It’s not unusual to see older men dating more youthful, prettier women – so why are people so confused by my relationship?

One fine Montréal fall morning, I sat at the kitchen table, writing, the cat fed and purring, the teapot still half full, in a sacred moment of flow, when the doorbell rang. I let my boyfriend answer it and eavesdropped from the kitchen.

“Oui, bonjour.”

“Hello, I’m looking for the woman of the house.”

Fishman! Oh no, not Fishman. He’d swum in on a wave of 90% humidity, back in the heat of the summer, hollered through my open front door, and tried to sell me fish. Arguably, he had also tried to chat me up. Both of these endeavours had been unsuccessful. His return did not thrill me.

Hopefully my Frenchman would dispatch him.

“Comment? Vous cherchez qui?”

“The woman of the house. The woman who lives here. She knows me.”

“Who are you?”

“Vendeur du poisson. The woman who lives here. Can you get her for me?”

Although we live in a Francophone neighbourhood, Fishman delivered these last lines in a slow and mocking English. He seemed insulted that his presence should be questioned. I could hear my usually calm Frenchman’s voice take on the particular irritation of a man who opens his front door to another man who refuses to tell him what he is doing there.

“But what do you want?”

“Look, the woman who lives here. The woman I guess would be your mother. Can you get her for me please?”

His mother.

Oh, you two are together,” she said. We call each other “mon amour”. What did she think we were?

Now, I am a little older than my fella. Seven years to be exact. Seven and a half to be exacter. We are not Harold and Maude. We are not even Brigitte and Macron. Could anyone realistically mistake me for his mother? Don’t get me wrong, his mother is very lovely and very pretty and, under different circumstances, I would be honoured to be mistaken for her. But she is also in her 60s, while I am in my 30s.

The cogs of my brain smoked as I struggled to process the category error.

I think that when Fishman – mid-50s, bearded, baseball-capped – first intruded upon me in the swelter of the summer he saw a woman in his dating bracket.

This is not Fishman’s fault, bless his polycotton blend socks. He has, like many men in their 50s, spent his life being deeply misled by the telly, where male leads his age and older are paired with pretty, flitty wee fillies in their 20s and younger. This has skewed his sense of reality.

It has skewed all of our senses of reality, to be honest. I remember watching the chemistry between Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and thinking, “Woah, that’s weird, she’s too old for him.” But Fisher was 14 years younger than Ford. I was so used to seeing Harrison dripping in women a third of his age that a more demographically realistic romantic interest jarred.

This is strange because if you stop looking at screens and look out of windows instead you notice that most people tend to date in and around their own age group. Beautiful 22-year-old women usually throw themselves at handsome 22-year-old men, not at dandies they picked up down the bingo. Decades-long age gaps are real and perfectly cool, and age is just a number, and love is love, and love is all you need etc, but such gaps are also not the norm. Yet, as a woman in her 30s, I can roundly attest that men in their 50s do not seem to know this.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emer O’Toole and her boyfriend. Photograph: courtesy of Emer O’Toole

So Fishman gets to my door, and expects to find a woman in his general league. When the door is opened instead by a handsome young man in his 20s, it does not compute. Thus, I must be my boyfriend’s mother.

Now, you might be thinking, what has handsome got to do with it? Is she just finding opportunities to boast about her sexy boyfriend? And yes I am, but, nonetheless, I think handsome is part of the equation. Because not only is my boyfriend a little younger than me, which is not the norm, he is also a little hotter than me, which is not de rigueur either. I know. It’s a cross I bear.

When we first started dating, I thought I was just wearing my “I fancy you” glasses, which are very like beer googles except that you can’t take them off. But then I started to introduce the Frenchman to my friends, or to send the odd photo of us on a city break to my Irish girls WhatsApp group. The responses were less, “Aww, you guys are cute” and more “hot damn”. This gave me pause. Was everyone wearing my I fancy you glasses?

After her first introduction to my Frenchman, my friend Alexa made a number of physical observations along the lines of: “But you didn’t tell me he was so… tall”, “But you didn’t tell me he was so… blond.” And I joked, “He is very good-looking, isn’t he? Maybe he’s just with me for my apartment.” “No offence,” said Alexa, “but if that man was gold-digging, he could sleep his way into a better apartment.” This was strangely comforting.

