If you buy into the idea that you lose value as you age, it becomes self-fulfilling

I’ve always found it painful to watch younger women being scathing about their older counterparts. Do you not know you’ll be old someday, I think to myself when I hear little outbursts like this. Do you not know there will be a sea of insecure, bitchy 22-year-olds with glowing skin and 10 per cent body fat waiting to tear you down too?

Being temperamentally disposed to always be anticipating future hardships years or decades in advance, I’ve identified with older women since before I turned 25, but now in my 30s I’m encountering an unexpected new generational dynamic. Suddenly, having not been around them in a decade, I’m increasingly socialising with women in their early 20s again, because now my peers are beginning to date them. I had sort of forgotten this was an inevitable part of life, that people, – more often men – can go out with people a decade or more younger than them. I knew that was a usual part of romantic life, but had somehow abstracted it and never applied it to my own friends. I was still seeing us all as the dorky youngsters we once were, back when dating somebody much younger than you was a marker of being a serious loser with serious deficits instead of perfectly normal – or even, if you are a particularly annoying sort of person, a kind of status symbol in itself.

I thought of this new development in my life when I saw the latest 25-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio is dating, a model named Vittoria Ceretti. DiCaprio has famously never publicly dated a woman older than this despite now being 48. He is the real-life edition of that iconically sleazy line from Dazed and Confused that Matthew McConaughey delivers with such winning enjoyment: “I get older and they stay the same age.” There’s nothing at all inherently wrong with an age-gap relationship between two fully formed adults, of course, and it would hardly be worth commenting on if DiCaprio had not maintained such a remarkably unbroken volley for his entire adult life. It feels almost intentionally provocative at this stage. Was there not a single 30 (or even an unthinkable 40!) year old woman on the face of the earth he found attractive enough to date for two months just to break the curse, or does he enjoy the sustained rally and perhaps even superstitiously believes in its ability to preserve his own proxy youth and relevance?

Many of the more tiresome misogynist responses at this stage will posit that it is simply a matter of evolutionary logic and that DiCaprio’s status as an A-list actor allows him to act in the way that all men would if they were capable of doing so. According to them, any high-status man with his power would only date women between 19 and 25, after which, according to them, attractiveness declines. Undeniably it’s true that men’s dating preferences skew younger, and that Hollywood is littered with gargantuan age-gap relationships (Al Pacino recently fathered a baby with his partner Noor Alfallah, who is more than 50 years his junior). But there are too many exceptions to this logic to hold up. Are we to assume that Daniel Craig, for instance, is unhappily settling for his stunningly beautiful 53-year-old wife Rachel Weisz because he is incapable of attracting anyone younger? It is simply not an empirical law of nature, and that’s why its consistency appears so comical in DiCaprio’s case.

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Regardless, I’m not so much curious about why he only wants to date much younger women, but rather about how other people in his life feel about it. Really, what I am curious about is whether he has any women friends of his own age and what they make of the routine roll-out of the latest model. Are they rolling their eyes? Do they wonder what is so repulsive about their shared age that he could never date someone within it?

[ Cannes 2019: Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend is how old? ]

I had a brief defensive jolt when some of my male acquaintances first began to date women 10 years younger than them, not because I was attracted to them or felt personally rejected by their choices, but because I suddenly felt the whole wearying cliche business looming just ahead in the distance, all that sitcom stuff of the woman in her 30s or 40s sitting home alone on a Friday night making popcorn while her contemporaries swan around town with their young girlfriends. But the fact is, although I understand these cliches are grounded in some sort of substance to do with skewed gender and age dynamics, the broader reality they suggest has simply never defined my experience of life – neither my own nor the older women I know. There feels to me a definite aspect of self-fulfillment in the rote scenario where, if you buy in to the idea that you lose value as you age, then not only will you be fearful of the future, but you will also be scrappy and bitter in the marketplace of romance, which is perhaps the least attractive trait of all. When you free yourself from the assumption that these social traditions are actual laws, life feels a lot longer, a lot less confined.

In this way you can even allow yourself to love the company of the 22-year-old women your friends bring around sometimes who – although you could not pay me enough money to either be 22 again or to date someone that age – are also kind of a blast.

Megan Nolan is a journalist and author