Daniel Dench’s bathroom shelf is so crammed with aftershave, he could open his
own duty-free. There’s Calvin Klein’s Eternity and Jean Paul Gaultier for
casual dates, and for more special occasions, Dior Homme or Carolina
Herrera’s 212. As he gets ready, his bedroom fills with the heavy, musky
scent of expectation. What will she be like? How will the evening end? When
he is showered, dressed and looking his best, knowing that in a bar across
town a beautiful woman is waiting for him, he feels like Richard Gere in
American Gigolo. Bartender, drop another olive in that dry martini.
Blond and blue-eyed, he admits to being a seasoned, if not serial, dater. With
a lean frame and easy-going smile, he looks a little like the new Bond,
Daniel Craig. He knows how to prise a phone number from a reluctant woman,
and how to extricate himself from a date with one he doesn’t fancy – without
hurting her feelings. “I get my brother to ring me and pretend he has lost
his passport,” he says. It’s a practised ruse; the women never twig. In the
business of dating and mating, he has a wisdom beyond his years.
But that’s not the only thing beyond his years. So are the women he sees.
Daniel, a 28-year-old City head-hunter, is a frequent visitor to the dating
site Toyboywarehouse.com, which offers to pair “gorgeous women” with younger
men. Here he can read about Gillian, 42, who likes to hook up with men 10
years her junior, or Rajveen, whose Indian parents despair of her having
reached 38 without a husband. “The shelf is very comfortable,” she writes in
her blog. But he’d have to move fast to date 38-year-old Claudia Spahr, who
is planning to wed a man 15 years her junior on a beach in Goa.
Dench has rarely dated females his own age or younger. “I like the maturity
and conversation you get with older women,” he says. “I don’t think there’s
anything weird about it. It’s not that I wouldn’t date someone my age, it’s
just that they can be pretty needy”. For needy, read “nightmarish”. Dench
describes the twenty- and thirtysomething women he meets at work as “alpha
males” who drink a lot and brag about the size of their bonuses: “I don’t
find that behaviour appealing. It’s not very feminine. And often, one of
their first questions on a date is, ‘Do you want to have a family?’ I don’t
think that’s a good start.”
His last relationship, with a TV producer who had two teenage children, lasted
a year. She was 36 to his 26. “We broke up because we had different
interests,” he explains. “We didn’t live together and neither of us wanted
to settle down with the other. I don’t think the age difference was a
factor. I got on very well with her children and it never felt strange.”
Another lover, Eleanor, was a 37-year-old management consultant from
Guildford. “I like spending time with her and we had a good relationship.
But eventually I found her too possessive. Again, her age was irrelevant.”
Dench, who read politics at Nottingham University, has had at least a dozen
dates with older women in as many months, yet remains optimistic he’ll soon
meet “the one”. So we will leave him in the bar of the Sanderson hotel,
cocktail in hand, waiting for his next companion, and go west across town to
where Nathan Sedgewick is waiting. A 32-year-old City trader, Sedgewick is
also a frequent visitor to the Toyboy Warehouse site. Like Dench, he is
attracted by the sophistication of the older woman. A graduate in industrial
design from Newcastle University, he went out with girls his own age as a
student but no longer does so.
“Women my age want to get married and have kids. But I’m not ready for that.
And I don’t enjoy dating younger women. We soon run out of conversation.” He
finds himself drawn to older women. “I don’t want to be tied down and
neither do they. And their confidence is the sexiest thing in the world.”
Like Dench, he has developed his own dating etiquette. If he is serious about
someone, they never sleep together on the first date. And he never suggests
dinner on a first meeting – just in case he needs to cut and run. Instead he
takes women on what he calls his “Knightsbridge circuit”, starting with
drinks in the Harvey Nichols Fifth Floor bar followed by cocktails at the
Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park. Depending on how they’re getting along, they
may end up at the Townhouse opposite San Lorenzo restaurant in Beauchamp
Place or the Blue Bar at the Berkeley hotel – always a winner with women
from unfashionable postcodes. “Girls from out of town are always impressed
by these places.”
