Larry Fitzmaurice on X: Found out about the age gap essay / X


Despite the unpopular nature of our relationship, the age gap strengthens our bond. I help keep Collin young and remind him to “play hard,” and he has more lived experience that can help me navigate my late 20s. While I lean into his wisdom, he never tries to “parent” me. We align on the things that matter, like commitment, love, service and faith.


Whta is more, there are other considerations as well, such as siblings who may feel jealous nad evoke a nagging feeling on the new baby and the rest of the family.

As I said before, a wide age gap becomes an obstacle when talking about couples.

If it is an 18 year old and a 14 year old freshman this age gap is completely unacceptable but if it is a 17 year old senior and a 15 year old freshman the age gap can be more tolerable.

That Viral Essay Wasnt About Age Gaps. It Was About Marrying Rich.

We try to put it off, but it will hit us at some point: that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone. A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her. I think back to the women in the bathroom, my husband’s classmates. What was my relationship if not an inconvertible sign of this unfairness? What was I doing, in marrying older, if not endorsing it? I had taken advantage of their disadvantage. I had preempted my own. After all, principled women are meant to defy unfairness, to show some integrity or denial, not plan around it, like I had. These were driven women, successful, beautiful, capable. I merely possessed the one thing they had already lost. In getting ahead of the problem, had I pushed them down? If I hadn’t, would it really have made any difference?

Couples who have a wide age gap between them will not stand the test of time.

To start with, there are different stages in life and each stage is usually accompanied by a goal or objective.

There are a few things I think contribute to the success of our relationship, despite being almost two decades apart. For starters, we began our relationship by being brutally honest. Three days into texting, I got a message from Collin that said he was only looking for marriage and never wanted kids. While we were in alignment on those things, I was surprised by his openness, and it paved the way for me to be transparent, too. I wrote back that I wasn’t about to move to Idaho.

Many things can be true at once. An age-gap couple can have a perfectly normal, happy, healthy dynamic or a predatory, imbalanced one. Some older men groom younger women. Our relationships can reflect any of these realities, and so can celebrity ones. But when we exclusively use celebrity relationships to frame the rest, we don’t get very far because we live according to an entirely different framework. Waterhouse and Cooper tell us nothing about how age gaps play out in real life. When we use celebrity relationships as a lens through which to view our own, things will never look quite right.


Theres a reason this piece about age-gap relationships went viral

I chose my fiancé, Collin, on purpose — not because of resources or networks, but because I fell in love with him. And despite the perception that age-gap couples have more trouble relating to one another, we actually have a great deal in common.

Not for nothing, but the 4 year age gap is honestly perfect

Waterhouse is entitled to whatever ill feelings she may or may not have toward Cooper—but we have no idea if she even has those feelings. In interviews, she mentioned looking back on a relationship and realizing it was unhealthy and even toxic, but she never explicitly talked about Cooper. Ultimately, he has little to do with this narrative at all. I don’t know what he’s like, and I have no interest in taking it upon myself to defend him. All I can say is that Cooper is like the weird older boyfriend you or your friend had in your late teens or early 20s. Cooper is not at all a parallel to the 20-year-old I “dated” at 15. Why? Because Bradley Cooper is fucking famous. And famous people, as much as they’d like to create an image of normalcy, do not abide by the same interpersonal rules and norms as the rest of us.

34K subscribers in the AgeGapRelationship community

Many people believe there is at least in these relationships, sometimes calling them “predatory.” And because equality is highly valued by current younger generations, age-gap relationships could become even more taboo in the future.

Why is Gen Z so critical of age gap relationships? - EL PAÍS English

For anyone, dating can signal status, be it wealth or beauty or other forms of power. This is particularly true for celebrities, whose relationships are often deeply entwined with their public image. There are dynamics at play that will never be relatable to most of us. It’s in drawing comparisons between our relationships and those of celebrities that we run into trouble: we assume that someone like Bradley Cooper is as much of a creepy scrub as some guy who can’t find a woman his age to date, or we compare our relationships to those of age gap couples when the status markers just aren’t the same. In both cases, we don’t have an accurate reflection of reality.

Stop Using Celebrities to Talk About Age Gap Relationships - VICE

Some people argue that it’s power and not age that divides the seas on age-gap relationships. Recent movements related to social justice and gender equality like have, rightfully so, brought about an increased scrutiny of power dynamics.