As children, we all have peculiar ideas of what our adult relationships should look like. If you’re anything like me, my elementary-aged non-negotiables included a man who wears glasses, has an identical career trajectory and persona to Dennis Quaid in “The Parent Trap” and always provides me with ample alone time. Most importantly, I had one hard-and-fast rule — he had to be my age.
I quickly formed a rigid idea of what a couple would have to be in order to work out. As silly as it sounds, this rigid idea developed around the central thesis that just as my mother and father and grandmother and grandfather, my future partner had to be in the same year of school as me. Since this was the only type of relationship that was modeled to me by my close family members, it was the only logical way for me to understand how relationships were formed — we are in the same grade and we share the same values, beliefs and desires. Laughable, I know.
Flash forward to my current relationship, where many of my childhood relationship perceptions have shockingly come to fruition. For instance, my boyfriend rocks a pair of glasses, provides me ample alone time to recharge my battery and could eventually excel as a winery owner in Napa Valley post-retirement. But here’s the real kicker — he is a year my junior. Yes it is true, I have become a woman who dates younger men. A cougar, one may say.
Although a fourth-year dating a third-year may seem like a minor discrepancy to most, I find myself subconsciously justifying the age gap constantly. Whenever I’m asked about my partner, I seem to bury the lede that he is in the grade below me. And when I finally build up to the big reveal, I catch myself embarking on a long spiel of “well he is a late-August baby which puts him right at the cut off…” and so on.
Despite this justification, I have been shocked to learn how little my cougarism has come to bother me as our relationship has matured.
At first, I was weary that a year of age difference would translate to a vast difference in our lives, priorities and problem-solving skills — all of which change rapidly year-to-year in college. Seeing how much I learned about myself in only my first year of college seemed like it could put him behind me on the self discovery learning curve.
But, in dating a younger guy, I have come to understand that age does not linearly equate to maturity. For example, my boyfriend can be much wiser beyond his years, always considering how the moves we make in our relationship will help us become an adult couple. Through moments like these, I realized that with the right person, your goals and priorities will be aligned regardless of the years in between you. Although our experiences may have been different at different times, I’ve come to understand that it was our reactions to our experiences that produced the most growth in ourselves, not the years of age differences we are assigned to.
Without a doubt, our reactions to different predicaments aligned time and time again. For instance, despite being a year apart we had similar approaches to combatting little spats we would have throughout the relationship — taking a moment to breathe to mitigate any regretful angry words, communicating that we are on one team trying to resolve the issue together and proceeding from there.
Through this, it became obvious that this was a guy I had to keep around because he had a mature outlook on fighting in our relationship. I couldn’t just expect someone who is my age to have this reaction simply because they were 21 instead of 20.
Obviously, I must point out that my one-year age gap is not nearly the same as a five- or even 10-year one. The larger the gap grows, the question of unequal power dynamics and major life experience accumulation takes more precedence. While age is an important factor, what should be defining our relationships is our alignment in needs, wants and desires regardless if you are 21 and your partner is 23. If you and your partner are on similar timelines for both personal development and relationship trajectory, then you are all set.
Being happy in my age gap relationship has exposed to me how deeply I once internalized the importance of age. Just because my parents and grandparents had success in their perfectly age-aligned relationships does not mean that my age-gapped relationship was doomed to fail. Perhaps, at one point, my hard-and-fast rules about age were to make relationships exist more cleanly in categories to make better sense of the dos and don’ts of dating. But it is always far too easy to make rules until you find a love worth breaking them for.
So break your own silly rules you made when you were five and take a chance on the person who, on paper, does not make any sense. Maybe in practice they were the piece you were missing, even if their birth year ends in an ‘06 instead of an ‘05.
Madigan Wirkus is a staff writer for the life desk. She is a fourth-year College student from Franklin, Mass., majoring in Media Studies and minoring in Public Policy and Leadership in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She frequently covers topics such as relationships and sexual health resources, as well as the occasional feature for the life desk.
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