Neither Dench nor Sedgewick gets teased by colleagues for his predilection.
“Their attitude tends to be ‘Go for it,’” says Sedgewick. And both men say
they would take home an older woman to meet their parents if it got serious.
“My parents are very open-minded,” says Dench. “If you can have friends who
are older than you, why not girlfriends too?”
Why not indeed? That explains why Toyboy Warehouse, whose motto is “See where
the chemistry takes you,” has hit upon a winning formula. The brainchild of
47-year-old Julia Macmillan, a painter and sculptor, it has been trading for
just over a year and has nearly 10,000 members scattered throughout the
country, each paying £10 a month. The gender split is 60/40 in favour of
men. In March alone the site had more than 33,000 hits. Macmillan, who is
launching a similar venture in Manhattan later this autumn, to be followed
by Los Angeles, Stockholm and St Tropez, looks like making her fortune – as
well as beefing up her own social life along the way.
She began the site when, newly single in her forties, she joined a number of
dating agencies and found she was repeatedly matched with retired
accountants from the home counties who played golf in Terry Woganesque
sweaters. Identikit man was charming, but dull. “I couldn’t accept that as
my future,” she says. “There are a lot of women over 40 who look fabulous
and are very attractive to younger men. I think the whole idea of age is
becoming increasingly irrelevant in our society. There are other things to
consider such as attitude and energy.”
Macmillan has had relationships, both serious and not, with a succession of
younger men; the age gap has been 7 to 15 years: “I find them so
appreciative and it does wonders for your confidence.” Blonde and slim with
a glowing complexion, Macmillan appears to me like a fulfilled woman. No
wonder that none of her current dates could tell their six iron from their
putter. Nor are they old enough to remember Terry Wogan. Could the
older-woman/younger-man (OW/YM) couple become the relationship of the future?
It all sounds too good to be true. A charmed circle of adoring men who crave
older, glamorous females – and beautiful women who want to be admired and
appreciated. “They’re so sexy and relaxed about who they are,” say the men.
“They’re so energetic, so attractive,” say the women.
But does this happy-go-lucky world, where the supersexy meet the superstuds,
exist outside a few metropolitan hubs? Apparently so: Toyboywarehouse.com is
one of many UK sites specialising in age gaps – such as Agelesslove.com,
Loopylove.com and Agematch.com. In the US there’s Gocougar.com.
Macmillan doesn’t pretend to be a canny businesswoman or a visionary, merely
an observer of human behaviour: “I’ve seen a lot of older-woman/younger-man
relationships, and many of them become permanent.
Age is a number, not a barrier.” She dates “downwards”, as the sociologists
put it. So do her friends. So do her friends’ friends.
So how many couples are we talking about? This reversal of the stereotype may
be an important cultural shift or just a loopy-love deviation from the norm.
Will these ripples turn into seismic waves in the 21st century? Germany’s
Stern magazine has called Macmillan a “European trendsetter”. But does she
just represent a minority? And when does the behaviour of a certain
subculture constitute a trend? Whatever the truth, it’s clear that our
society, so long in flux from decades of women’s emancipation, is changing
in ways we could not have imagined a generation ago.
Our cultural inheritance can make us feel deeply uncertain about OW/YM
relationships. Yet the archetype of the older woman as seductress remains an
enduring male sexual fantasy. In some Polynesian communities, that fantasy
is made flesh: young warriors must sleep with older women as a rite of
passage into manhood. The woman as sophisticated teacher is present in
literature in Colette’s Chéri, the story of Lea, 49, an ageing courtesan and
her 25-year-old lover. She exists in popular culture as Mrs Robinson in The
Graduate. Many psychoanalysts believe this can unlock emotions deep in our
unconscious such as the Oedipus complex, where the older woman symbolises
comfort and nurturing – an echo of the intense and pure love the man felt
for his mother. As Brett Kahr, a psychotherapist and author of Sex and the
Psyche, says, “the Oedipal complex does not represent a simple sexual
desire, but a state of love and security. It is a reverberation of
childhood, which can seem like a golden age”.
