Here’s a story I rarely tell. When I was 22, I was briefly pursued by a famous singer. We met at an awards ceremony, exchanged numbers and, for a couple of months, he left me several voicemails a week, asking me out. Don’t worry, I probably wouldn’t believe me either, which is why I made a friend listen to the messages in our office loo.
As far as I can remember, they were pretty charming and would stand up to scrutiny post-MeToo. But he was older – almost 40 – and persuasive, so there was a certain pressure to just go with the flow, even though the whole thing made me feel unsteady on my feet. When he invited me to accompany him out of town, I hesitated. I thought it would probably be fine (and I still want to think that), but my gut told me there was no way I would accept such an offer from a random bloke of his age. I’d think that was sleazy and predatory. I said no.
I tell you this now, not to burnish my own ego, but because I’ve just seen The Idea of You, a new rom-com in which Anne Hathaway plays a 40-year-old art gallery owner, called Solène Marchand, who starts dating Hayes Campbell, the 24-year-old lead singer of internationally famous boyband August Moon (think One Direction 2.0). In fact, the 2017 Robinne Lee novel on which it’s based is believed by many to be Harry Styles fan fiction.
The pair meet at Coachella, where Solène is chaperoning her 16-year-old daughter. Campbell pursues her and she agrees to accompany him on a trip out of town. You don’t have to try and imagine what happens when the tabloids catch wind of their relationship, because we’ve seen it play out in real life. “Hayes Caught With a Cougar” and “Sleaziest Mom of the Year?” are two of the film’s fictional headlines (“A passion for cougars!” was a real one when Styles began dating director Olivia Wilde, a decade his senior, in 2021).
Age-gap romances – particularly those in which the woman is older – are something we still struggle to understand. Despite an upward trend in famous women dating younger men and searches for age-gap relationships booming on dating apps, they’re still fetishised as something way outside the norm. Instead of seeing two people in love, or lust, we assume there must be something not quite right about one or both of them. It’s actually pretty depressing.
Take the director Sam Taylor-Johnson, 57, who recently admitted that she still isn’t able to “fathom” the public interest in her marriage to actor Aaron, 24 years her junior. Even after almost 15 years together and two children, we still can’t seem to get our heads around the idea that a 33-year-old man might genuinely find a woman with a few wrinkles attractive and loveable without having been somehow manipulated into it. What’s more, it’s come to define her. Never mind the fact that she’s a widely successful artist who made one of the highest grossing films ever directed by a woman (Fifty Shades of Grey); the fact that she’s married to a younger man is pretty much the first thing that’s always said about her.
Of course, not all age-gap relationships are morally sound. There’s an understandable unease around potential power imbalances. It’s telling that, so often, our knee-jerk reaction to an older woman-younger man scenario is: “But what if it were the other way round?” We all know what that looks like. We’ve seen how predatory it can be, with the underlying threat of physical coercion; it’s why I told you about my own nervousness around that uneven pop star power dynamic.
But I’m not convinced that this explains why we have such a problem with an older woman dating a younger man. It’s too simplistic and ignores the double standard that vilifies older women for dating down, but lets older men off the hook.
The Idea of You embraces that and runs with it. The consequences of dating a younger man are all too clear for Solène, who ends up feeling isolated and ashamed, while Hayes escapes with his reputation unscathed. It might be conveyed through big, Hollywood statements made for dramatic effect (“It’s because you’re a woman and older… that’s hypocritical and wrong,” says Hayes) but at least it doesn’t shy away from showing how society treats women who dare to stray outside the path deemed “acceptable” for them.
“I didn’t know my being happy would piss so many people off,” Solène tells her friend Tracy at one point. “People hate happy women,” comes the reply. Yes, and happy middle-aged women even more so.
What the film does well is to unpick why two characters with a 16-year age gap might be drawn together: one of them seeking stability after years of being exploited by the music industry, the other yearning for the carefree experiences she missed out on as a young mother in her twenties. In fact, the most offensive thing about their relationship is the guitar strumming that Hayes subjects Solène to.
The truth is: we still can’t handle seeing “older” women (even mere 40 year olds) as sexual beings with desires of their own, unless it’s within the context of a marriage or long-term relationship with an age-appropriate man. When we don’t conform? We’re called tragic, deluded, desperate and sad. A scene in the film where a group of 20-something women in bikinis try to put Solene in her place captures it perfectly: who do you think you are? It’s still apparently much easier to pull out old sexist stereotypes than accept that women with grey hairs and baggage might actually be worth something.