The real problem with dating younger men
“It’s not you, it’s… your friends”
Younger men are having a cultural moment. Well, at least two have been getting women excited this month so let’s call that a moment! No sooner had fortysomething women stopped blushing at 29-year-old’s Nicholas Galitzine’s exquisite lips in May-December romance The Idea Of You then it was announced that 27-year-old Leo Woodall, of One Day and The White Lotus fame, will be playing fiftysomething Bridget Jones’ love interest in the film adaptation of Mad About The Boy, which is currently filming in London.
I’ve seen numerous pieces about the benefits of taking a toy boy in response to this. Most of the women who pen these articles are in agreement that having a fling with a guy in his twenties can transport you back to your youth to relive those blissful, carefree years and remind you of a time before you knew what things like ‘tax free childcare’ meant. They are mostly, breathlessly, in favour of the twentysomething fling. ‘Get it, girl’, they purr.
Before I met my now-husband when I was 36, I was known to dabble in the younger arts. (If anyone is concerned that I am being disrespectful towards my partner then just know that when I told him I was going to write about this his response was “Knock yourself out, look forward to reading”).
Of course I’m not saying these relationships can’t work; I have a good friend who met her partner, ten years her junior, when she was in her thirties. A decade on they live happily together and have two beautiful children. I love it for the women it works out for. Get it, girl. But my experience of twentysomething men was a very different story altogether.