That's a big takeaway from an analysis of the on-screen relationships among 20 of Hollywood's leadingest men of the past 30 years. You know the names: Denzel Washington. Harrison Ford. Tom Cruise. Will Smith. The analysis was done by the folks at GraphJoy, with numbers culled from IMDB and studio Web pages.

The chart above shows the average age difference between the male leads and their female screen counterparts, for the films the actors made when they were age 35 or older. Denzel Washington's age gap is the largest, averaging more than 15 years. In 2013's "Two Guns," for instance, actress Paula Patton was cast as his love interest. She's 21 years younger than he is.

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Out of the 20 men in GraphJoy's list, nine of them have an average on-screen age gap of 10 years or more. One, Channing Tatum, just turned 35 a few months ago and hence is excluded from this part of the analysis.

Hollywood's penchant for May/December couples — with men almost exclusively in the December roles — has been noted plenty of times before. Back in 2013 New York Magazine put out a great series of charts on how Hollywood's leading men age, but their love interests don't.

But GraphJoy did a more systematic analysis, drawing some interesting topline findings from their database of 20 leading men. Among them: an overall distribution of male actors' on-screen age gaps. This becomes especially illuminating when you pair it with actual age gaps among married couples in the Census, as in the chart below.

You can see that roughly one third of straight married couples in real-world relationships are less than a year apart in either direction. But less than half of the Hollywood pairings studied by GraphJoy meet that definition. And compared with the real-world couples, the men in the on-screen couples were more than three times as likely to between 10 and 14 years older than their partners. And they were more than six times as likely to be more than 15 years older than their romantic interests.

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In other words, Hollywood films hold up a mirror to our real-world relationships. But the reflection we see in that mirror is heavily distorted, skewed toward the left side of the chart where older men pair off with much-younger women.

But what does it even matter if the film industry is depicting an unrealistic view of human relationships? Aren't most big-budget movies just a harmless form of entertainment, providing 90 minutes of escape into a glamorous fantasy world?

Of course they are. But the fantasy they're selling us — where older men well into their 60s and 70s cavort with nubile young women — is a distinctly male one. Data from dating site OKCupid show that men prefer women in their early 20s, regardless of what age the men themselves are. Women, on the other hand, tend to look for men who are roughly the same age as them.

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