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Sarah* was having dinner with her father when she caught sight of his cellphone lock screen. A glowing photo of a young blonde woman smiled back at her. For a split second, Sarah, then 28, thought it was a photo of herself. It wasn’t. It was her 57-year-old father’s new girlfriend — the 27-year-old he left her mother for.
And to add insult to injury, Sarah knew the woman — they were at elementary school together, just one year apart.
“It sounds like a silly thing, but it was really horrifying,” she says.
Two years into her father’s new relationship, Sarah is still grappling with conflicting feelings about the age of her father’s new partner. Sarah has no interest in meeting her. “I’m disgusted by it,” says Sarah. “I can’t stomach it. It’s deeply traumatizing the way that my dad's gone about it. The fact that she’s younger makes the situation so much worse — that’s the part that people are pretty much horrified about.”
After seeing her father in a new light, she deals with uncomfortable thoughts that nobody wants to think about their parent. “It’s left me with these incredibly f***ed up feelings where I’m questioning whether my dad has had sexual feelings towards my friends,” she says. “It’s just cast a shadow over our whole relationship.”
Age-gap relationships, while relatively common, are among the most divisive subjects in modern romance. While many think there’s nothing wrong with a relationship between consenting adults of different ages, others believe they are inappropriate or riddled with power imbalances.
In Hollywood, the list of male celebrities with younger girlfriends is endless. Mick Jagger, 82, is engaged to 39-year-old former ballerina Melanie Hamrick; 51-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio is dating 27-year-old model Vittoria Ceretti; Robert De Niro, 82, has a 36-year age-gap with his partner Tiffany Chen; Legally Blonde actor Luke Wilson, 54, recently welcomed his first child with his 24-year-old girlfriend, Kendall Yates; and Brad Pitt, 62, is dating 33-year-old jewelry designer Ines de Ramon. Age gaps are such a hot topic that Netflix dedicated one of its glossy dating shows, Age of Attraction, to mixing singles between the ages of 22 and 60 (to limited success, in terms of both viewership and romantic connections).
Plenty of the men in the list above have children from prior relationships. What isn’t discussed enough is the idea that children in the orbit of these relationships are suddenly expected to accept a parent’s new, much younger partner and welcome them into the family.
This is a pretty familiar feeling for me. When I was a child, my dad started dating a woman in her twenties; she was younger than my eldest brother. She was young enough to be his child. I wasn’t old enough to understand the dynamic until I hit my early twenties, and my dad began dating another woman in her late twenties. This time, I was old enough to form an opinion on it.
I felt uncomfortable about her age, specifically how close it was to mine. It was also embarrassing; what had been a stable family life now felt like a strange, disturbing cliché — like in the 1998 version of The Parent Trap when the dad has that cringey younger girlfriend named Meredith.
I had so many thoughts: what business does a 60-year-old have dating someone more than 30-ish years his junior? What do they talk about? Why can’t he date someone his own age? When I brought it up at dinner with my dad, the conversation wasn’t productive but I was listened to. That night we came to an understanding that has become an unspoken rule: he doesn’t tell me if he’s dating someone that young again. It’s cold, but I simply don’t want to know.
It’s worth pointing out that I don’t think all age-gap relationships are inherently problematic. Nor am I against them. People of different ages can have healthy, consensual and mutually fulfilling relationships with each other. But when your parent is dating someone nearly your own age — or in Sarah’s case, is younger than you — your view of age-gaps becomes more complex.
When Sarah confronted her father about the age of his new partner, she says he shut down and wouldn’t listen to her perspective.
“I've tried to meet up with him a bunch of times and we can't talk about it,” she says. “He doesn't understand why it's so distressing for my sister and me, particularly being women, who are older than his girlfriend; he won’t try to understand our viewpoint.”
The only way to confront this dynamic is to have brutally honest conversations about it, says Dawn Moore, a family therapist and Clinical Director of the Center for Individual, Couple and Family Counseling at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Moore explains that parents need to recognize that their new relationship may be hard for others to grasp. Acknowledging that, though, can open the door to honest dialogue.
“When the parent brushes off their emotions and the concerns of the child, and that child doesn't feel heard, you're causing a rupture there,” Moore says of Sarah’s situation. “Probably what this young woman is feeling is maybe her dad doesn’t care about her feelings. She’s thinking, ‘Is this new person more important to him than? And, what's going to happen to my connection to him?’”
Adult children in this situation aren't always trying to change their parent's mind. Often, they're looking for answers. “It’s about that ability to listen and accept your children's emotions,” Moore says, adding that adult children might also ask themselves if something in their own life is driving their discomfort.
Moore recalls a client in her twenties whose 50-something mother began dating a man in his thirties. The daughter felt uneasy because her mom represented stability. “Her mom was going through a reawakening and the child was thinking, ‘Is my mom as reliable as she used to be?’” Ultimately, saving the mother-daughter bond required them to honestly communicate their fears.
Moore says children of parents in these relationships may also benefit from stepping back and considering the bigger picture: what brought these two people together in the first place.
She adds that a key dynamic at play can be explained by an “exchange of desirability” — a mating theory based on the idea that individuals bring perceived social value or resources to a partnership. Take the example of the celebrity Luke Wilson, 54, who is dating and now has a child with a 24-year-old: his wealth and status may offer a level of freedom and flexibility that aligns with a younger partner’s priorities.
Ultimately, Moore believes understanding these relationships is far more useful than judging them. “There is an evolutionary sense to desire,” she says. “Whether it's youth, whether it's fun, whether for the younger counterpart or it’s more stability. I’m not saying it’s always healthy.”
“The parent has to be able to communicate what it is about this person they love, what attracted them to this person, why they're having a relationship with this person,” she adds. “The child has to hear that too.”
*names have been changed
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