far the earth hasn’t shattered below my feet. Nor am I worried about continuing to age. I admire older women and still want to be Jennifer Lopez when I grow up. I don’t hate younger women; I don’t envy them, either. Do I sometimes feel a pang of sorrow for my evaporating youth? Yeah. But I wouldn’t turn the clock back if offered the chance.
I don’t resent Christie for her seemingly older-women-phobic opinions. In fact, I understand Christie. As a fellow Miamian who was married to an older man, I used to be her. And now I’m a divorced single mother, navigating life after tradwifery and dating men who are younger than me. The truth is, I’ve never been happier or felt more authentic.
With Z, I set out to have a purely sexual relationship. Because, well, why not? For the first time in decades, I wasn’t paying attention to “the calculator.” I allowed myself to spend time with him simply because it was enjoyable, not because it needed to lead somewhere. I have my career, my kids, my health. Which is to say, everything I need. Any partner coming into my life is a bonus, the proverbial cherry.
Six months later, Z and I are somewhere in the narrow gap between situationship and relationship. In a charming plot twist, the hot gym bro turned out to be more tradwife himself than fuckboy. He cooks for me. He cleans. He looks great doing it. Sometimes, yes. he likes to rave and stay out until the sun comes up. But, most of the time, he’s in bed with me by 9 p.m.
Our coupling, however, can’t last. Z wants to start a family one day, while the best I can give him is a blended one. I know that sounds like an argument against dating a younger man, but it isn’t. As women, we are so programmed to value things that last—to watch the clock, punch the calculator, and hedge our bets in the pursuit of securing the mythical right man before our equally mythical expiration dates—that, in clinging to a false sense of forever, we miss out on so many beautiful moments.
It doesn’t matter that Z and I probably won’t last forever. As Soléne says in one of her more vulnerable moments, “I got swept up in the idea of you and it’s been fun, it really has. But we both knew it had to end.” But for the time being, it works for me—physically, emotionally, and intellectually. I’ll always look back on this time and smile—because it’s been spicy and fun, because he makes me laugh with his ridiculously boyish charm, and because it turns out my love life didn’t meet an unceremonious end with divorce and middle age. My value didn’t disintegrate into a million little undesirable pieces—and my time with Z will always be a reminder of that.
Recently, I’ve been called things like “cougar,” “MILF,” and “sugar mama” (Z, for the record, is a successful lawyer and deeply not in need of sugaring). When I was married to my older husband, I was called names like “child bride” and “gold-digger.” I get it. Society is judgmental, especially when it comes to a woman’s sex life. This is neither groundbreaking nor surprising. As The Idea of You so accurately opined, “People hate happy women.” I didn’t care then and I certainly don’t care now. At the end of the day, I’m going home with who I want, when I want, how I want. Not because I’m trying to make a point or cash in on some imaginary sum of my remaining sexual market value, but because I truly can’t think of one reason not to do as I please.
When I’m with Z, I don’t think about our age difference—except for the occasional moment like this one: We were watching the Super Bowl when the Usher halftime show came on, giving me flashbacks of college frat parties and dancing on tables. As I savored the memories, he turned to me and said, “Wow. This really takes me back to middle school.” Those are the times I realize that, at one time, seven years was a big number. These days, not so much.
I’ll leave you with one final note before I crawl back into my bed with my young lover: If I could change the narrative about middle-aged women, I’d stress that we should define ourselves not by what we’re losing, but by how much we’ve gained. I truly believe that, for coupled and single women alike, these years can be our golden age. The time when we finally put the calculator down and just live our own damn lives.
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