Here’s a story I rarely tell. When I was 22, I was briefly pursued by a famous singer. We met at an awards ceremony, exchanged numbers, and, for a couple of months, he left me several voicemails a week, asking me out. Don’t worry, I probably wouldn’t believe me either, which is why I made a friend listen to the messages in our office bathroom.
As far as I can remember, they were pretty charming and would stand up to scrutiny post-#MeToo. But he was older—almost 40—and persuasive, so there was a certain pressure to just go with the flow, even though the whole thing made me feel unsteady on my feet. When he invited me to accompany him out of town, I hesitated. I thought it would probably be fine (and I still want to think that), but my gut told me there was no way I would accept such an offer from a random bloke of his age. I’d think that was sleazy and predatory. I said no.
I tell you this now not to burnish my own ego, but because I’ve just seen The Idea of You, a new rom-com in which Anne Hathaway plays a 40-year-old art gallery owner, called Solène Marchand, who starts dating Hayes Campbell, the 24-year-old lead singer of internationally famous boyband August Moon (think One Direction 2.0). In fact, the 2017 Robinne Lee novel on which it’s based is believed by many to be Harry Styles fan fiction.
The pair meet at Coachella, where Solène is chaperoning her 16-year-old daughter. Campbell pursues her and she agrees to accompany him on a trip out of town. You don’t have to try and imagine what happens when the tabloids catch wind of their relationship, because we’ve seen it play out in real life. “Hayes Caught With a Cougar” and “Sleaziest Mom of the Year?” are two of the film’s fictional headlines (“A passion for cougars!” was a real one when Styles began dating director Olivia Wilde, a decade his senior, in 2021).
Age-gap romances—particularly those in which the woman is older—are something we still struggle to understand. Despite an upward trend in famous women dating younger men and searches for age-gap relationships booming on dating apps, they’re still fetishized as something way outside the norm. Instead of seeing two people in love, or lust, we assume there must be something not quite right about one or both of them. It’s actually pretty depressing.