CONVERSATION: May/December: Where We Talk About Age Differences
Trigger Warning: Child Rape
Janine: I’ve been thinking lately about age gaps in romance. When I started reading romances in the 1980s, May/December pairings were quite common, with the MCs often being a decade apart in age. Queer romances were almost unheard of in mainstream publishing, self-publishing was expensive, and ebooks didn’t exist in the 1980s. But when I first dipped my toe into m/m in the mid-2000s they weren’t that uncommon. Over time, it seems to me, the May/December trope has become less commonplace. A gender role reversal, where the female protagonist is significantly older than the male one was rare in m/f at one time and still isn’t incredibly common.
So… how do you feel about age gaps in romance?
General Feelings
Kaetrin: I’m not sure I have strong feelings one way or another about age gap romance. I think it depends on the execution.
Jennie: I used to have a secret (maybe not so secret?) fondness for May-December romances, back when they were common. My only excuse is that *I* was young then, and the idea of an older man remained sort of a romantic notion to me.
Now that I’m older, I find them kind of hard to justify, at least in theory. In practice, sure, a good storyteller can make me feel the chemistry between two characters regardless of their ages. But the things that I now know to be real issues in such relationships – imbalances in life experience and in power, often – keep me from seeking these out the way I once did.
Jayne: Back in the day, a big age difference didn’t bother me so much but now … ‘eh. If there were no power imbalance, I might read it in spite of the age difference but it wouldn’t be a draw for me.
Sirius: So as a general rule I don’t care for true May/December romances. I don’t mind several years age difference but as a rule (of course exceptions can happen but in this case it truly is rare for me) anything more than ten years difference I will avoid.
I actually spent couple of hours trying to recall May/December romances I loved and the only one that came to mind are “I Spy” series of three books by Josh Lanyon. One man is 29 and a spy/agent and other turned fifty and a surgeon. For me these books really really worked.
I cannot think of any May/December books I have disliked. I guess I just avoid them.
Layla: I actually dislike May/December romances of all kinds and usually avoid them. There are some exceptions, like two Julie Anne Longs that Janine recommended to me.
Rose: I don’t seek, or avoid, age gap romances; it depends on the story and characters. Focusing specifically on age gaps feels to me like those lists of tropes that often appear instead of synopses these days, which I find pretty uninformative.
Jayne: For most historicals that have this trope, unless the author makes a big deal about it, I tend to ignore it. If no ages are mentioned, the idea of it rarely even crosses my mind. It’s definitely not one that I seek out.
Janine: As a general rule I think May/December books work best when the difference isn’t one of maturity. Life experience, yes, but maturity, no. The younger person is as mature as the older one in many of the best ones.
Sirius: For me it works when younger person has both maturity and life experience. Maybe not as long life experience as the older person, but significant enough.
Kaetrin: Sometimes it doesn’t seem like a big deal to me – I listened to a couple of Annabeth Albert audiobooks recently – Rocky Start and Hard Job – and while there is an age gap it didn’t feel significant to me – I can’t remember the age difference exactly but I think it was around 12-15 years – and it wasn’t really a major part of the story.
I loved What I Did For A Duke by Julie Anne Long – thank you for the rec Janine! – that gap felt more significant because Genevieve was only 19 and Moncrieffe was almost 40. What a fantastic book.
I have read a couple of younger men/older women books – none of which I can recall the titles of now though! – and I do like those because it seems – still – to be judged by society more harshly than the other way around.
Janine: It’s refreshing when a female protagonist is significantly older than the male one. There’s a smaller power disparity. The “Woe is me, I’m old and my breasts are sagging” trope, seen in some of these, is one I don’t care for, but otherwise it’s a trope I enjoy. I have a few I plan to mention in the recommendations post.
Jennie: I don’t think I could go back to reading books that I used to love like Katherine Sutcliffe’s A Fire in the Heart, which featured a 17-year-old heroine and a 36-year-old hero. Further, she is his ward and if I recall correctly he doesn’t tell her until after the romance is consummated that he actually has a wife. (Though that last detail may be from another book from the same era; the internet seems to suggest that he had a mistress he wanted to marry, not a wife.) A lot of these over-the-top external conflict elements used to be ubiquitous in the historical romances I sought out in the 1990s, though.
Janine: I hated and still hate the guardian/ward romance. It’s disturbing to me.
I also want to bring up that I dislike diminutives. I hated the way Avon called Leonie “little one” in These Old Shades (I read it in the 1990s but it was published in the 1920s, so maybe I should cut Georgette Heyer slack here). And actually that applies to Faelan in Kinsale’s Uncertain Magic as well. He actually called Roddy “little girl.” Ugh.