However, while men fantasise about the older woman, they tend to marry younger
women. Social anthropologists believe our mating habits, honed over
millennia, are ingrained: men seek fertile partners; women seek good fathers
and providers. Experts describe marriage as a market in which both sexes
have something to sell, bringing their share of “commodity” to the union.
Thus a man will provide money, status and power; a woman, youth, beauty and
fertility.
The statistics, however, present a far more nuanced picture. In fact, in about
26% of marriages in Britain, the wife is older. According to the Office of
National Statistics for 2001, the most recent year in which age
differentials were compared, wives were at least a year older than their
husbands in 26% of marriages; in 9%, women were at least five years older.
In a recent report on social trends for the government, Professor Maire Ni
Bhrolchain, a demographer at the University of Southampton, compared 2001
with 1921: in the latter, women were at least a year older than their
husbands in 23% of marriages and they were five years older in 5% of unions.
So the percentage of couples in which the women are five years older than
their husbands, although still relatively small, has almost doubled.
Of course, these figures do not take account of cohabiting couples, or those
who don’t live together. To find out more, Ni Bhrolchain analysed data from
more than 20,000 couples. “Up to the age of 30, many more women express an
interest in dating older men than men do in dating younger women,” she says.
After 30, however, the picture changes. Women express less interest in
dating older men, while men show more interest in dating younger women. As
both sexes age, youth is ever more attractive. So it’s a complex field with
no absolutes. The rules of attraction are constantly changing.
That view is borne out by research carried out by dating agencies who have
also found that attitudes to OW/YM relationships are changing. Society’s
taboo, though still significant, is being broken down. When
Cybersuitors.com, an online dating service, canvassed its clients on this
issue, it found them increasingly liberal. Ten thousand were asked to
specify the age range of partners they were seeking. Overall, 75.4% of women
said they would consider a younger man, while 4% said they wanted only
younger men. By comparing responses with previous years, a trend for women
to date younger men emerged. In the years 2002-4, only 3.1% were exclusively
seeking a younger partner; by 2005-7 that figure had risen to 5.8%.
When men were asked the same question, 72.5% said they would be happy to see
an older woman, while only 2.8% wished to date just older women. During
2002-4 just 1.7% were seeking only older women; by 2005-7 that figure had
increased to 5.9%. “The percentage of men seeking older women has more than
tripled in the last six years,” says Jon Cousins, chairman of Cybersuitors.
The past 10 years have seen a boom in social networking sites, particularly
those catering for special-interest groups. There’s Christianmingle.com, for
instance, Gaydar.co.uk, and Jdate.com for Jewish singles. Almost half of
single people in Britain say they intend to use the net to meet partners.
Bestsellers such as Move Over, Mrs Robinson and Be an Outrageous Older Woman
deal with OW/YM unions, and on transatlantic talk shows, toy boys are a hot
topic. As Cindy Gallop, a British advertising executive based in New York,
says, there is a long-established culture of empowered women dating
downwards – the legacy of the feminist movement of the 1970s. In Britain our
celebrity magazines may laud Joan Collins for her succession of increasingly
younger husbands (Percy Gibson, 32 years her junior, is the latest), but the
US has many more examples to shout out. There’s Demi Moore, 45, and her
30-year-old actor husband, Ashton Kutcher; Susan Sarandon, 61, and Tim
Robbins, 49. And it has the trump card in the shape of Samantha from Sex and
the City, played by Kim Cattrall. “She’s the oldest of the four women in the
drama and easily the sexiest,” says Gallop. We may revere older sex symbols
such as Catherine Deneuve, Sophia Loren, Charlotte Rampling and Helen
Mirren, but it is the feisty, hedonistic Samantha who has done most to
change the way we think about older women. We watch her live the menopause,
fight cancer and hold on to her younger, adoring boyfriend.
