When my 25-year-old boyfriend unceremoniously dumped me after having a threesome with two girls I knew well enough to say hello to in the street, I fell into a spiral of despair. It was early spring. The pit of my stomach, a part of my body I’d never be aware of the existence of before, was suddenly raw. I could feel it all day and all night: achingly hollow and full of acid. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. I drank coffee and worked out five times a week. When I wasn’t doing that I was in the bath staring at the ceiling.
The prescription offered by everyone as the perfect tonic to get out of this was the same: ‘you need an older man’, they all said in unison.
I was pretty hostile to the idea. The clichés about older men looking for younger women exist for a reason. That said, there are also some legitimate psychological reasons why younger women go for older men. Evolutionary psychologists arguethat it all comes down to the fact that while women are only fertile from puberty to menopause, men are often able to procreate until their late middle age. So, it goes without saying that there’s a Darwinian advantage to dating, shacking up with and, ultimately, making a life with someone older than you: he’s likely to have more resources, be able to offer greater stability and provide security. In a nutshell, on paper older men make good mates.
It was only when people started to suggest it that I realised all of my boyfriends, bar one (the biggest heartbreak of all) had actually been my junior by one or two years and, they had all been disasters. Was it possible that because someone older than me had broken my heart at a young age and that I had what are commonly known as ‘daddy issues’ of the highest order that I was avoiding anyone who might possibly have any seniority?
One night that summer, I was lying in the bath where I had been soaking like The Lady of Shallot for about two hours when my phone went off. ‘We’re going to the pub. Come’. It wasn’t an invite it was an order. I hauled my heavy body up, rinsed off, got dressed and ordered an Uber.
That was when I met Alan (obviously not his real name). He was sitting with my friends, wearing thick-rimmed glasses, an open shirt, and perfectly coiffed grey hair. If I was ever going to date an older man, I thought to myself, it was probably this one. I estimated that he was somewhere between 15 and 20 years older than me and closer in age to my newly single mum than to me.
I flirted with him shamelessly all night, asked him what it was like to be an adult in the 90s and demonstrated my interest in fine wine with comic aplomb. Looking back, I like to think I was treading a fine line between charming, sexy and ridiculous.
When he left the pub, my friend Sam leaned over and said ‘did I imagine that or were you flirting with Alan?!?! What the fuck?’. ‘He’s hot’ I said back, really meaning it. ‘Can I give him your number? No, wait you should text him?’ Sam said excitedly. ‘Is he even single?’ I asked. ‘Err yeah he’s been single since you were, like, 15.’ And with that, I tapped his number into my phone and texted him. He replied quickly ‘I thought I had imagined that you were interested but I’m glad that wasn’t the case.’
What followed this was a flurry of dates which saw the summer through into early autumn. It was fun. We ate well at good restaurants. I allowed him to look after me in a way that I’d never really let anyone do, ever. I went to a friend’s wedding without a date, got drunk and invited him to the reception. He came.
And that was where I started to suspect that an older man probably wasn’t actually what I needed. As I danced he repeatedly tried to bring me glasses of water and encourage me to ‘slow down a bit’. Everyone’s parents loved him. When I told him, he was irritating me with his concern and endless charm he was frustratingly good about it. Alan, to his credit, was someone you would never be able to get into a passionate fight with but, in my early twenties, I wasn’t ready for that yet.
The things I thought I would bother me about being with someone who was older than me by the number of years I’d been alive weren’t what killed our nascent romance in the end. It wasn’t that he’d been nearly married before, that didn’t make me jealous or uneasy at all. It wasn’t that he had lived a whole life before me, it was fascinating to hear about. It wasn’t the fact that his naked body was different to that of younger men I’d been with. It wasn’t even the time we were having drinks after a very nice dinner in East London and someone my own age came over and asked me out in front of him, saying ‘oh I thought you were her dad’ when I explained.
It wasn’t any of this. I really was attracted to him. I found him engaging and it didn’t bother me that he was obviously older than me. Everything that ended our relationship was about me. At 26 I wasn’t ready to settle down and, as someone in his mid-40s, I knew Alan would want that soon if not immediately. He was winding down in his career, mine was only just getting going. As wonderful as it was to be around someone who was committed and supportive, I was still enjoying having a little bit of chaos in my life, not knowing quite what was going to happen next. I wanted to get too drunk and regret it the next day, I didn’t need anyone to remind me to drink water. I needed to find a way to repair my broken heart alone, in my own time and on my own terms. I couldn’t expect someone else to do it for me, no matter how much they wanted to share the security and stability they had cultivated in their own life. I had mistakes left to make and I didn’t even know what they were yet.
I ended it while on holiday because I liked him so much that I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it in person. It was, without a doubt, the coward’s way out but I don’t regret it for a second.
I see him from time to time. Last week I walked past him in the street. Before that, he was sat at the bar of a pub when I walked in. Our lives are still not quite intertwined because, while we are physically in the same place, we’re both there at very different times in our lives.
Like this? You might also be interested in:
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.