Rose: An age gap can be meaningful to the story (Liberating Lacey by Anne Calhoun) or less so (After Hours by Cara McKenna) without affecting my enjoyment. Where I do find age gaps repellent is when one character is really young, or when they’ve known each other since one was a child and the other an adult and it reads like grooming.
Young Brides in History (trigger warning: child rape)
Janine: As a teen I hated all those 18 year old heroines being matched with thirty year old men. I couldn’t imagine being in love with someone that age. I’m more open to them now because of a few books I’ve loved (What I Did for a Duke by Julie Anne Long tops the list), but many still fail. In m/f historicals they can work better than in some other genres possibly because women of the aristocracy typically married young. But it is very, very easy to find bad examples.
Rose: I’m not sure it’s true that women married that young in the past, at least in the UK. Though with romance novels focusing mostly on the nobility, maybe it was different.
Jennie: I’ve mostly heard about it with nobles/royals, and often with marriages that are formalized very young but without consummation until later (still usually pretty young, though).
Janine: Rose–yes, that’s why I said “women of the aristocracy.” I was thinking mainly about the 19th century, actually.
Kaetrin: One thing I didn’t think of before, technically most of the bodice rippers I read back in the day were age gap but it just wasn’t regarded that way. In The Flame and the Flower, Heather is 18 (I think) and Brandon is in his early or mid-30s. But the difference in age was just business as usual.
Janine: Yes, in the bodice ripper era big age differences were commonplace. Rebecca Brandewyne published a book in the mid-eighties that totally grossed me out, Rose of Rapture, set during the War of the Roses. The heroine was fourteen when she and the hero consummated their marriage, and he was about a decade older. Eek.
Jennie: Proof that there’s such a thing as too MUCH historical accuracy!
Janine: Oh absolutely. I always appreciated those medieval heroines who were widows for that reason. They could at least be a palatable age while fitting the times.
Jayne: Yes on too much historical accuracy with young medieval teen brides. Henry Tudor’s mother was (IIRC) twelve when she was married off and thirteen when she gave birth to him.
“Margaret Beaufort, byname The Lady Margaret, (born May 31, 1443—died June 29, 1509) Margaret was the daughter and heir of John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset, and great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (a son of King Edward III). In 1455 she married Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond and half brother of King Henry VI (reigned 1422–61 and 1470–71). Their son Henry was born in January 1457, three months after Tudor’s death. “ -Encyclopedia Britannica
Jennie: I don’t know if Edmund was just gross or there were political reasons for getting Margaret pregnant so young, but yuck.
Janine: In Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act I, Scene 3, Lady Capulet says the following to Juliet, her daughter, who isn’t yet fourteen years old:
LADY CAPULET
69 Well, think of marriage now; younger than you,
70 Here in Verona, ladies of esteem,
71 Are made already mothers: by my count,72 I was your mother much upon these years
73 That you are now a maid. Thus then in brief:
74 The valiant Paris seeks you for his love.
This is anecdotal but awful. The reasons for this trend are awful too. Many aristocratic young ladies were married young partly for their ability to have sons. Aristocrats had to assure they had heirs to hold on to their family’s rank and worldly possessions, so from their vantage point, it made sense to marry a girl young enough to produce lots of heirs. Virginity was prized because no one wanted their holdings to pass to someone who wasn’t their child. That’s one of the motives behind the horrific practice of chastity belts and many other terrible things.
Some history is really revolting. As much as I like a higher degree of historicity in historical romances, it’s an excellent thing to draw the line somewhere.
Join us tomorrow for the second part of this conversation, where we discuss the May/December trope in specific books.
We also want to hear from you now, readers of this post. How do you feel about big age differences in romances? Like them, hate them, indifferent to them? What about the older woman / younger man variant? Do you feel differently about those?
I read countless Barbara Cartland and Georgette Heyer books as a young teen so the hero being ten or fifteen years older than the heroine seemed normal to me then. These days, I wouldn’t automatically accept that as normal, but the right author could sell me on it or on the reverse where the hero is younger than the heroine.
For me, an age difference is only part of the story.
@Kareni: I forgot all about Barbara Cartland, probably because I only read a few and it was a long time ago. But you’re right! And about Heyer too, of course. The Leonie/Avon pairing in particular really bothered me, but I read the book in my thirties.
I agree that there’s more to a book than the age difference. I actually feel that way about most tropes.
I forgot to disclose that I’m currently working on a manuscript that features an age difference. The heroine is twenty-six and the hero is forty (at the moment–this is an early draft).