It is evident that Fishman could not help but be confused, the poor lamb. I mean, take 20 seconds to think of a celebrity pairing – real or fictional, past or present – where the woman is more beautiful than the man. Easy, isn’t it? Harvey Weinstein and Georgina Chapman. Beyoncé and Jay Z. Kirsten Dunst and that guy from Fargo. The romantic leads in every single Woody Allen film. It’s just too simple.

Then try it in reverse. Twenty seconds. I’m counting. Whatcha got? Nothing? Me neither. So I Googled it and found my way to a chic listicle entitled, “Twenty-Five Smokin’ Hot Celebrities With Just Average-Looking Spouses” and was told that Christian Bale and Matt Damon are both married to less attractive women. I eagerly Googled their ostensibly homely honeys only to find that I’d been lied to and both wives are, disappointingly, very beautiful indeed.

I’m not sure this trope can be dismissed by looking out of the window quite as easily. I think that very attractive women are more likely to date regular looking blokes than vice versa. Women are less shallow than men, you see. This is the only explanation I am interested in or will accept, and anyone coming at me with evolutionary psychology about women’s innate desire for resources and men’s innate desire for lithe yoga instructors will be put directly in the bin.

(Wait – does this mean I’m shallow for dating a more attractive man? No, no. Not I. I’m so deep I don’t even see beauty.)

On the doorstep, my Frenchman was out of patience. He told Fishman to wait and came to fetch me from my writing nest, from whence I made my finest “Don’t make me go out there” eyes, then reluctantly followed him out to the hall.

“The woman of the house!” said Fishman.

“Yes, hello.”

“Who’s this?” he said, gesturing to my Frenchman, “the security?”

Yes, this is my son, the security. I birthed him when I was seven by way of a biological miracle and sent him directly to jujitsu camp in Paris, where he spent 25 years acquiring deadly martial arts skills and an impeccable French accent, before moving to Québec to protect me, his recently relocated Irish child-mother, from murderers, thieves, and door-to-door fish salesmen.

I did not say this. Instead, I said, “That is my boyfriend.” But I am confident that my tone communicated “and your error, sir, in mistaking him for my son, has ensured that I will never, ever purchase any of your seafood.”

Fishman curled his lips into a snarl. Then he circled, dived off my stoop, and cut his way through the crisp of the day.

At first, I liked the story of Fishman thinking I was my boyfriend’s mother. I told it to everyone, laughing, in a “Can you believe it!” vein, and everyone obliged me by insisting that, no they could not believe it and isn’t it funny, and who could possibly make that mistake?

My Frenchman, conversely, did not like the story one bit. He thinks Fishman was trying to provoke him by telling him to go get his mother and then asking me if he was the security. “Foo-king guy,” remains his main analysis of the situation, masking a depth of complex heterosexual man emotions.

With time, I find I too like the tale of Fishman less, because it has made me sense the water in which we all swim in a way I didn’t before. When a fellow student at the art class my Frenchman and I attend remarked harmlessly, but with a note of surprise, “Oh, you two are together,” I parsed her meaning. After all, she’d sat right next to us for the last four still life sessions. We call each other “mon amour” and share all our brushes and paints. What did she think we were?

There are plenty of metaphorical fish in the proverbial sea, but the expected patterns of how they should choose a mate are actually pretty limiting. I wonder how many women would never date a younger man, even if they wanted the same things from life, because of a subconscious awareness of social perception? I wonder how many men wouldn’t follow that delicious chemistry to a woman who lights them right up, because they feel that, looks-wise, they could do better?

But fear not, my Frenchman and I will continue to swim bravely upstream to spawn, battling the current of social expectation, avoiding the anglers’ hooks of judgment, politely correcting other salmon who mistake us for Mama Fish and recently hatched fry. For feminism, you understand. It’s a tough job, and, admittedly, I am selfless, but if someone’s got to do it, why shouldn’t it be me?

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