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Jessica Moss met Kevin Hardesty in the summer of 2000 at a feature film production company in Los Angeles.
He was a 37-year-old manager;
She was a 19-year-old intern. Moss first noticed Hardesty while doing paperwork in the operations department: He walked around in a Prada dress shirt tucked into a pair of perfectly cut slacks and had thick, horn-rimmed glasses.
On the last day of her internship, she followed him to the elevators as he headed home and asked him out to lunch.
As the elevator doors closed, he shrugged and said, "Good."
Moss looked for him, found him, they went out a few times after that, but eventually Hardesty told her it couldn't happen.
"You're too young," he said.
"You need to go live your life."
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Moss took her first trip to Paris that Christmas and says she talked about it non-stop with her friends.
In 2004, she ran into him down Larchmont Boulevard, and they ended up having dinner together.
She had just moved into an apartment with a partner her age, soon to be her husband, and they shared a puppy.
In 2013, that marriage broke up.
That same year, Hardesty took to Facebook to wish her a happy birthday.
"We've been inseparable ever since," Moss said.
They married in 2017, when she was 36 and he was 54.
Moss and Hardesty both look good.
Hardesty has shiny silver hair that sweeps his forehead, and Moss sports a tangle of wild curls.
They sat side by side in their office in Los Angeles, chic and in matching attire - he in a white sweatshirt and she in a spotted gray sweater.
When I asked how the age difference affected their attraction, and whether it made their dynamic more exciting, they both laughed.
Moss put a hand on Hardesty's shoulder, and they looked into each other's eyes.
"Sure," she said.
"Yes," he agreed.
"Describe specifically what it is a bit" - they both blushed - "personal".
They are aware that people in the world may look askance at their relationship given how young Moss was when they met.
A few weeks before this meeting, news broke that stand-up comedian Dane Cook, 51, had married a 24-year-old Pilates instructor named Kelsey Taylor;
The pair started dating when Taylor was 18. In the comments, some called Cook a predator, implying that Taylor was an unwitting victim.
"A bit insulting," Moss said.
"It assumes that this 24-year-old is not a mature, whole woman and that she can't make her own choices and is therefore somehow confused or a victim. It really doesn't have to be that."
She points to herself "and this is proof that it doesn't have to be this way."
Age gaps/ShutterStock
Over the past few years, age-gap relationships have been obsessively scrutinized, and no attempt to trace the history of the trend would be complete without discussing a 2019 viral post about Leonardo DiCaprio.
That year, someone made a graph tracking DiCaprio's age alongside the ages of his girlfriends;
As DiCaprio passed his 30s into middle age, the age range of his girlfriends never reached 25.
The phenomenon was given a name ("Leo's Law") and generated a lot of ribbing along with many think pieces attributing DiCaprio's dating to the devaluation of aging women or to Hollywood's sexism problem or to basic evolutionary psychology.
One assumption that set the tone for much of the discourse about the age gap was that DiCaprio wasn't attracted to these women just because they were hot but because their youth meant he could easily manipulate them.
As the love and relationship site YourTango posted, "Given that DiCaprio's breaking point is right around the time when neuroscientists say our brains are done developing, there's certainly a case to be made that the desire to date younger people comes from a desire to be in control."
Throughout Hollywood's history, Americans flocked to the movies to watch relationships between middle-aged men and much younger women.
Throughout the 20s of her life, Audrey Hepburn played characters who fell in love with Humphrey Bogart (54), Gary Cooper (56) and Fred Astaire (57), except for five of the 26 main Bond girls, who were two digits younger than the mystery man they loved.
In 1979, Woody Allen's portrayal of the relationship between Isaac Davis, a 42-year-old writer, and Tracy, a 17-year-old high school student just past the age of consent in New York, created so little controversy that the New Yorker spoke of the film as "the most moving and expansive work of a creator the movie so far," and barely mentioned the gap except for a passing description of Tracy as "a beautiful 17-year-old nymph with an upside-down mouth."
It wasn't until 2018 at the height of the Me-Too movement that Isaac and Tracy became the "poster couple for exploitative relationships".
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Lea Seydoux with Woody Allen at the premiere of "Midnight in Paris" at the Cannes Film Festival 2011/GettyImages
Increasingly, people argue that any relationship between a person in their early 20s or even mid-20s and someone older is inherently predatory.
When Florence Poe was 24, she received so much criticism for her relationship with then-boyfriend Zach Braff, 45, that she addressed the criticism in several interviews and on Instagram: "I'm old enough to be an adult and pay taxes, but I'm not old enough to To know with whom I should and should not have sex?" she said.
