LOVE WITH NO LIMITS

Helen Coffey digs into data to find out if age gaps are not so much taboo as the new normal and shouldn’t hold us back

- Helen Coffey

“I do think we’re in the middle of a serious trend.” Theresa MacPhail is a medical anthropologist and associate professor in the science and technology programme at the Stevens Institute in New York. But she’s not just an academic she’s also a single woman in her fifties with extensive first-hand experience of using dating apps. And the trend” she’s referring to concerns age gaps.

We’re well used to scrutiny and discourse around the older man, younger woman trope – see the million or so thinkpieces about Leonardo DiCaprio and his bevy of love interests, who never seem to get past the age of 25 without being abruptly dumped, like some mad dating version of Logan’s Run – but MacPhail is talking about the reverse phenomenon.

Over the past 10 years, she says, there’s been a steady and significant increase in the number of men aged between 23 and 30 messaging her on all the major dating apps, including Hinge and Tinder.

“What really changed is that I’m now seeing men as young as 19 message me,” she says. “I have been single and dating from age 40 to my current age of 52. Over that time, I would say that the percentage of men who are younger than me that find their way into my inbox has grown two or even threefold.”

She’s not averse to casting the net wide – at the age of 42, she embarked upon a serious three-year relationship with a man 15 years her junior. Her current dating-app parameters are set between 35 and 55, though she says she’ll go up to 65 if someone “seems interesting and active in the world”, and she sets her cut-off on the other end of the spectrum at 30-year-olds.

“I am very comfortable dating younger and older – for me it’s more about how we get along, and if we share interests and values,” she tells me.