Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart. Beyoncé and Jay Z. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. These are just a few of the A-list celebrities who have an age gap of over a decade, and they’re some of the most beloved and respected couples in Hollywood. Their unions are living proof that—when it comes to love—age really is just a number.
So read on to find out what these couples—and others with a major age difference—know about love that the rest of us don’t.
A 2006 study found that “people generally disapprove of relationships in which one partner is significantly older than the other” and that this social disapproval does have a negative impact on the relationship. However, it also found that “marginalized partners appear to compensate for investment deficits by perceiving the quality of alternatives to their current relationships as poor, thus bolstering commitment to their current partners.”
Which means that while knowing your friends and family are judging you undoubtedly takes a toll on things, once you consider what life could be like with someone else, your marriage gets even stronger.
We’ve all met people who are in their 50s but who seem to be no different from the 23-year-old you grab brunch with on the weekends. We’ve also all met people who are in their 20s who seem to have been born reading on an arm chair in a smoking jacket. When it comes to a marriage that has a large age gap, your mental age can often therefore be more important than what decade you were born in. “I have seen couples with significant age differences bridge that gap,” relationship expert Rachel A. Sussman told Insider. ” [I] think it works well when the younger partner is very mature for his/her age, and the older partner is playful and perhaps a bit immature.”
“I’m 42, she’s 22,” one user wrote on Reddit. “She’s rather mature for her age. We have very few problems or disagreements. We’ve been together for 3 years and I just recently proposed to her. It wouldn’t work out if she wasn’t so mature already. And no, it has nothing to do with a midlife crisis. I’ve never been happier in a relationship.”
Research has found that the age gap between a 20-year-old and a 40-year-old can cause more issues than the gap between, say, a 50-year-old and a 70-year-old. The theory is that this is due to the vast gulf in life stages among the former group. If one person still wants to go out all the time and the other is in a phase of life where he or she wants to spend more time at home, this can cause problems. Those potential issues diminish with age, however.
In a Reddit thread on couples with major age differences, one user wrote of her husband, 12 years her senior, “There’s really not much of a difference. Other than the fact that he’s way more mature than anyone else I’ve dated. Only thing that’s weird is when we think about how he was 20 while I was 8.” When I was 24, I dated a 34-year-old, and it was all well and good until we realized he was 18 when he saw Titanic and I was eight. Best not to dwell on this.
“My husband and I are 19 years apart; we were 21 and 40 when we started dating. It works because I gave up the notion that because I was older, I knew better, and how to love or guide a relationship better than him,” Carol, 54, told Insider.
One Reddit user wrote that her husband is nine years older than her, and everything is great—except for his decreasing libido. “I’m now at the age that he was when we first met (I’m 31) and I feel like I’m in my prime but we just don’t get to do it like we did when he was 31,” she wrote. This is a common issue with couples in May-December relationships, but she also wrote that she would “10/10 would do it despite that” because “he’s a great husband and father.” After all, it’s not all about the sex, and that tends to go downhill for most couples after a while, anyway.
“Jake and I have been together for over 21 years. Our age difference has never really been an issue,” Keith, 42, told Insider. “No matter what the age difference, you both have to accept each other for who you are, including all those things that drive you absolutely bonkers (remembering that the grass is always greener until you get to that side; that’s when you realize it has its own weeds). It’s about compromise, being honest and communicative about what you’re feeling, and every now and then doing something you’d rather not (or wouldn’t normally) do.”
“Currently I’m eight years older than my fiancée and that has upsides,” one Reddit user wrote. “I get to be the older person sharing wisdom and guidance when necessary and that’s cool. Life is interesting because I’m essentially one life station ahead of her all the time. When she was in college I’d just graduated. When she started her career I had just finally landed my first ‘real job.’ And so on. This has simultaneously kept me feeling useful and kept me feeling younger than my years.”
The same Reddit user wrote that his “biological clock has started ticking loudly the last few years and she’s still trying to decide if she’s ready for kids and such. I completely understand her hesitancy, but there’s a voice in my head screaming that I’m running out of time to be a dad while she’s still getting ready. It’s possibly one of the biggest issues we face currently in our relationship but because it’s not a really ‘day to day’ issue, we don’t address it much.”
It feels horrible to admit, but studies have shown that women are happier with older male partners than the other way around. The theory behind this is that, from an evolutionary perspective, women are more prized for their looks, which are thought to decrease with age, whereas men are valued more for their resources, which typically increase as they get older.
One 2016 study f0und that, in spite of the stereotype,”74 percent of the women in age-gap relationships were securely attached” and “the common belief that the women who choose much older partners because of having ‘daddy issues’ was unfounded.” Love is love.
Novelty keeps you young. “Tom and I are in a long-distance relationship (he’s in England and I’m in the US),” Reyna, 46, told Insider. “We do one month in London, one in America (New York and Miami), and then meet in fun places around the world in between. This, too, may help our relationship work; it’s always new and fun and exciting.”
You know the saying that if you want to know if someone is old enough to date, divide their age in half and add seven years? Well, according to one Reddit user, there’s truth to that. “My personal experience is that the half-your-age-plus-seven rule seems grounded in common sense. A big difference in age isn’t in itself problematic. But once you get to the point where you’re from two different generations (e.g. middle age + teenager) the obstacles to overcome become very significant.”