In another case, about 100 people died in a fire at a wedding in the Nineveh province of Iraq.
In a post on X with nearly 5 million views, a woman who identifies as a feminist claimed the real tragedy was that the bride was 18 and her husband 27. "The wedding should never have happened in the first place," she wrote.
"She lost her entire family in the fire and the only person she has left is a predator."
The outrage over the age gap, in part, represents the culmination of a shift in liberal attitudes.
In 1978, Gore Vidal spoke at a rally in support of two dozen men accused of child molestation.
As Jesse Walker has pointed out, Vidal challenged the very idea of statutory rape and suggested that the line between young and too young should be puberty—not a claim you would hear from a public intellectual today.
Also, it's hard to imagine many second- or third-wave feminists thinking of DiCaprio's ex-girlfriends as helpless victims just because they were in their 20s when they dated him.
As Gloria Steinem once put it, "If feminism means anything, it means taking responsibility for ourselves. It's not 'women as victims' but women who refuse to be victims."
The revelations of Me Too undermine this logic, showing that powerful men, protected by the institutions they controlled, can hurt even the strongest and most intelligent women.
The discourse on age gaps, which is mainly aimed at older men who dated younger women, grew out of the movement's concern with power differences and coercion and consent.
But it's also at odds with Me Too's core ethos — "you're believed" — that upsets women who have no complaints about their relationships, but even if they say they're happy, critics of the age gap don't believe them.
A couple with age gaps/ShutterStock
Anne, a feminist writer, and Fred, a DC real estate developer, started dating in September 2020, in the early days of the pandemic; she was 25, he was 56. (Both asked to use pseudonyms.) They were a match on Hinge, They flirted by text, got tested for coronavirus, and met. With their normal lives on hold, they had the time and space to consider how to build a life together outside the typical confines of heteronormative romance. Fred already had children, and he'd had a vasectomy years before. Jane knew she wanted to be mother someday, so they can envision a life that will eventually include other partnerships. "We understand how we can always love each other and also give each other enough space to find people who can satisfy other needs," Jane said.
Challenges Some emerged as the world opened back up—“I had to prove to the people I loved, that I wasn't being taken advantage of,” Jane said. These faded over time. The harshest judgments came from strangers. A few months ago they were on vacation at the beach in Delaware; at dinner one night, a drunken woman Fred's age came up to their table with a group of her friends and asked him, "Is that your daughter?" Then she said, 'It's disgusting.
You should be ashamed of yourselves.
She's too young for you.'" Her friends had to pull her away. Jane went into the bathroom and cried. "I'm so sure it's love," she said. "I don't deserve to be slut-shamed," she said.
Justine Lahmiller, A social psychologist and researcher at the Kinsey Institute, he began studying relationships with an age gap of ten years or more in the era. As with gay and interracial couples, he found that people in these relationships felt judged. "When people see an age gap, they tend to imagine that there is something unequal about it. Essentially — that the older partner wants someone they can control and the younger partner has daddy issues or is just looking for money," says Lehmiller.
Sometimes we instinctively don't like what other people are doing just because it's different from what we've chosen for ourselves. "People are looking for bits of information. Simplicity in which they can judge without considering all the nuances of this situation," said Lehmiller. "But exploitation can happen in any relationship, regardless of the age of the spouses, and the fact that someone may be older and may have more money, does not mean that he is the one who decides all the decisions."
Do you think he makes all the decisions?/ShutterStock
And even if the older partner makes many decisions, or some of them, this is not necessarily abuse.
Sex advice columnist Dan Savage, who is 7 years older than his husband and 22 years older than his boyfriend, explains it this way: "We are status-obsessed, power-obsessed primates who are always after control - socially and in our interpersonal relationships," he said.
"There is no interpersonal relationship without power differences, without advantages or disadvantages on both sides. And if you want to fix it, or cancel it, you have to eliminate human relations."
Morgan, a 30-year-old massage therapist writes about her attraction to older men.
Growing up, she told me, she only met her father a few times.
Her desire for a father figure explains why she has always been attracted to men her father's age.
She got into her first age-gap relationship just after she turned 21, but her boyfriend was 54. They met online, he helped her move to New York, where she began to rely on him to tell her what to eat and what to wear, to set her up when she felt like it anxiety.
At first, she said, it felt wonderful, but after a few years it became suffocating.
