I’ve always loved the age gap, whatever it may be, but until recently I’d never dated someone 20 years older than me. I’m 34 and met Pete last year after we were introduced by a new friend after I moved to Edinburgh. A man in his 50s was a fresh prospect, which is exactly why I was excited about the idea.
He wasn’t looking for the stereotypical benefits, you know? Millennials like me look at older Gen Xers like him and see financial security, career success, a fancy car, probably a property somewhere, whereas men our age typically don’t have any of those things.
But that wasn’t what attracted me to Pete. What interested me more was the extra years of experience: I like being taught things, and he had an undeniably superior knowledge of the world.
What did I learn about dating a fifty-something man as a thirty-something woman? Well, good things and bad things, and many of them were a big surprise…
Last year, Lucy Holden, 34, dated a man 20 years her senior after moving to Edinburgh and being introduced by a friend.
Sex won’t solve a dispute
During my six-month relationship with Pete, I realized how ingrained casual intimacy is in my own generation. To test out a new attraction, to settle a fight, to soothe a hangover — you name it, my peers and I use sex and dating, via apps, to generate the endorphin rush we crave. For us, the euphoria of intimacy soothes all wounds.
Not for Pete. After four months of sleeping together, we were walking to a bar and he was in a really bad mood. I don’t remember why, the bad mood came quickly and easily. (Was it him or his age? I didn’t know.)
“Should we go back to my place and sleep together?” I asked, knowing that the privacy would at least make me feel a lot better than sitting in a bar with someone in such a bad mood.
“No, I don’t want to go home and get into bed,” he snapped, sounding genuinely offended.
“I don’t offer it to everyone, obviously,” I wanted to say.
He wasn’t a very tactile man, maybe that was the problem. Surprise, surprise, we had one of our biggest fights that night.
You will learn how short life is!
Part of the fun of dating someone so much older is diving into decades of obscure music and movies. I quickly became obsessed with a playlist full of great songs he made for me, in particular with Silver Lady by former Starsky & Hutch actor David Soul.
Then David Soul (Hutch) died and I had to mourn his passing. The same thing happened with the singer Sinead O’Connor. I knew Nothing Compares 2 U, of course, but it was Pete who introduced me to the rest of her music. And then she died and my sadness was greater than it would have been.
It seemed like the old saying “It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all” was a song that was repeated over and over again.
Given his age, there was also a friend’s funeral from time to time. Death was part of the deal, it seemed, which taught me that no one (not even life) should be taken for granted.
They are really obsessed with their customs…
So don’t try to change his look. Not that I would have dared. Pete’s scruffy-chic style had been perfected over many years.
He wore baggy jeans, long-sleeved flannel shirts, sports jackets, cool old sneakers (probably) and always, always a little hat.
Who was I to step in and decide that those tiny hats that only cover the top half of your head and make you look like a fisherman weren’t what he needed in life? So, eager to support him, I bought him one. He rejected it and I eventually gave it to my mother.
Pete introduced Lucy to Sinead O’Connor’s music: When the singer died, Lucy says her sadness was “greater than it would have been”
“We’re closer in age than you two,” she said insistently. She wasn’t too convinced about our relationship, but she agreed that he sounded “interesting.”
What I learned was that a man’s habits become firmly set by the time he hits 50. Pete had had 20 years older than me to figure out what he liked, which also meant that when it came to the elements of our relationship (where we went out or the kind of food we ate), it was largely his way or the highway. Flexibility was zero.
Space becomes private the older you are
For example, I was starting to get worried because he had a whole family holed up in the apartment he was renting. We had been dating for five months before they invited me back to their apartment.
It turned out he was teaching me a lesson about space: that having our own was important and it was a privilege to be in someone else’s.
On most of our dates, we ended up at my place. But then, on New Year’s Eve, I got the invitation to his. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I figured he must be hiding something by then.
And yet, I found no framed photographs of another family, no hideous decorations, no piles of dirty clothes to indicate that he was a mess but didn’t want me to know it.
It was a beautiful place, tastefully designed and filled with plants. Suddenly, though perhaps only because I had to wait, I realised that one is lucky to be invited into someone’s home. It is a part of them that not everyone gets to see.
They’ve probably slept with half of your friends.
It was while I was sitting at an appropriately older gentleman’s nice bar that I realized that three of the five women at my table had slept with my boyfriend. That includes me.