Hugh Jackman and his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, have been happily married for almost 23 years now, and Jackman rarely misses an opportunity to gush about her in interviews. In spite of that, people act like it’s odd that his wife is 13 years older than him, even going so far as to say it means their marriage is a sham. This is obviously incredibly offensive to Furness (and women everywhere, really), who told Australian Woman’s Weekly that she considers it a “putdown” that people talk about how “lucky” she is to have married a handsome younger man.
There are a lot of countries in which having a large age gap is considered normal. But research shows that only eight percent of married couples have an age difference of 10 years or more in Western society, which makes you a member of a relatively small club if you’re in a May-December relationship yourself. It should be noted that this statistic only applies to heterosexual relationships, as there has been limited research on age gaps in homosexual ones, so the numbers are likely to be higher than that in real life.
According to a 2018 study, the reason people often regard marriages with large age gaps with suspicion is because they perceive them to be “exchange-based” rather than “care-based.” That means that people still make the extremely unfair assumption that couples with large age gaps are in it for something other than love (i.e. money in exchange for sex). Surprisingly, the study also found that younger people are actually more likely to be judgmental of these pairings than older ones, in spite of the reputation they have for being more open-minded about non-traditional relationships than previous generations.
Josh Hetherington, a Chicago-based family and relationship therapist, says that couples with large age gaps often have to deal with people assuming the older party is the parent rather than the spouse, which can be really uncomfortable. As such, these couples need to get “beyond the sense of how it looks on paper.” It’s no easy task, but you can use Katharine McPhee as inspiration. When the 34-year-old actress announced she was engaged to 68-year-old music producer David Foster, she posted a sassy tweet that included a ring emoji and a gif of Ariana Grande saying, “And what about it?”
Hetherington says that one of the biggest challenges that couples with age gaps face is that they might have a hard time relating to one another’s experiences. “What I see the most is that the younger person will face a challenge that the older person has already faced and overcome, and they will struggle to empathize with that person,” he said. “There has to be an openness to the idea that everyone is adult. You have to try to understand that instead of getting stuck at the place where you see yourself in someone and your own experience.” Good advice for any couple, really!
The research on this is conflicting. One recent study found that a 10-year age difference makes you 39 percent more likely to get divorced than if you had no age difference at all. But even the authors of the study admitted that this doesn’t necessarily mean the age gap is the issue. “It could just be that the types of couples with those characteristics are the types of couples who are, on average, more likely to divorce for other reasons,” lead author Hugo Mialon said. And another study found that age-gap couples reported higher levels of relationship satisfaction, greater trust and commitment, and lower jealousy levels. Given the lack of concrete evidence and the number of factors that go into making a marriage work, there’s little to suggest that the age gap plays much of a role in your likelihood of divorce at all.
Another common complaint among age-gap couples is that you might not always get your partner’s pop culture references or music and movie preferences. But, then again, there are a lot of older people who are pretty culturally savvy, and lots of younger Old Souls out there. So, once again, your mental age is what really counts here.
“My ex was 12 years older than I was when I was 25,” one Reddit user wrote. “Wasn’t a big deal to me since I always preferred older guys anyways and we had a lot in common. The weirdest thing for me was when I was filling out my passport application, I put my mom’s date of birth on it and he was closer in age to my mom than me. I had also dated a 34 year old guy when I was 19. That was a lot weirder and I was way more immature at that time (obviously). We had nothing in common.”
Another great way of dealing with the social stigma of being in a marriage with a large age difference is to joke about it both inside and outside the relationship. “I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been referred to as my wife’s parent,” Julie, 60, said of her marriage to 39-year-old Brandi. “When my brother-in-law was teasing me about robbing the cradle, I replied, ‘Are you kidding? She robbed the old folks’ home.'”
One of the most controversial couples in recent years is French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron—largely due to the fact that, at 65 years old, the First Lady is almost 25 years older than her 41-year-old husband. Their romance is also considered scandalous because they met when she was Macron’s teacher in high school and she was married at the time. As such, she resisted their undeniable attraction, but Macron was resolute. Before being essentially exiled to Paris in his senior year, he reportedly told her, “You won’t get rid of me. I will return and I will marry you.”
In 2006, Brigitte finally divorced her husband and married Emmanuel the following year. In 2017, the French First Lady told Elle that, “There are times in your life where you need to make vital choices. And for me, that was it. So, what has been said over the 20 years, it’s insignificant. Of course, we have breakfast together, me and my wrinkles, him with his youth, but it’s like that. If I did not make that choice, I would have missed out on my life. I had a lot of happiness with my children and, at the same time, felt I had to live ‘this love’ as Prevert used to say, to be fully happy.” Their seemingly blissful union, and the united front that they present in the face of controversy, may very well do a lot to reduce the stigma of age-gap relationships in the future (fingers crossed).
Experts say that, when it comes to marriage, the important thing is to have the same core values and to be a good team. So, while being in a marriage with a big age difference may come with its own unique set of challenges, as long as you picked the right person, there’s nothing preventing you to making it for the long haul.
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