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Hello, subscribers, Domscribers, and non-scribers!
It’s ramble time again, and you are under no obligation to keep reading. If you do choose to continue, I will offer up the usual disclaimer: my feelings are my own, not meant to represent a wider POV, and the thoughts below are just a fraction of a much larger—and very much ongoing—conversation about romance, craft, and genre trends.
Teal Deer (TL; DR)
Mind the Gap
I don’t particularly want to get into Age Gap Discourse TM, because god knows there’s an infinite number of subtopics therein that could make this newsletter the size of a PhD dissertation. But I’ve been mulling my own history with age-gap romances and how my feelings have evolved.
First off, let me say that I generally love them. Some of my earliest canon ‘ships featured substantial age differences. I was 14 when I fell for Guiding Light’s Ross and Blake. He was her mother’s ex-boyfriend and a rising local politician. She was an emotionally wounded brat lashing out at the world. They were absolutely meant to be. Jerry verDorn’s Ross embodied the stern brunch daddy decades before author Andie J. Christopher coined the term. Actress Liz Keifer replaced Sherry Stringfield as Blake in late 1992, but that initial fire that Stringfield kindled with JvD is seared into my brain.
I rooted for Marvel Comics’ Pete Wisdom and Kitty Pryde. I adored As the World Turns’ Dusty and Lucy. Give me Lamhe, Roman Holiday, Sabrina (Hepburn-Bogart edition, obviously), Charade, and Murphy’s Romance. Hope/Karl and Savannah/Adam from Kelley Armstrong’s Otherworld series. Dennis and Davia from Good Trouble. Beyond the Gates’ Dani and Andre. Of course Chicago Med’s Hannah and Dean. And this isn’t even getting into all the fanfic I’ve written about various pairings over the years. (Some of it admittedly problematic.) I’m the furthest thing from a hater. I don’t come at this subject from a place of judgment—or, at least, I didn’t until recently!
I’ve been slowly weeding my Kindle library, and I came across an age-gap novella from 2017— a “dad’s best friend” erotic romance. Now, at some point, I was okay with this particular book—after all, I did buy it. At the ripe old age of 48, with a niece who just graduated high school, skimming it made me SO uncomfortable. Everything in me recoiled at the set-up: an 18-year-old “finally” hooking up with her father’s best friend, a guy in his late 30s who’d been secretly lusting for her since she grew into her womanly curves. Ew. All I could think about was how damn young 18 really is. And of course the story was obsessed with it too. But in a way that felt creepy. Simultaneously paternalistic and perverse. Suffice it to say, I deleted the novella and started pondering why I reacted so strongly.
I think there’s a distinction to be made between age gap as plot point and age gap as kink. The fetishization of youth and innocence (and purity and virginity) versus “These people were born x years apart and here are the story beats that address that disparity.” This really crystallized for me while rereading Meagan McKinney’s 1994 historical romance, The Ground She Walks Upon. There’s a 19-year age gap between Ravenna and Trevallyen. He first meets her as a newborn! As I described on social media, “These old Irish dudes and her gran are like ‘She’s your fated wife! You have to wait for her! There’s a curse!’ He’s like ‘HELL NO. Do I look like Jacob from Twilight?’ and marries somebody else. Who dies in childbirth. Because of curse. Ravenna grows up into a violet-eyed beauty. Because of course.” |  |
The story doesn’t shy away from how freaking weird it is to be ‘shipping characters so far apart in age just because an ancient Irish superstition says they should be together. Trevallyen spends 20 years attempting to marry other women and being generally grossed-out by the predestined pervery. Even when he sees Ravenna again as a stunning 19-year-old, he’s like “She’s gorgeous, but I’m 40 and this is some bullshit.”
“Certainly he could marry her, he could bed her, he could lure her with money and status, but taking a young girl to wife seemed only for those out to prove their manliness and youth, neither of which was in question for him. Love was the only question, and he couldn’t imagine it. It was rare if not impossible to find a girl of her years who could truly give her love to a man old enough to be her father.”
