Florence Pugh has spoken out about the trolling she’s received for being in a relationship with fellow actor Zach Braff (she is 24, and he is 45 which, maths fans, makes him 21 years older than her). Speaking on Super Perkins’ An Hour Or So With podcast, she said the criticism levelled at her relationship ‘made her feel like shit,’ and added ‘I’ve always found it funny, how I can be good enough for people to watch my work and support my work and pay for tickets and I'm old enough to be an adult and pay taxes but I'm not old enough to know who I should and should not have sex with.’
The actress addressed this in April this year when she received a barrage of abuse on her Instagram after posting a birthday tribute to Braff. In a follow-up video on Instagram she said. ‘On Monday, I posted a photo in honour of Zach's birthday and I wrote a birthday message underneath. Within about eight minutes of the photo being posted, I had about 70 percent of the comments hurling abuse and being horrid—basically bullying someone on my page.
’It is the first time in my entire Instagram life that I've had to turn off the comments on my page. I've never been an Instagram page that encourages that. I've never been an Instagram page that likes that toxic vibe.’
It sounds like a lot of hate to be directed at a couple over the fact that he’s 20 years older than her, but in some ways, I’m not surprised. We’re increasingly tuned into any relationship that looks like it could be fuelled by an imbalance of power, and we automatically see a big age gap as a proxy for that. If he’s two decades older, then that means he’s a letch and gross, and she’s either vulnerable and manipulated or in it for the money. Equally, if the woman’s 20 years older, then it means she’s desperate and he’s… vulnerable? In it for the money? A total #lad? Who knows…
But this sort of shorthand isn’t doing any of us any favours, and if that’s how you feel about your mates’ older partner, your sibling’s older spouse, your mum’s new younger boyfriend, just because there’s an age gap between them, then, assuming they’re both consenting adults, maybe it’s time to think again. We don’t automatically assume that a relationship between two people who are the same age is doing to be functional and perfectly balanced, so why do we assume the opposite when there’s an age gap involved?
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As Pugh said in her interview with Sue Perkins 'There's a reason why I'm not with someone my age – it hasn't worked, so who are you trying to match me up with?' And she’s right, what are the trolls saying? That there’s some age-appropriate 27 year old round are corner who’d be better suited to her? Or that she has no sense or agency to make that decision for herself? Everything I’ve seen and read about her would suggest that’s absolutely not the case.
I have a vested interest, my husband is 15 years older than me. He’s Gen X and I’m just about a Millennial, he remembers getting free milk at school and just about remember Margaret Thatcher getting ousted from Downing Street. Apart from the fact that our Saturday morning breakfast television references are totally different (errr wtf is Tiswas?) it’s rare that our age gap comes up. We have shared values when it comes to the big stuff - parenting, money, religion, when and where it’s acceptable to order a second bottle of wine, similar tastes and we don’t annoy each other.
I don’t think it’s something our friends and family think about. Apart from the fact that it’s not instantly obvious that there is an age-gap between us (having a baby combined with lockdown mean I look increasingly knackered and grey, whereas my husband seems to be ageing in reverse, a veritable Benjamin Button), we’ve been together for long enough that it long-since ceased to be a talking point.
Or maybe other people do talk about it when we’re not around. Maybe they raise an eyebrow and insinuate that he’s a letch and I’m in it for the money (I mean, lol on both fronts), but I couldn’t think of anything less interesting about our relationship, and we’re not particularly exciting, so the bar is already pretty low.
I’m going to massively project my own relationship experience onto Zach Braff and Florence Pugh for a moment if you don’t mind, and assume that they absolutely do not give a shit about the age gap between them. What seems endlessly fascinating or a point of curio to other people (the trolling they received being a case in point) is probably not on their radar. We live in a world where generational touch points in terms of culture, fashion, politics have all blurred to the point where a 20 year age gap can be almost imperceptible, and probably will be to them.
Again, this is all guesswork, but I suspect he doesn’t tell her stories about his misspent youth while she sits wide-eyed on his lap, waiting for the moment when she can ask for his credit card, she (probably) doesn’t have to explain what Tik Tok is to him while he tries to work out how to make the text bigger on his iPhone. They probably just have a nice, boring life together. Because what no-one mentions about age-gap relationships is that they look a lot more interesting from the outside in.