"I didn't grow as a person," she said.
Still, when she looks back on the relationship, which lasted several years, she doesn't feel taken advantage of.
"I knew what I wanted, and I got what I wanted, whether it was healthy or not," she said, "and the fact that people hate it makes me love it even more, to be honest with you."
Today, she is in another age-gap relationship - with a 20-year-old woman - who also grew up without a father.
"I know I'm fulfilling something for her that she grew up with and misses," Morgan said.
"And I don't mind, because it makes me feel important."
And it also turns her on.
"I like the taboo in it."
Other young partners spoke of the comfort, stability and wisdom that an older partner can provide.
Tom Delavan, 60, an interior designer and editor, recently married Max Reese, 33. They met at a yoga class in the Village when Reese was 24. "I would never want you to miss a thing," Delavan told Reese a few days ago.
They lounged on a plush white rug in the living room of their West Village apartment.
Delavan has lived there since the late 1990s.
Reese already understood a few things when they met: he had a job, he was in therapy.
Still, Delavan said, "I ask Max sometimes, because my life is set up a certain way, 'Is our life giving you what you want? Do you want to do it differently?'" When they got serious, he recalls asking Delavan if He wants to have children - Zdlavn said he's open but suggested they wait until Reese is a little older.
"I was very sure about it at 24. Now I'm 33, and I don't want kids yet. He was supportive no matter what," Reese said.
A year and a half after they started dating, he started an event production company: "Imagine being young and inexperienced and then having such a supportive support system behind you while you're building a business. He's been guiding me all along the way for the last ten years."
There are also certain corners of the internet where men who prefer young women unabashedly admit that they want innocent, malleable partners.
In one viral TikTok, a burly 29-year-old towers over a small 19-year-old boy as he tells an interviewer that he "loves them young" so he can "train them to be the perfect woman."
Andrew Tate, an alleged human-trafficking YouTube personality, is a prominent proponent of this school of thought.
Tate has a rule that he won't date a woman over 25. "The younger a girl is, the less crap she's been through with men and the softer she is," he once declared.
"When you get a 30-year-old girl, how many cocks has she had?"
Allen, a former investment manager, said he finds younger women desirable in part because they don't have "baggage."
He was 56 and recently separated from his first wife when he met his current wife, Carrie, then 23, in 1998.
He tried dating women his own age, but he found that "they were hurt because a husband dumped them and ran off with a younger woman or they had problems with their children."
Some had to take care of aging parents: "I felt bad for the situation these women were in, but I didn't want to take on such responsibility."
He felt that his desire for someone younger was simply human nature.
"In my entire life I've never met a guy who was against a relationship or a date or whatever with a younger woman," he said.
Today, he and Carrie do a podcast, a YouTube show, and also run a Facebook community, all called "Age Gap Love Story."
One of their goals is to correct what they see as widespread hate speech against couples with age gaps.
One of the most prolific critics of the age gap is Jocelyn Ellis, a musician in her late 30s who calls herself the "age gap girl" on TikTok.
Alice has created more than 100 videos about couples with age gaps in Hollywood.
In a typical post, she appears in front of a photo of the couple and says something, for example, about Celine Dion and her late husband, Rene Angelil, who were married for 21 years, until Angelil died of cancer.
"Even though Celine doesn't agree that it's wrong, I'm going to bring it up," Alice says before noting that the two met when Dion was 12 and Angelil was her 38-year-old manager.
(The couple said they started dating when Dion was already 20.)
When Alice herself was 14 and a middle school student, a teacher sexually, emotionally or physically abused her, and no fewer than 200 students.
After months of grooming, Ellis said, the teacher invited her on an informal trip to the school, where he forcibly removed her top and exposed her breasts to several other students.
Nothing else happened between them, but she remained close to the teacher for years and continued to visit his class after she graduated.
Years later, in the midst of the Me Too movement, she and another victim of the teacher contacted the police.
In February 2021 he was arrested, but a few days later he committed suicide.
Some victims were relieved they would never have to face their abuser in court, but Alice was devastated.
"I was really looking forward to looking into his eyes as a grown woman," she said.
She started making the TikTok videos six months later.
"If I can't call out the man who abused me directly, I'll at least point out others. I just think it's always worrying, no matter what, when older people date someone whose brain hasn't even fully developed," she said.
This is a common refrain among critics of age gaps.
The legal age of consent varies by country, between 16 and 18.
But as Ellis and others see it, just because someone is technically of the age of consent doesn't mean they're impossible to exploit.
