How I Suspend Disbelief Part 1: Age Differences

A recent post on Twitter involving Yet Another Annoying Reddit Dude raised some discussion about age differences in relationships, with the usual people saying that no really it’s not creepy for forty-year-olds to try and date people right out of high school and the rest of us weighing in that NOPE.

Like, for a relationship, half your age plus seven is a pretty damn decent rule. (One night stands? As long as everyone is legal and there’s no other sketchy dynamic, have at it.) Absent a power imbalance, when you go outside that range, it’s not necessarily that one partner is taking advantage of the other, but they’re generally at really different life stages. If A has been in the working world for a while and B has just stopped living full-time with their parents (or…still is) there’s a lot of difference there, it often says Some Things about A when they’re involved with B, and while those things can vary, none of them are generally great.

And yeah, there are exceptions. (And by the way: this, and future discussions about timing/age of both parties/etc are not where I want to hear about how you or your friend or your mom totally had a May-December relationship and it worked out GREAT okay STOP JUDGING, like, congratulations, in the best case scenario you beat Vegas odds, but the other 90% still applies and justifies some quiet side-eye and Car Talk*.) Those exceptions are generally where both parties have known each other for a long time–platonically but not for the love of God in a parent-child-ish way, ew–before anything happens, where the younger person takes the initiative, and where the younger person is used to more independence/responsibility than is generally the case.

Preferentially hitting on, or repeatedly “just ending up with” people way younger than you are might not necessarily be predatory as such, but it’s often fairly pathetic. Like–PLEASE STOP READING NOW IF YOU ARE IN ANY WAY MY MOTHER–my senior year in high school, I had a fling with a guy who was 25, and whose previous girlfriend was also 18. I didn’t, and don’t, think that I was in any way exploited or taken advantage of: I had a good time and it was a fun way to spend Senior Spring. I also don’t, and didn’t even then, feel like the guy in question and “a stable and functional dude with a great life ahead of him” had any Venn diagram overlap AT ALL.

So. I said this, I believe all of it…and I also write novels in which one side of a pairing is often hundreds of years older than the other. Am I a big old hypocrite? Possibly.  How do I justify it? Like so:

Independence.  In general, I try to give each character in a romantic pairing their own goals, their own life, and the ability to live that life without assistance from the other person, because otherwise…ew, frankly. There are exceptions to some extent, but I try to make them temporary and situational–Joan from No Proper Lady and the hero in my upcoming book are both Fish Out of Temporal Water, each in different ways, and Joan is on a semi-suicide mission, but they either have existing missions or pick them up, they had lives beforehand, and they develop resources and connections other than their romantic partner.

This is doubly important when one partner is way older or more powerful, which wasn’t the case in either of those stories. I’d have a hard time doing Fish Out of Water where the partner was also a functionally-immortal being: there are one or two future books where I’m considering it, and in those I’m being very careful to give the non-immortal, non-knowing-the-world partner distinct goals and ties of their own, as well as making sure they can still affect the world in ways that the immortal protagonist can’t. And that leads into my second point.
Pertinent contributions. I develop romantic parings using a scaled-down version of the D&D party balance model: each character should have skills that the other one lacks. Depending on the situation, there can be a certain amount of overlap, but everyone should have Their Thing that they know about or can do really well. Unlike D&D, this doesn’t have to be combat-relevant–Mina from Legend of the Highland Dragon kicked ass through pertinent library-organizing and talking to the right people–but it does need to be practical and come into play in both the story and the characters’ lives.

Again, when you’re writing one character as improbably younger than the other, this is even more crucial–and for the love of God, “heals his cynical soul with her childlike innocence and trust” does not count, and also just never do that, and also barf.
Everyone is a fucking grown-up. Yeah, I heart Buffy and Labyrinth too, but high-school romance mostly doesn’t work in general (I will write another post on this, but meanwhile see above re: Not Wanting to Hear It, people for whom it worked out against all odds and reason), and when one character is explicitly underage, or painted as even more innocent than their normal age group…NOPE. (Depending on the first two points and also how the immortal is portrayed, it’s, again, not necessarily predatory but not a recipe for a functional relationship or a believable HEA, for me.)

This also applies less technically. I’m not a huge fan of naive characters as a whole–though I’m better with unworldly men, for Reasons–but if one partner is hundreds of years old and the other is not only twenty but acts like they fell off the turnip truck yesterday? Ew, no. The younger person doesn’t have to be jaded and experienced at every possible thing, but they have to have a decent idea of how their world and the people in it work, and how to operate there. (One of the things I tried to do with both Mina and Sophia is use the places they lacked privilege–not being rich in either case, being Jewish in the Middle Ages in Sophia’s–to make them more aware of how the world works, for a lot of people, than Stephen or Cathal.) Knowing a particular way reality functions that the other person doesn’t is a big one here–it goes along with “pertinent skills,” even if it doesn’t advance the plot per se.

All of these things are important even if both people are the exact same age, in my view–I don’t want to fuck a clinging vine or an emotional support dog, and I’d like to think most of my readers wouldn’t view those as viable romantic partners either–but way more so when there’s a massive discrepancy of experience and knowledge.

That said, I don’t think human/inhuman lifespan mismatches have nearly the issues that large human/human discrepancies do. Obviously, the former makes me money, so I feel better about it, but the other reason is the same one dictating that the rule is half your age plus seven, not a specific number of years: to put it nerdily, after a certain threshold, experience stops stacking. The difference between 16 and 26 is staggering for just about everyone in most modern cultures. Between 26 and 36, well, there are some general differences, but it depends much more on life choices than anything else: I have friends and family who were much more settled in a number of aspects at 26 than I am now or anticipate being in the future. And yeah, people generally tone down the melodrama as they age and learn how to roll with the emotional punches better, but…not always, I have some stories, yowza.

Once you’ve been living on your own, supporting yourself in some way, and making your own decisions, you’re an adult. And once you’ve been doing that for a few years, the difference between Adult A and Adult B diminishes, whether that difference is two years, twenty, or two hundred. If everyone’s a goddamn grownup, cool. And if everyone is not a grownup, functionally and emotionally as well as legally and biologically, this is not a pairing that should be going on anyhow.

*I am a judgmental bitch, but absent abuse and so forth, I also don’t think people are justified in butting in. “So…she’s…nineteen, huh?” is why God made brunch with mutual friends.