Number’s up for age-gap couples
YOU might say the odds have always been stacked against age-gap relationships.The tut-tutters predict doom the moment they so much as sniff a union between May and December. “What does that old fool possibly think that beautiful damsel sees in him?” they ask. “How could that ancient crone believe that hunky young buck finds her attractive?”
These naysayers have a field day taking bets on how long their fragile arrangements will last. “You mark my words, when she realises she’s turned into his nurse – or he gets sick of pushing her about in a bath chair – it’ll be curtains.”
I’d been so inculcated with caveats and dire prognostications that I never for a single second dreamt I’d end up in an ongoing 14-year entanglement with a chap ten years my junior. Frankly, I wasn’t even attracted by the prospect. I much preferred a vintage gentleman with greying temples and worldly air.
The heart, however, plays the strangest tricks and here we are at 47 and a half and 58 still frolicking, arguing and driving each other demented – now with lockdown flung in for additional irritation and over-exposure.
Only now, as my friends and Daily Express colleagues Richard, 63 and Judy, 71 point out, there’s an added poignancy to age-gap coupledom. Although we have survived ups, downs and in-betweens as a unit, coronavirus rules and regulations might end up forcing us apart
THE Madeley-Finnigan household received the standard letter from the Government decreeing that Judy – now remarkably in her eighth decade – must remain sequestered in their homestead for 12 solid weeks, while Richard, eight years her junior, is free to meander wheresoever he pleases.
Richard detests the very notion. “For some couples”, he expostulated, “if one can go out and one has to stay in, what is it going to do to them? It’s obviously going to put a strain on things. We are either all in this together or we’re not. It’s ridiculous and they need to have a rethink.”
Now there’s talk of a “phased” return to what will pass for something approaching an approximation of “normal”. We’ll be eased out of our hutches – possibly in age-based batches. Children might go back to school in age bands. Even exercise slots and travel opportunities might be apportioned on the basis of age. But where does that leave the Richard and Judys, the Bens and Vanessas, and the other age-gap lovers who thought they had proved – pre-pandemic – that age is just a number?