We should forget the crabbed Michael Douglas, 63, and his beauteous younger
wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, born on the same day 25 years apart. The new
model marriage would be Zeta-Jones and, er, a zygote – or at least a boy in
kindergarten reading The Cat in the Hat.
The Americans call these age-gap unions “May-December” relationships – one
half is in the spring of life, the other in winter. At least it’s slightly
more poetic than “cougar”, a term coined on the West Coast for the predatory
older female. “I don’t want to think of myself as a predator,” says Wendy
Salisbury, 62, the British author of The Toyboy Diaries, an account of her
dating experiences. “It’s negative and one-dimensional.”
Nor do the bar-room stories doing the rounds appeal to her. There’s the old
chestnut, for instance, where the man says: “I love older women. The reason
they perform so well in bed is because they always think their orgasm is
going to be their last.” And a variation: “I love dating older women.
They’re always so grateful.” As Salisbury splutters, “It’s the young guys
who should be grateful. They want articulate and experienced women, not
ladettes.”
Twice divorced, she has been dating younger men for the past 20 years. One
relationship, with a man 21 years her junior, lasted seven years. “At my
age, society dictates that I should be with men who are 65 to 70,” she says.
“They don’t appeal to me. I am slim and fit and all they do is sit on the
sofa and flick channels. I think energy levels have a lot to do with
attraction. And I don’t want to be somebody’s nursemaid.” In fact, Salisbury
ended her relationship of seven years because her boyfriend became obsessed
with sport. Her grown-up children, older than most of her lovers, show a
grudging admiration for the path she’s chosen. “They say, ‘Oh, Mum’s off on
one of her rompathons again.’”
) ) ) ) )
The basement of Vivo, a bar in Soho’s Poland Street, on a wet Tuesday evening.
Toyboy Warehouse is having one of its parties. All of the 150 or so gathered
have chatted for hours online and are keen to meet up. Yet it hardly
promises to be a rompathon. The music is quasi-rap, thoughtfully turned down
for the over-fifties. There are lawyers, investment bankers, hedge-fund
managers, paediatric surgeons and wealthy non-doms. Most women are
fortysomething professionals, their male counterparts a decade or so
younger. But it’s dark, and after downing a vodka cocktail or two, it’s hard
to differentiate.
Take a look at Elena Badamiants, for instance, a 35-year-old Russian oil
consultant who is dating a man 12 years her junior. Elegant in her
Chloé-style top and designer jeans, she looks a decade younger. Or the
coiffed and manicured Tierney Stone, a 37-year-old former investment banker.
Such women have the Manolos and the Mulberry bags – but no baggage such as
husbands. They have hourglass figures, honed by hours in the gym, and the
best complexions that beauty products can buy. “I don’t see much physical
evidence of a generational divide,” says Stone. “Women look after themselves
these days. There’s no middle-aged uniform any more. You don’t start wearing
dowdy clothes when you hit 40 or wear your hair a different way.”
Badamiants is seeing William Benaim, a Frenchman who runs his own business as
a party planner. At 23, he has dated a few older women including one
American woman who was 40. “Older women appreciate you,” he says. “They
don’t want husbands, they want fun and independence. A few want to show you
off like a new car and drive you around. But most aren’t like that. And such
a superficial relationship won’t last.” Benaim is not interested in women
for their money – he has enough of his own – but he admits to finding their
contacts useful in building up his business. In that sense the older,
successful woman can act as a finishing school.Both Badamiants and Stone,
who have successful careers, believe that women’s growing economic
independence explains the OW/YM phenomenon. As Stone says, “I’ve got the
kids, the job, the house and the estate car. I don’t need a meal ticket, I
don’t need a provider. Plus the younger men I date aren’t threatened by the
idea of a powerful woman.”