Newly acquainted with Adriana Franklin/ Diana Norman, and sad for many reasons to hear of her death.
@Lucille: Yes, that was very sad news. I’m still grateful that her daughter finished off the unfinished MS and wrote the last book in the “MotAoD” series.
@Lucille and Jayne: Your conversation made me think of one thing I try not to focus on when reading May/December books—the fact that one character is likely to outlive the other for a long time.
I can enjoy a well-written age difference when the younger character is at least in their 20s (no teenagers, please — though like others I have read HR that had 18/19 year old heroines that I enjoyed at the time, when I was younger myself) and has a mental/emotional maturity about them.
While there’s so much more to a story than the MCs’ ages, I think it can be a fun trope when deployed well. I like “fish out of water”-type stories where a character is entering into a foreign-to-them situation and having to form meaningful relationships with people who are strikingly different from the character’s previous experiences. This is partly what I enjoy about portal stories, marriages of convenience across countries/cultures, some sci-fi alien or fantasy (shifter, vampire, etc. when one character starts off as unfamiliar with the fantastical characters’ existence), etc. I think to a degree age differences *can* have a similar effect, though sometimes it’s more subtle/muted.
This is a thought I have swirling around – perhaps incorrect – in the 18th and 19th centuries, the world didn’t change as quickly as it does now. Clothing fashions changed, but art and music – didn’t people in their teens and 20s listen to the same music as people in their 30s and 40s? And view the same art? Weren’t modern playwrights enjoyed by everyone who enjoyed plays? A long way around to say that the differences between an 18 year old woman and a 35 year old man are probably much greater today than in earlier centuries. Which makes, for me, a contemporary May/September novel more challenging to believe than a historical May/September novel.*
*Well, except for author Betty Neels…
@JPeK: That’s a great point. There are cultural gaps across generations. Although I’ve never been in a significant age difference relationship, I came to the US at eleven and sometimes don’t get the early childhood references of people in my age group (Captain Kangaroo is one–never watched it!). That kind of thing is even more pronounced with friends who are a decade younger than me (I have a few). I can only imagine that would impact a romantic relationship even more.
I have to say though that the cultural differences don’t stand out to me in age gap romances. What does is other types of life experience, for example if the older character is widowed or divorced, and the younger one has never been in a serious / committed romantic relationship before. I think that can be really interesting and in m/f it can change some of the dynamics. In a lot of books (especially ones from earlier decades) it was/is the heroine looking for commitment and marriage and the hero wanting to stay single. When the hero is significantly older and has already had that commitment, he may be less resistant than she.
@LML: That is a great question about how the world changed. I don’t know that much about the 18th century but there were a lot of technological innovations that changed life in the 19th century. Everything from threshing machines to bicycles to telephones came about in the latter half of the century and earlier than that you had the industrial revolution, which caused a mass migration to urban centers. There were also a lot of changes in fashions–hoop skirts and bustles for example came and went. In the tail end of the 18th century you still had tricorne hats and by the end of the 19th century there were bowler hats.
A lot of romances don’t portray it as much that way, though. There are plenty of romances set in the late Victorian era where you don’t see trams, electric lights, telephones, etc. I’m not sure why there’s so much resistance to it but maybe it has something to do with the popularity of Austen and Heyer and how they set the tone for much of 19th century romance.
Overall though I think you are correct that the pace of change keeps speeding up.
But as for how different things were between the generations themselves it’s harder for me to say. Differences between the classes were more pronounced. Aristocrats had servants and luxuries and I wonder if that insulated them to a degree from some of the cultural upheavals. And I think (I could be wrong) that most were conservative so maybe change was also slower to come for that reason too. Working class people had a vested interest in learning to read and write, and later on getting more information on socialism. In some ways class difference romance show more cultural differences than age difference romances in historicals. But I don’t know enough to say how representative that was.
I will say that I think the feeling that, in the words of L.P. Hartley (Wikipedia tells me), “the past is a foreign country,” allows some of us to impose some fantasies on it more easily. I find that as a reader, when I’m less familiar with the setting, it’s easier to suspend disbelief. That’s as true for me when reading a novel set in the world of, say, theater (a topic I know a lot about) vs. the world of deep sea divers (I know almost nothing about that). And when it comes to history the differences in mores and values are easier to live with because the consequences of some of them don’t feel as close to home.
