As an incorrigibly online 42-year-old woman, I have always known that the day would come when I would find myself out of touch with the youth. Even though I consider myself “hip to the jive”, I’ve always anticipated that one day I won’t understand a reference, and my finger bones will simply be too tired to look it up. That I’ll have an interaction with a teen and they will say a word I’ve never heard before, or use it in the wrong context, and it will confuse and startle me, like an elderly horse. It is natural and correct. We all age and need to triage our energy into other things, like getting through the days.
What I didn’t expect, in the year 2025, was to be at odds with many young people on subjects associated with sex and dating. Generally I consider this a “none of my business” area, like maths and the internal lives of men, and am very happy to be blissfully ignorant of whatever the youth are up to inside the bedroom. However, I keep encountering their commentary surrounding Problematic Age Gaps (PAGs).
There has been discourse around PAGs forever, but these aren’t your PAGs of yore, where a 60-year-old man is called out for marrying a 20-year-old. It seems like there’s been a recent shift from judgment and concern about age-gap relationships where there is a clear power imbalance, to judgment and concern about any kind of age gap.
A recent example was the many comments in TikTok and Reddit threads about the US pop star JoJo Siwa’s new relationship with the Sydney influencer and actor Kath Ebbs. Siwa is a 21-year-old woman in a queer relationship with a person who is 27 years old. I’ve seen comments that there’s “something off” about this, that it’s “really weird”. I posted that I thought everyone should calm down a bit about the age gap in this situation, and I was called a predator for supporting it. Please, I don’t have enough energy to predate anyone!
Admittedly I am the Problematic part in my own PAG, as I am 42 and in a relationship with a 32-year-old – but we are in similar life stages, and she finds it offensive that people might think someone like me (a buffoon) could mind control her into a healthy relationship. The main time the age gap arises as an issue is when she laughs at me for having done “secretarial studies” in high school (fair).
Not only are Siwa and Ebbs both in their 20s, not only is it a queer relationship, but this is a situation where the power dynamic is not all age-based, with Siwa having been wealthy and famous basically from birth. It seems that these sorts of factors are being dismissed, and some young people are finding it inherently problematic for two people with any sort of age gap to date – while also being more open about gender and sexuality than any generation before. One viral tweet proclaims that “at 25, I wouldn’t even date a 21 year old”.
Some of this is understandable. Young people today have grown up in a world obsessed with pitting different generations against one another. Of course there’s also the inevitable swing away from what came in the generation before. Many of these young people are wary of oversexualisation, exploitation, or sex scenes in movies. They feel a need to protect themselves, and each other, which I get and totally respect – I just think they have swung too far the other way, like rebounding to someone who is the complete opposite of your ex, when the real solution is someone normal in the middle. It’s become too black and white, and the power dynamic aspect, along with any nuance at all, has been tossed out in favour of a strict age-difference cutoff and a big stamp that says SICKOS.
Being in an age-gap relationship myself doesn’t mean that I am automatically going to defend all age-gap relationships. I still find it gross when men have a pattern of only dating young women. I think many of them are hacks who want to date 21-year-olds because 35-year-old women know too much about men. I don’t think teenagers should be with 30-year-olds. But these situations are just not the same as two queer people in their 20s dating. It’s not the same as 50-year-old Sarah Paulson dating 82-year-old Holland Taylor, something else I’ve also seen called strange and problematic. If everything is otherwise normal, I think when you are old enough to have had several significant relationships and be facing menopause, you can date Holland Taylor.
The issue is that the nuances of each situation don’t seem to matter any more; we are trending towards having the same arbitrary rule applied across all relationships, ranging from “half your age, plus seven” to “any age gap is wrong”. You can’t tell if a relationship is inherently wrong just by applying a number. I don’t mean we shouldn’t cast a critical eye over relationships. I don’t condone men using this sentiment to justify being creepy losers. But I do mean more nuance should be applied to situations where two fully grown adults are consenting and healthy and happy.
Most importantly, accusations of grooming and predation should not be levelled willy-nilly. Accusing every relationship with a five-year age gap of being problematic, or involving grooming, heavily diminishes the very real and very common practices of abusers. It dilutes the concept, it fuzzies the borders of what we are looking out for, and it makes the real baddies harder to identify.
I am not rousing on young people, nor do I think they are foolish. I think they are trying to protect themselves and each other. I understand the impulse, I just think it could be deployed with more care and thought. I may be a startled elderly lesbian horse with a PAG, but we are ultimately on the same side.
