It started with the age gap. Can a 40-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman truly get along? That was once a question answered with a resounding “yes” by creepy English professors or moustached indie film-makers with a questionable grasp on the meaning of Lolita. Then came gen Z.
A cohort raised on the rigid moral boundaries of internet discourse – things are either good or bad, no in-between – decided that May-December relationships were either problematically one-sided or transactional in nature. Growing up in the fractured aftermath of #MeToo, where monstrous men were often much older than the women they victimized, probably contributed to that conclusion.
The upshot was heated posting on social media about celebrities such as Billie Eilish, Florence Pugh and Beyoncé almost certainly being “groomed” by their older partners. Vogue wondered how many years between a couple’s respective birth years was acceptable. The New York Times called older women “in demand by younger men” The age gap became a news cycle of its own.
Now, the discourse has exploded such that seemingly any difference between two dating humans can be described as a “something” gap.
Said gaps are rarely flattering. There’s the intelligence gap, when a smart person hooks up with a dumbie. The unlucky avatars of this gap are Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. She’s written 14 No 1 hit singles. He once tweeted: “I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy.”
Cool people in love with losers have a swag gap. Pair an AI evangelist with a luddite and that’s a Claude gap, named for Anthropic’s LLM. An executive dating a middle manager faces a wage gap. I once heard a friend describe the predicament of a “Joe Rogan gap” – her boyfriend listened to the podcast during car rides while she plugged her ears to tune it out.
Publications continue searching for new and ultra-niche gaps to cover. New York magazine reported on the rise of the Disney gap, where adults obsessed with Mickey and co fall for people who couldn’t care less about the happiest place on Earth. The New York Times documented “restaurant gaps”: a Resy-obsessed woman who wants to eat at buzzy new places, yet is dating a man who eats the same deli sandwich for lunch every day. (In most gap scenarios, ages and genders are not prescriptive.)
Single people have been able to filter their potential matches on dating apps for well over a decade; you can set “dealbreakers” on Hinge that exclude people on the basis of age, ethnicity, religion, height and politics. Gaps are what happens when, despite all our best efforts, deviation creeps in.
Few of us (I hope) would argue that no power imbalance exists when a very young woman dates a much older man. I can see how a couple with a Joe Rogan gap might come to understand that variance speaks to larger ideological differences. But does a swag, restaurant, Disney or even wage gap really seem noteworthy?
This obsession with gaps seems to reflect a larger cultural queasiness around experiencing friction in relationships. This makes sense; much of modern dating is a humiliation ritual (so much so that many women are opting out of it entirely). For those who do hold their nose and dive in, it’s tempting to bail out at the first sign of trouble.
That trouble can look like someone trying to hurt you, or cheat on you, or vote for a candidate who is actively trying to erode your civil rights. Or, it can look like a boyfriend who doesn’t know how Resy works.
It’s true that we tend to be attracted to people who are similar to us. Psychologists believe this is because we associate our interests with an inner essence of self: someone who loves the same music or movies, we assume, will share our broader views and outlook on the world. Those invested in the lexicon of gaps ascribe a naughtiness to ending up with someone who is not their carbon copy, often attaching insurmountable odds to that relationship’s chances. But there’s one thing I know from attending a few weddings at the happiest place on Earth – that would be the New York City marriage bureau (sorry Disney gap-ers). If you watch enough people stream in and out of city hall, you will see soulmates who fell in love despite – or maybe because of – those so-called incompatibilities.
Dating needs fixing, but the solution is not seizing upon gaps. No two people are alike, and we are luckier for it. There should be more gaps, actually. Good thing I think that – they’re inventing new ones every day.