Something that is advertised as sn age gap romance will typically get a no from me. But I don’t really mind an age gap as long as the youngest character is around 25 or older and has some comparible life experience. I’m 10 years old older than my husband, but we met when he was 30 and I was 40. My brother is 5 years older than his girlfriend but they started dating in their 50s. The older you get, the less it matters, though I do know a couple that started dating when she was 40 and he was 24, and they’re still married 30 years later. They fit well together.
@Janine: That makes me think of Roselynde by Roberta Gellis. Alinor is only about 16 or 17 when she marries Simon whose age is never fully disclosed but he must have been over 40 given the context. Simon was very concerned about the age difference but Alinor was determined to have Simon and have him she did! Then in the next book of the Roselynde Chronicles, Alinor, Simon has died from some chronic illness related to him being older – something debilitating and painful. She ends up having another HEA with Ian, who had been Simon’s squire back in the day and is more Alinor’s contemporary. It definitely helped that I read Gilliane (book 4) first and so I knew that Alinor was happily married to Ian when I went back and read from the beginning. Because Simon does not die on the page I did not feel it broke the HEA code but Gellis is probably one of maybe 2 or 3 authors where I’d accept this from!
Regarding Roselynde itself, the age difference wasn’t as much of an issue for me because Alinor was clearly in the driver’s seat – very clever and wise beyond her years and if anything, she took advantage of Simon rather than the other way around. And they adored one another.
@Kris Bock: I don’t think of five years as a significant age difference, really. But I do agree that the older you get the less it matters.
Do you have a preference for older women / young men books over the reverse? Just curious.
@Kaetrin: I’ve heard you talk about that before and it always makes me interested in reading the Alinor because I love the trope of a widow or widower finally realizing it’s okay to find love again, and not disloyal. I don’t know if Alinor has that trope but it used to be more common than it is these days.
Do you think you also liked the Roselynde and Alinor books better because it was a different time, also? We’ve talked before about how we approached books differently in the 1980s than we do now.
One of the things I find least appealing about contemporary age-gap romances is the tendency for them (whether m/f or m/m) to include “Daddy” kink. That is not a favorite trope/setup of mine (although I think some of Misha Horne’s and Cara Dee’s m/m romances incorporate it fairly well), so I’m already predisposed to avoid age-gap romance—even though I’m a few years older than my husband.
Regarding the fact that until very recently age gaps between people did not necessarily means gaps in social or cultural awareness: in his book THE FIFTIES, David Halberstam asserts that it wasn’t until the introduction of the transistor radio that a separate youth culture was able to flourish. Up until then, the radio (and later, the television) was a large piece of furniture in a central room and everyone in the family listened to (and watched) the same music, programs, news, and shows. Once young people had a portable source of music, music was developed for and aimed specifically toward them: youth culture was born. Only after that did differences in cultural knowledge start developing on generational rather than class lines. So historical age-gap romances, at least from a cultural perspective, don’t bother me quite so much. Slightly o/t: a 16-year-old told me that she looked forward to the weekend so she could spend all day watching Tik-Tok videos. I can’t imagine anything more tedious…so I know I’m old!
@DiscoDollyDeb: Thank you for answering LML’s question so well. Better than I could! That is so interesting about radio and youth culture, and it makes perfect sense.
I’m not into the daddy kink either. It’s up there with doctor / patient in terms of being one of the most discomfiting tropes to me. Recently I also stumbled on a book listing on Goodreads that was for a book where the heroine’s father married a young and insufferable wife; the heroine and the wife’s father hook up. I.e. “she stole my father now I’m stealing hers.” I was shocked, but I guess anything goes today.
I don’t mind age gap romances per se as long as the age of the younger person is in at least in their mid twenties and both parties have lived in, adult life experiences.
Even outside of age gap romance, I generally don’t like my protagonists in romance novels to be under 20. Just not my jam. I tend to prefer my heroines to be at least mid-twenties with late 20s-early 30s my sweet spot. And that they are written that way.
So that is all to say, if there is an age gap, I simply want them both to be and act like grown folks, no matter the gap.
I do prefer it when the gap is younger woman/older man in MF romances. It is a personal thing. Mainly because personally younger men don’t appeal, so while I can forgive fictional characters a LOT things that I would not stand for IRL, the younger man/older woman just doesn’t automatically pass the fictional barrier test for me. Go figure, LOL.
So I might knee-jerk pass on a book if the blurb tells me they are older woman/younger man. But as in everything, it is all in the execution. I have read one or two that I’ve liked, LIBERATING LACY comes immediately to mind.
