About once a week, I wake up across the river in the bed of a 30-year-old man (sorry, Mom). I kept this routine to myself for a few months, and when I eventually told friends, they usually reacted with, “No, you’re not,” “Are you joking?” or “Is he rich?” To almost everyone, the idea that this could be a good decision was out of the question.

I recently came across a quote from Maggie Nelson’s book Bluets, in which she writes about a night in the ER: 

… a young doctor inside asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10 … I said “6”—he said to the nurse, Write down “8,” since women always underestimate their pain. Men always say “11,” he said. I didn’t believe him, but I supposed he might know.

Just write down 6, I thought. How is discounting a woman’s comfort any better than calling her pain into question? If I was saying that I was comfortable, why weren’t people believing me? And how do you maintain a relationship, whether sexual or romantic or something in between, that has so much judgment cast upon it? I decided I needed to talk to the women of Brown who were dating older men. For the sake of anonymity, everyone is named Eleanor. I refer to myself as Big Eleanor.

19 and 39, 2024-2025

Eleanor: We met at a coffee shop. He started up a conversation, and we were just chatting. We randomly started getting into some pretty deep conversation. Later, we were texting and we hung out and somehow it quickly turned a little bit sexual. The second time we hung out, we had sex: That was my first time. He had a brief crisis about “Oh my God, you’re so young,” because over two times the age is a little crazy.

And then I guess it ended up being a sex thing. 

Big Eleanor: How long were you seeing him?

Eleanor: It wasn’t that frequently, but it was over a long period of time, around 6 months or a year.

I will firmly stand by the fact that I wasn’t groomed at all. He was kind of a boy to me. I just felt like he was still very lost. And I think it had a lot to do with him having just gotten out of a decade-long relationship where he built a life with someone and it fell apart, so he had to reconfigure his life.

B.E.: Do you think that impacted your self-image?

Eleanor: Absolutely. It was strange, because it was more that when it fizzled out, I didn’t feel like I had an explanation, so I felt like I had done something wrong, but obviously now I know that isn’t true. I just felt like, especially because it was pretty kinky, I had given a lot of myself, and then was forgotten.

B.E.: Did that upset you more than it would have had he been your age?

Eleanor: I think so, yeah. We have that expectation that older people have it all together. And even though he showed me all the signs that he didn’t have it together, it still stung when he didn’t have it together. And it’s not like I wanted anything long-term; I just wanted him to be mature about it. At that point, he wasn’t, but he is now.

B.E.: So how was the age gap impacting the way you acted toward him?

Eleanor: I tried to suppress my teenage urges. I didn’t want to be emotional, clingy, confused, so when I felt that way, I would just push it down and pretend I was mature enough for him, which I was in some ways. But at the same time, at the core of it, there’s so much life I haven’t lived.

It was never so much, “Oh, he’s old,” as it was, “I’m young.” I mean, I’m doing my homework. “Yeah, I can come over when I finish my homework.” Like, what?

But I’m just gonna say it, the age gap is a huge turn-on for me. I’ve always been really into a power dynamic and I want to be on the receiving end of that, and an age gap automatically sets up a power dynamic. But I could walk away whenever I wanted to, and I didn’t want to walk away. And people think you don’t walk away because you can’t walk away.

A lot of people also think that age-gap relationships are more serious than they are, as if you can’t have a casual relationship with someone who’s older than you.

B.E.: Do you have any regrets about the relationship?

Eleanor: No.

+++

19 and 27, 2023

Eleanor: We both worked at the same restaurant in the city. He was a server, I was a hostess, and I worked that job the entire summer full-time, so I would see him every night. I wasn’t treated like I was 19 by any means. I didn’t feel like I was childish, and I didn’t present that way. I felt like I was old enough to hold my own and not have anyone question how old I was or who I was.

If I was ever with an older man who was more established, it might feel like there was a bigger power dynamic. But he was a server, we were equals, we were working at the same fucking restaurant.

Big Eleanor: So it’s about seeing this person as an equal?

Eleanor: Right, and if you can’t, then that’s the gap. 

B.E.: There are a lot of imbalances in age-gap relationships that also exist in relationships between people who are the same age. If you have two 24-year-olds, one of whom has a parent paying their rent, the other who’s supporting themself, I don’t think that means they can’t have a successful relationship. Yet there’s still an imbalance there.

Eleanor: There’s a money imbalance. There’s an imbalance in every scenario, whether it’s their ages or not. I think age is just the one that’s played the most upon because there are enough bad examples of it. 

I guess you’re not a fully-formed adult brain until 25, but what the hell else are you supposed to do between the ages of 18 and 25 except learn? And if you look back after a few years and say, “That was just a guy I dated,” and don’t feel like anything weird was happening inside, then that’s probably it. There doesn’t have to be anything deeper.

B.E.: Did you tell anyone you were hooking up with a 27-year-old?

Eleanor: Just my best friend. I was not in the mood to listen to very many people tell me what they thought about it. 

B.E.: Is there any way you speak about it now that you wouldn’t have spoken about it when you were 19?

Eleanor: Well, now I’m 22 and more people believe me. When the story was coming out of my 19-year-old mouth, which it didn’t often, I felt like people really saw me as a child still, and that’s part of why my relationship with someone that much older would be frowned upon.

B.E.: If we’re moving toward a culture of believing women’s pain, why aren’t we believing their comfort?

Eleanor: A woman can fully acknowledge her own comfort as much as she can acknowledge her own pain. You should be able to make that decision, and you shouldn’t be questioned on that. 

There is a shame factor that comes with saying, “I’m 20, and I’m seeing a 30-year-old.” I think that exists because of trends of relationships that look like that, and also that women are told that it’s an uncomfortable situation. They might think, “Okay, yeah, that was a bad relationship,” even if that’s not what they thought in the first place, just as much as a woman is not given her full permission to feel the pain that she feels. I think that’s the same. If you’re pushing a narrative that this should be bad and this is bad, then they’ll likely come out of it thinking, “Yeah, that was bad,” just as much as they’ll come out of a bad situation thinking, “Oh, I’m so fine!” if they’re told they should feel fine. It goes both ways. You need to give women the full ability to feel the way they feel. If you don’t, you leave women devoid of the autonomy to make their own decisions. If you can fully say you feel comfortable, then I’m listening to you. That’s how my friend said it: “Okay. You’re telling me you’re comfortable. I hear you. And if you ever don’t, let me know,” and that was that, instead of being like, “Are you sure?” and egging something out of me because she didn’t think it should be that way. It’s like that book. What if she really was a 6? Why the hell does she have to be an 8?