Is Age Just A Number In A Relationship?

A relationship with a huge age gap may seem perfect at the start but both the sex and the emotional connection will need to be managed with time, says Anupama Bijur.

- Anupama Bijur

One of the most memorable books I read during school was Daddy Long Legs. It’s the story of a young girl who grows up in an orphanage, and when she’s about 17, is told by the matron that a rich benefactor has agreed to pay her college tuition and that the only condition she has to fulfill is to write him letters regularly. She is told that she will not receive replies. She writes to him diligently nonetheless, calling him Daddy Long Legs, after seeing a glimpse of his shadow. Eventually, she falls in love with him, a much older man, and his identity is revealed.

When this novel was written, the euphemism used to describe such relationships was ‘May-December’. One partner was in the spring of youth (May) and the other in the winter of their life (December). We’ve been conditioned to believe that a marriage has a certain template—that it must be between a man and a woman, and that the man should be older. So if you have an age-gap relationship, you have one more variable to deal with.

In bed