As far as ‘Daddy Kink’ — yeah that is outside my comfort zone. But I understand it is a niche, erotica subgenre of the age-gap romance. I have read Eve Dangerfield’s ‘ACT YOUR AGE’ based on a friend rec. And I did like that a lot. The H&H admit to having that particular sexual kink, but in the course of the story it very clear that it is deployed when they are scening during sex only and it isn’t a lifestyle thing. And the rest of the plot outside of that is really good.
Outside of that, I have also enjoyed some books where the hero was explicitly the father of someone the heroine’s own age (a BFF or ex-boyfriend) and the plot obstacles that ensue there.
@janine I don’t particularly like any age gap romance, at least not enough to seek it out. If it’s no big deal in the story, then it’s fine, but if it’s no big deal, why make an issue of it?
I prefer characters who aren’t too immature anyway, regardless of age.
I’ve re-read Roselynde and Joanna and Gilliane fairly recently but I’ve been unable to get an e copy of Alinor so that one I haven’t read recently. From memory, Alinor needed to marry because of something to do with King John. She’s a rich heiress, young and beautiful and she owns the Roselynde lands in her own right. Roselynde harbor is valuable in terms of military advantage as well as trade also. Alinor is a very practical woman. I don’t recall her feeling disloyal to Simon. In fact, it was Ian who was the one who felt disloyal IIRC! That they both loved Simon dearly helped actually.
I have read books where a widow finds love again in contemporary fiction and that works for me – what I’m not sure about is how well I’d go if I’d read the romance of the first relationship beforehand. That kind of age gap in contemporary fiction would be pretty rare for me as well. In medieval fiction it’s less of an issue for me but in contemporary a 16 year old and a 40+ year old would be a hard no.
@TinaNoir: I get what you are saying about younger men (although I don’t feel that way myself). My husband is balding and very attractive to me, but I just can’t deal with balding heroes in romances. I think Carla Kelly had one? And that’s about it. For good reason, I think!
I believe we don’t really choose our fantasies or what attracts us, so I’m not a happy camper when I see people monitor what others read. I have nothing against bald men IRL, but I don’t want to read about them in romance. Same with daddy kink, too.
Re books where the hero’s daughter is a friend of the heroine, I like those a lot when they are executed well. I’m actually writing a manuscript like that now! She’s 26 and he’s 40. So I’m more than open to it.
The book I mentioned though, I really wish I could find the blurb for. It was in the heroine’s POV and she said something about her father marrying a nasty stepmother her own age, and at the wedding she meets this gorgeous guy and oops, he’s the stepmother’s dad, and they start having a kinky affair. I don’t know if it uses the daddy kink or not (I should have made that clearer) but the title was something like “She stole my dad now I’m stealing hers” or something like that. And it sounded like a soapy cat fight which is so not my thing. However I haven’t read it and maybe it’s a lot more nuanced and interesting than I give it credit for. You really can’t judge a book by its cover (or title) at all.
@Kaetrin: Oh yes, I agree, if I read the prior romance I’d be really unhappy to a have that hero killed off and replaced nowadays. Sandra Brown had a book like that. We actually did a whole conversation post that touched on this (ruining the HEA) but it was a long time ago, I don’t know if you recall. Here it is for anyone who is interested:
https://dearauthor.com/features/conversations/conversation-dont-mess-with-a-past-hea/
@Janine: I’m pretty sure I mentioned Roselynde/Alinor in that conversation actually! :)
@Kaetrin: You did!
I’m not a fan of big age gaps when I read Romance because the older man/much younger woman is too close to Real Life – just look at the politicians, billionaires, and movie stars who grow older but somehow their wives stay the same age (i.e., they move into their 40s, 50s, 60s, but somehow they always have a 27 year old wife). Big age gaps, therefore, are simply not Romantic to me. Romance to me is where women are seen as beautiful and desirable no matter what their age. This may explain why one of the tropes I’ve enjoyed is where the hero initially is attracted to/courts the younger woman but then finds himself intrigued by and falling for the older sister/governess.
@Susan/DC: Susan, how do you feel about books where the heroine is older than the hero?
@Janine: I don’t care much for large age differences, although in a totally hypocritical fashion I don’t mind so much if the woman is older. Despite the recent positive reaction to some so-called cougars, it’s still much rarer in Real Life than the aging male with a trophy wife. In RL such women are too often figures of fun while the men are cheered on. The feminist in me wants women to have equal opportunity to love when and where they can without societal blow-back.
As several others have mentioned, to some extent it depends on how old the younger partner is: it bothers me more when the younger is late teens/early 20’s than when s/he is in their 30’s or older. I’ve read that a standard formula for appropriate age differential is older partner’s age divided by 2 plus 7 years.