Can a relationship between an older woman and a younger man ever really work? VANESSA FELTZ and JULIE BURCHILL argue the pros and cons

‘I love it when barmaids call him “Darling”’

By Julie Burchill 

I’m not the most wholesome person in the world, so I’ve always been quite keen on the idea of age-gap relationships. When I took up with my husband Daniel around 30 years ago, I was 35 and twice-divorced and he was 23. I never foresaw the ageing process being a problem. Daniel was so reliable and I was so flighty that my (also generally far younger) friends called him ‘Dad’. We were told it wouldn’t last. But I look at the people who said this the loudest, and they’re generally alone, having not found anyone who could put up with them for more than a few years.

In the early days of our relationship, because Daniel looked so young, I was sometimes mistaken for his mother. I found it funny and took a delight in getting him to kiss me in front of the person who had made the error, relishing the look of horror on their faces.

There’s something slightly sleazy about age gaps (both fiscally and physically), be it the young gold-digger rinsing the lecherous tycoon or Mrs Robinson showing the Graduate the ropes. When you see a couple around the same age, you’re less likely to wonder about the sex and money dynamics. They’re more likely to be (triple-ick) ‘partners’, surely the unsexiest word in the English language to describe a sexual relationship. 

That’s not to say that many May-September relationships don’t turn out to be the real thing. Joan Collins is the most famous example; her quip about her husband Percy Gibson (he’s 61 and she’s 93) remains a classic: ‘If he dies, he dies’. Compared to her much shorter marriages to men her own age or older, Ms Collins understandably considers this union her most successful, seeing as they’ve been together since 2000. Like I said, there’s something about such unions that inspires humour. 

So I was dismayed to read that, according to the Office for National Statistics, this jolly trend has ended. Couples now marry a decade later than they did in the 20th century; at the millennium, marriages between a man and a woman in England and Wales were three times as likely between under-25s as over-55s, a pattern now reversed. Despite our population being a whopping quarter larger than it was 50 years ago, half as many marriages take place.

All of this would be bad enough, backing up the general idea that young men and women are scared of taking a chance on love these days. But age-gap romances that added so much to the gaiety of nations appear to be less frequent, too. There’s been an increase in wedded ‘partners’ not more than a year apart, from 9 per cent to 15 per cent. 

The change is the most striking in unions like my third marriage; though older men marrying women at least a decade younger has dropped from 11 per cent to 7.5 per cent in the past 25 years, old ladies getting their liver-spotted paws on young studs has gone from a mere 2.5 per cent to a barely there 1.3 per cent. Interestingly, where couples are of the same sex, 11 per cent of women and 23 per cent of men are in age-gap double digits. Indeed, who hasn’t seen photos of Stephen Fry and Russell T Davies with their much younger partners and thought, ‘Good going, grandad!’?

Sure, marrying someone much older or younger than you involves taking a chance – but doesn’t any marriage? It’s making a promise that might well not be within the powers of one or both pledgers to stick to, and considering that 42 per cent of marriages in this country currently end in divorce, it’s not a solid-gold certainty.

But then, the stats for the staying-power of cohabiters are even worse (and, for the final time, there’s no such thing as a ‘common law marriage’. It just means you’re with a person who is waiting for someone better to come along).

Until Christmas week of 2024 – coming up to the 30th anniversary of our alliance – we had a great time. Then I was diagnosed with a spinal abscess and had emergency surgery. I emerged in a wheelchair without the use of my legs.

Now it’s as if old age has happened in fast-forward: I’m more like a 76-year-old than a 67-year-old. I was going to say that I look like his grandma as he pushes me along the street, but his grandma was a woman of great elegance who actually looked quite a bit younger than me at my age.

Everything I thought would make us the exception to age-gap relationships (‘It’s fine now, but what about when you’re in your 70s and he’s still in his 50s?’) has been turned on its head. I don’t need much help, but what I do, he gives me. Whereas once we were sex fiends, I now look at him with almost maternal pride. I’m not the jealous kind; I love it when barmaids call him ‘Darling’. ‘Take off your coat – show everyone your lovely big shoulders!’ I encourage him in public.

It must be odd having your wife talk to you like an expert on a reality TV dating show, but if Daniel was to meet someone and want another go at the relationship game in his 50s, I’d be honour-bound to engage a professional carer and bow out gracefully.

We had nearly three decades of fun; we still have a laugh, and I’ve still got a fairly strong man to help me in and out of the bathtub. Imagine if I’d married someone of my own age: could they haul me around the way Daniel does? Whatever the latest dreary trend in marriages, I’m glad I made the choice I did all those decades ago.