Exactly how old is old enough is a matter of debate.
"Women in their twenties do not have the ability to consent to sexual activity with men in their thirties," claims a widely discussed tweet.
For Ellis, the threshold is 25. "The frontal lobe rule," she calls it in one video, referring to the theory that the brain isn't "fully developed" until a person reaches age 25.
Long before there was an outcry against older men dating younger women, Valerie Gibson, who was sex and relationship reporter for the Toronto Sun, remarked that "older women who date younger men are despised."
The term "cougar," popularized in her 2001 book of the same name, reflected our culture's tendency to perceive such women as predators, while an older man who dates or marries a younger woman has no special name—he's just a man.
Today, a transformation has occurred.
Some celebrate Madonna and Cher for having boyfriends half their age and claim that any criticism of these relationships amounts to misogyny.
"This is about the most rock and roll move these two female icons could have made," they said, and if you ask Lehmiller he will tell you that in his research he found that older women in relationships with younger men are the most satisfied of all the zeitgeists in couples with age gaps.
Some social scientists speculate that the women may have been satisfied because they could communicate with men on their own terms for a change.
A 50-year-old woman separated from her first husband, with whom she has two children, six years ago.
When she started dating again, she wasn't keen on what the men her age were offering.
"Either he's an incredibly bitter divorcee who wants to trash talk his ex-wife all day or you get an old puckboy who has roommates," she said, laughing.
"No thanks."
Then she met
a 25-year-old programmer at a party.
He had never considered a relationship with an older woman before;
On Bumble, he filtered anyone two to three years older or younger than him.
But he liked Huang's suggestion for their first outing.
.
Since then they have gone to Burning Man together twice.
In September they were engaged.
"My ex-husband was what I needed when I wanted to have children and have a family life," she told me.
Nash didn't want children: "He's not a family man. He's an adventurer. And that's what I want for the rest of my life."
Early in their relationship, some of her friends expressed skepticism, asking what would happen if Nash decided he wanted kids after all.
She found the question insulting.
As she saw it, the question implies that a woman can only bring value to a relationship "if she can procreate."
Her mother often asks her, "Why would he want to be with you?"
"She is very worried that he will leave me and that I will be lonely when I am old," she explained.
Every time they discuss it, she tells her the same thing: "Look, mom - someone my age can also leave me. He can also die. You never know what the future can bring."
Still, she is not without concerns of her own.
For now, as she put it, they "look pretty good together," but she wonders how long that will be true.
In the meantime, she likes to read interviews with Brigitte Macron, who at 70 is 24 years older than her husband Emmanuel: "Every time she talks about their age gap, she says something like, 'I go down every morning with my old face. And he goes down every morning With his youth and beauty. That's how it is. And we're happy."
Ardesti says one of the biggest regrets of his life was telling Moss she was too young for him.
"My instincts told me she was going to be the one," he said.
But he felt that the world might judge him.
"I was a coward," he said.
"I really think about it, precisely because of the time we lost, and because there is a level of sadness in our relationship," he admits.
What all age-gap couples know is that their age gap means they probably won't get as much time together as a same-age couple. "My only comment," one friend in a 12-year age-gap relationship told me, "is that it's a lot different when you 51 and he is 63 than when you were 38 and he was 50. Suddenly there is an urgent need to talk about the end of life, final directives and social security. If the couple has children, these issues may feel more pressing.
Witza was 55 and a widow when she met her third husband, Norman , at a tennis tournament in Sun City Center, Fla. He was 83, but she didn't know it. She was impressed by his play on the court, and when he called her to ask her out to dinner, she said yes. He was a retired Air Force colonel, And she was surprised by how intelligent, precise, consistent he was. She wasn't worried when she found out his age. Growing up in Romania, she was close to her grandfather. "So respect and love came naturally to me," she said. They married a year after they met. On the morning of their wedding, they played tennis , showered and then went to church. They loved going to the opera and watching TV together, holding hands on the couch at home. She always knew he would probably die first, and when he turned 90, she threw a huge party and invited all their friends and relatives.
"It was a wonderful day," she said.
He surprised everyone by living another 13 years.
He was himself to the end, she said: "From the moment I knew him until he died, there was no part of his body or intelligence that wasn't working."
One day, when he was 103 years old, he lay in bed and did not respond to her.
She called an ambulance.
They were together for 21 years, and it was a wonderful marriage, Witza told me.
She takes pride, she says, in the feeling that her love may have helped him live longer.
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