Trevallyen’s reaction being “This is ridiculous, I refuse, Fate doesn’t exist!” goes a long way toward making his rocky romance with Ravenna rootable. And the book title itself reveals the most important dimension: He needs to worship the ground she walks on. It’s not enough for her to love him, the power dynamics of him as an older landed earl and her as a young and ostracized orphan demand that he make himself vulnerable. McKinney repeatedly stresses that Ravenna can’t be with someone who views her as lesser, who inherently has control over her life. But love can be the great equalizer. It levels their emotional playing field.
Love didn’t level Mac and Freddy’s airfield in Judith Krantz’s soapy historical saga from 1988, Till We Meet Again. Reading as a teen and watching the miniseries, I was gutted that Mac dies early on and refused to acknowledge Freddy’s later love story with Jock. Rereading and rewatching as an adult? Oof. Mac’s a grown man in his 30s who starts giving Freddy flying lessons when she’s 11 or 12. She crushes on him for years and “wears him down” by the time she’s played by a gamine Courtney Cox. They get together when she’s 18—possibly still 17 (please don’t make me go back and fact-check). Ew. How very Celine Dion and her manager. Barry Bostwick is incredibly sexy in the screen version, but I was repulsed. Full on “Get away from her, you creep!”
 | Mac’s death is completely warranted. It’s his comeuppance. In the book, he expresses a lot more self-disgust about getting involved with Freddy and readers get the sense that he leaves to do dangerous aerial stunt work knowing he might die—courting it, even. So, I’m still gutted that he dies because that kind of self-immolation is tragic. But Freddy moving on with Jock hits differently. I embrace it. The scandalous age-gap relationship is a pivotal life event that she needs to grow past—and, fortunately, that’s exactly Freddy’s character trajectory. |
Most contemporary, heterosexual, age-gap romances don’t delve that deep. Okay, they do delve deep, but it’s usually into someone’s pants. The focus is on the taboo, or on the idea that an older male love interest is The First—the one who gets to guide a younger woman’s sexual awakening and teach her everything. Congratulations, Christopher Columbus. Please take your colonizer penis elsewhere. Give me the queering of the trope, or the subversion wherein the dude is the virgin and an older woman is the teacher, any day.
For me, the appeal of age-gap romance isn’t in the power differential or the experience gap, in everything that makes them different. It’s in everything they share despite those differences and in the caretaking aspect. James Garner’s cranky liberal pharmacist grounding Sally Field’s frazzled single mom and giving her the support she needs in Murphy’s Romance? swoon. It’s even better when it’s the younger character protecting the older one.
Half demon Adam is not the male lead in Kelley Armstrong’s closing Otherworld trilogy. He is very much the supporting love interest—he could almost occupy the position of damsel in distress—and Savannah is a powerful witch who will throw down to keep him safe! Sure, they meet when Savannah’s 12 and Adam is his 20s. He helps rescue her and, naturally, tween Savannah’s like “Oh, he will be mine.” Absolutely nothing happens for 11 books as a decade goes by in canon, but it still loops back perfectly. They’re colleagues, they’re best friends, and then eventually they’re lovers. He is hers. It’s the spiritual opposite of a rebellious hoyden “seducing” her longtime flight instructor when she’s barely legal. It’s earned. It’s how to do it right.
That’s really what it comes down to: not just the characters’ caretaking but the author’s. The older I get, the more I want to see the growth, the conflict, and the justification in both the authorial voice and the characters’ experiences. I’ll be the first to admit that I probably fall short of this ever-evolving standard in the stories I write as Kali Decker. Mick and Lily are 26 years apart in Bad Desire. It’s 19 years for Ren and Hitha in Nobody’s Bargain and 16 between Nepo Baby’s Rohit and Deeni. I can’t promise that I successfully made their relationships palatable. Somebody somewhere has definitely said “Ew!” while attempting to read those novellas. That’s okay! We all have different comfort levels, different places we draw the line. If someone’s getting their rocks off to a fictional 18-year-old calling her father’s bestie “Daddy,” it’s between them and their e-reader. And I’ll continue to ruminate on what I’ve downloaded to mine.
Thanks for reading all of that! If you enjoyed yourself, please consider hitting subscribe, checking out some of my books, or dropping a tip in my Ko-fi.
-Suleikha