Her words attest to the legacy of the women’s movement. As Dr Glenn Wilson, a
psychologist based at London’s Institute of Psychiatry and a specialist in
mating and dating, says, “Women’s wealth brings them choice. They can pick
youth and beauty in a man the way men have always done. Men have tended to
see sex as fun, not bound up with reproduction. Women are catching up with
men in all areas of life and sexuality is one of them.” Women are free to
become the new pleasure-seekers.
At 37, Stone’s desire to dance on tables, play pool – “anything but stay home
on a Friday night with a bottle of claret and a DVD” – points up the
essentially playful nature of these OW/YM encounters. For playful, read
semi-permanent. For some women a husband really is just for Christmas, not
for life. “I’m not looking for a life partner,” says Stone. “I want to enjoy
myself.”
The reason OW/YM relationships are so potent is freedom. Such unions are
characterised by lack of responsibility – commitment and domesticity do not
tend to feature. “The man and the women have time for one another,” says
Wilson. “There is no nappy-changing, no school run.” It’s escapist, carefree
– and very physical.
Simple demographics provide a further explanation for the OW/YM phenomenon.
“Traditionally there are two groups who find it difficult to find a
partner,” he adds. “Young males, because the best females their age are
taken by older, more successful men, and older women, many of them divorced,
who are past their reproductive best. So here are two pools of available
people. It’s basic supply and demand.”
That pool of available young bloods is also being increased by the decline in
marriage and the delay in settling down. Both men and women, dubbed
“kidults”, are enjoying a prolonged adolescence, committing to relationships
later or not at all. The marriage rate in 2006 was the lowest in 144 years,
while the average age at marriage has risen by five years since 1991. In
2006 it was 31.8 for men and 29.7 for women. So the number of unattached men
who are in their sexual prime – think Peter Pan hits puberty – is a key
social shift.
Factor in our increasingly laissez-faire attitude to relationships outside the
norm and the scene is set for a kaleidoscope of sexuality. “We are growing
more relaxed and tolerant of differences as a society,” says Dr Helen
Nightingale, a clinical psychologist based at the Priory hospital in
Altrincham, Manchester. “We have seen reductions in racism, sexism and
homophobia. Perhaps we are seeing less ageism. And we should be putting a
greater emphasis on shared values and emotional compatibility, the glue that
binds people together, not focusing on age.”
) ) ) ) )
So what is the prognosis for such relationships? The larger the age gap, the
greater the challenges. In time he will be wrestling with his career and she
with gravity. What if the twentysomething man decides he wants children and
his wife hits the menopause? Will the glue stick then?
Adrian Cox, a 24-year-old saxophone player, was married to a woman 19 years
his senior. As a young jazz musician he’d spent time with older people, and
settling down with one “seemed natural”. He and his wife, a dancer, decided
not to have children. “I didn’t even know her age when we started going
out,” he says. “We married after nine months. It ended after two years
because I was travelling with the band the whole time.”
None of the older women or younger men interviewed for this article had gone
the distance for more than a few years. As Chairman Mao remarked when asked
whether he thought the French revolution had been a success, “It’s too early
to tell”. So we will have to revisit our Dans and Nathans, Elenas and
Tierneys in the future. For the moment, our clinicians must provide a clue
to the durability of such relationships.
Nightingale does come across age-gap couples in her clinic who stay the course
– though not without difficulties. “Many women in their forties and fifties
worry about holding on to their younger partners. They blame problems on the
age gap even though it may not be the cause.” Relationships can founder if
the man decides he wants a family. Yet she sees couples who remain together
and have children – many women are having children well into their forties.
And, as Nightingale reminds us, not all relationships centre around
procreation. “These unions between older women and younger men are only
problematic if we only think in evolutionary terms. We ought to be thinking
about a real connection.”
Daniel Dench and Nathan Sedgewick agree. “I love the vitality of the older
woman,” says Dench. “She doesn’t put on a dress and ask, ‘Does my bum look
big in this?’” He would like to have children but realises it may not be
possible with an older woman. “Not being able to have children is a risk you
take with any woman. The important thing is the quality of what you share
together. Love is meant to conquer all, isn’t it?”
