Mind the Gap

About a month after Dori and I first meet, fourteen months before we’ll get married on the lawn outside the Santa Barbara courthouse, Facebook’s algorithm—with its remarkable ability to be on-topic and completely off-base at the same time—suggests a listicle of the “most uncomfortable age gaps in cinema” as something I might be interested in. I cringe as I swipe, increasingly pissed off by the catalog of clichés I see before me, and by the lack of distinction between consent and coercion: Humbert Humbert is right there alongside Harold’s Maude.

If the older person is a woman, she will be a stilettoed manipulatrix, deftly ensnaring a clueless babe-in-the-woods in her web. There’s world-weary Mrs. Robinson, flashing her tan lines in a last-ditch mating display; Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard scheming, wheedling, and buying her way into Joe Gillis’s heart. The young partner, meanwhile, tends to be portrayed as a drifter trying things on for size, a lost little lamb with daddy or mommy issues whose winsome naiveté offers a pleasant dalliance, a vacation from grown-up obligations. None of it has anything to do with me and Dori, the real-life, fifty-seven-year-old woman whose neck I’m nestled into as I scroll through these fictional portrayals.

Even the terminology riles me up. “May-December relationship is such a dumbass term,” I complain to Dori. “How do your fifties equate to December? That’s, like, October at the most.”

Still, in the weeks that follow, I watch every movie from the list, mining the genre for glimmers of familiarity. I’m used to having to squint to see the resemblance to my own life: I grew up dreaming of a leading lady and putting myself in Richard Gere’s shoes.

All my life, I’ve been drawn to older people. Precocious and cerebral, I was the kid that loved sitting