‘I was a mere 44, but made to feel like a crumbling Roman ruin’ 

By Vanessa Feltz

Freud was right: it’s a mummy and daddy thing. If your chap is older, he’s your dad. If your bloke is younger, whether you want to admit it or not, you are his mummy. Just like Oedipus’s ma Jocasta, you are the mum with whom he has spirited sex and we all – Google it if you’ve forgotten – know how badly that turned out.

You can kid yourself you are a hot piece, the quintessence of spring-chickenhood, and that this throbbing hunk of youthful testosterone fancies you because you are simply irresistible, but that delusion doesn’t last. Frighteningly soon your favourite phrases ‘age is just a number’ and ‘he’s so mature, we both feel as if he’s older’ wither on your tongue.

Youth is currency. Everyone craves it, loves it, gravitates towards it. He has never heard of Tony Bennett, Samuel Beckett or the long hot summer of 1976, can’t drive or deadhead a petunia, but he oozes youth. You don’t. You can’t, however frenetically you moisturise. Even a tiny ten-year age gap makes him the winner and you the loser. Technically, he may be the plus-one, tagging along to the Baftas on your invitation, but it doesn’t matter. Rocking up the red carpet in your slipstream, tight trousers signalling strong swimmers, he is the main event. His juvenescence trumps your experience every time and, boy, doesn’t he know it.

Let me give it to you straight. Couples in age-gap relationships who claim they ‘never think about age’ are liars. They think of almost nothing else. Wave goodbye to the honeymoon period and the gap gapes into a yawning chasm. I was a mere 44 – just eight years senior to blushing bride Taylor Swift – when I embarked on my last ill-fated foray. He was ten years younger. I was made to feel like a crumbling Roman ruin. 

He casually wondered if my antique ovaries might perhaps spark up? I’d last given birth 17 years earlier. My eggs had run out of va-va-voom. Oh no! There’s nothing like past-their-sell-by-date reproductive organs, echoingly empty fallopian tubes, pointless womb, to put a woman on the back foot. It doesn’t matter that your swain lacks the wherewithal to buy a child a Cornetto, let alone keep a son and heir in shoes and trainers. It doesn’t signify that he has not a single paternal bone in his body and uses potential fatherhood solely as a taunt to remind you of your antiquity. Although your age is all over Wikipedia, and you’ve never fudged it and have banged on about being a 1962 baby for ever, somehow it is now shaming and all your fault.

Remember when divine Demi Moore, at 40, began dating and then married Ashton Kutcher, 25? Tabloids brimmed with lurid revelations about the plastic surgery she’d endured. Demi spent an estimated £200,000 plus on breast implants, liposuction and ‘a specialised procedure to lift the skin on her knees’. Ouch! One of the most beautiful women in the world, having herself chopped up and stitched together like a patchwork quilt to stave off the ravages of time? I got it but I didn’t fancy doing it.

I diligently paralysed my forehead with Botox and had my greying roots rendered gloriously golden every three weeks, but I wasn’t prepared to cut and paste boobs, butt or boat race.

It’s supposed to be such a privilege to bask in the pheromones of a younger man, so no one dares give the raw nitty-gritty. It’s a big fat bore being ‘mummy’ to a hulking great adult – especially when you have children and, in my case, four sumptuous grandchildren brilliantly satisfying your maternal urges. Explaining proportional representation/the significance of Nigel Lawson/how to work the toaster/the lyrics to Greased Lightnin’ is draining. Likewise listening to yet another treatise on 1990s boy bands or paying his phone bill. We took to arriving at the cinema à deux, watching separate films and reuniting resentfully in the car park afterwards.

Does sex with a stripling live up to the hype? I am too ladylike to give chapter or verse. I do confirm youthful vigour is a definite plus – but it isn’t everything. Let’s not overlook the impact of on-demand porn on junior generations. It’s impossible to be unaffected by free access to gruesome faux-ecstatic fakery. I’ll fling in the words: performative, repetitive and anti-intimate. Romance? Poetry? Flickering candles. Shades of D H Lawrence? Forget about it.

Menopause: your lashes drip. Your elbows are aflame. You take your cardigan on and off 36 times in a one-hour radio broadcast. Your brain thuds with fug. Your sheets are fire and ice. Sleep is a mirage. Inexplicable anxiety upends your equilibrium. Now imagine pretending, to your own partner in your own home, that you are fine, dandy and fizzing with frolicsome enthusiasm. You can’t admit you want to stand in the freezer with the fish fingers. You can’t let on that you are knackered and wretched. You are scared he’ll brand you a decaying dinosaur, write you off and head for the hills. When you can’t relax and lean in authentically to your own f**king menopause, life is torture. After all that, my (not too) Bright Young Thing cheated so ferociously I had to throw him out three years ago. None of that ‘Menopause? What menopause?’ stuff was worth the effort.

If a younger fellow bobs up alluringly, relish the romp but, by all that’s holy, do not, I repeat NOT give the juvenile the door key.