I’ve had quite a few exes myself, but they’re spread across the UK, and I’ve had far fewer one-night stands. My risk of running into ex-lovers was much lower than his.
It was hard knowing that the man I was dating had slept with so many people I knew. His attitude towards some of them didn’t endear him to me either.
Lucy says that when they went out to dinner, they couldn’t order sushi without Pete describing it as “frozen” and “not really tuna belly.”
“Oh, that was ten years ago,” she’d say, or, “Oh, that was once and she’s a little crazy.”
When you date someone much older than you, you realize that this is much more likely to happen. He had been having sex for 20 years longer than I had, so of course it seemed like he had already been in the relationship game. Twice.
Middle-aged men can be big food snobs
“Nothing tastes like New York,” he would say. Very often.
Pete had lived all over the world, which was one of the things I liked most about him. The conversations about culture, music and life in other cities (Berlin, New York, Riyadh) never ended.
But his cosmopolitan past had spoiled him in one important respect: now that he was home in Edinburgh, the food was never good enough. In particular, no restaurant could match his favourite restaurants in Manhattan. We couldn’t order sushi without it being described as “frozen” and “not really tuna belly” – before the place was blacklisted.
In New York I had the best bagels, the best pasta, the best everything. “I don’t eat in New York,” became a running joke until it started to get really irritating.
“Why don’t you move back to New York if everything is better there?” I finally said.
For me, being with him was a pleasant experience, but that lovely feeling didn’t seem to work the other way around.
Families are hard no matter how old you are
My relationship with Pete coincided with the decline of my relationship with my brother, which hurt me greatly. But being with Pete taught me that siblings don’t have to be close, and that as you get older, lifelong friends often take their place.
He had four brothers and sisters and he wasn’t particularly close to any of them. Whenever he showed up, he would cancel plans to meet up with the one he liked the most. For me, however, the situation with my brother was tragic.
What happened to sibling loyalty as they all grew up?
And yet, seeing how many friends Pete had around him and how he had learned to accept a different version of conventional family, I wondered if blood ties really did trump everything else. I was learning that they didn’t.
Pete had a high sex drive, says Lucy Holden, but his gifts were VERY unattractive
The gifts will be… middle-aged but well thought out.
Since Pete definitely had a sex drive, I was surprised to find that the gifts he gave me (to a much younger woman) were so sensible.
First came slippers. No, really. They were great slippers, made from 100% Scottish sheep’s wool. But slippers?
“What’s next? A robe?” I joked.
It turned out to be a tea strainer. A high-end tea strainer for the very fancy loose leaf tea he bought me. I politely thanked him and said, “Can I have a sexier gift next time?”
At one point she gave me a half loaf of artisan bread from a local bakery that she thought I would like, and I began to feel like Emma Thompson’s character in the movie Love Actually, who is given a depressing Joni Mitchell album while her husband’s mistress is given sparkly jewelry.
Pete’s gifts said we’d been together for four years and he wanted me to be comfortable and eat nice things, but at that point it had only been four months.
That made me wonder exactly how reluctant he was to us doing something exciting.
Drinking is worrying if you don’t control it
Alcoholic depression gets worse with age, that’s for sure. After a big night out, Pete would sometimes disappear for a week, mired in an abyss of regret that left him ignoring his phone and me feeling completely discarded.
Sometimes, just when I was thinking how well everything was going, he would suddenly disappear.
However, these absences had nothing to do with me. They were a form of self-flagellation and an illustration of how much worse hangovers can become with age.
“Something bad is going to happen to me if I keep drinking like this,” he once said, because when he drank, he drank, and he wasn’t sure he could argue.
It made me think about my own drinking and hope that, having seen someone go through this mental war, I would be able to curb my own enthusiasm for alcohol if I felt it was similarly out of control.
My biggest lesson? Learning what a commitment-phobic person is like
Do women always think they can change a man? I’ve certainly been guilty of that in the past.
With Pete, it was a pleasure not to have to deal with an ex-wife or kids. Everything was easier and it made me happy to think that if we ever did something like this again, it would be a first for both of us.
But beyond the dream was the reality that if someone has reached age 50 without ever having married, or had a child, or even bought a house (despite the opportunity), they probably don’t want to do it.
It lasted six months.