When I tell people that I only date men younger than me, they often look at me with pity, disdain, or ask if I’m having a midlife crisis.
For the record, I’m not. I’m a 40-year-old fabulous geriatric millennial who went from never being allowed a boyfriend to someone’s wife, aged 19, through a forced marriage and then a long-term relationship and a revolving door of “situationships”.
I’ve only ever been single for a grand total of 18 months in my entire adult life. So when I hit my late 30s I finally realised I didn’t really want any “ships” at all. Which is why dating men in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties works perfectly. No strings attached, no future, no emotional admin – just the way I like it.
Part of the appeal is that they’re not looking for anything serious, either. Most younger men I meet are in no rush to settle down. They get to go out with a “hot cougar” (their words, no offence taken), and I get to channel Leonardo DiCaprio. If he can do it, so can I.
What I didn’t expect was what dating younger guys would reveal. Most of them are operating from the same unspoken “Lad Code” playbook.
Of course it’s #notallmen – a lot of them are often funny, kind and emotionally literate – but I have noticed, particularly in the 23-28 age range, they tend to follow the same script. On dates, I hear variations of the following lines:
“Most girls aren’t into that,” when I mention ethical non-monogamy.
“Girls can’t be hot AND fun so you must be hot and crazy” – in response to my dating profile, which is admittedly a work of art .
“You are so confident” – said like a compliment, but often landing with a faint undertone that I shouldn’t be this confident.
Then there are the double standards they don’t even bother to hide. Men can sleep around, but women can’t. Men can have a “high body count”, but women shouldn’t, and if they do, they’re judged to kingdom come.
One man I went on a date with reeled off six different words for a “slag”, just part of the everyday banter between him and his mates. At one point I said: “I’m a slag.” He immediately shut it down. No, I wasn’t one. I was, apparently, a more “classy” version. I was discovering a whole ranking system and I didn’t even know I was being graded. When I asked what the male equivalent was, he couldn’t think of a single one. Obviously.
Men can “accidentally” mess up on a stag do in Marbella, but if a girlfriend did the same, it would be “unforgivable”, another told me. He genuinely couldn’t see the hypocrisy, no matter how I framed it. It’s like men are operating from one code and women from another, and no one gave me the memo.
And that’s all just three drinks in. We haven’t even got to sex yet. Or more specifically, the complete lack of communication around it.
The irony is not lost on me that some men are able to communicate very well what they want from women but far less capable of asking what women actually want. In the bedroom, in life. Anywhere.
For instance, the number of men who have casually choked me without asking is… alarming. Not always malicious, but almost always assumed.
One otherwise lovely 26-year-old I dated; sober, sweet, emotionally switched-on, went straight for my throat. When I asked if he usually checked with girls first, he said yes. In reality, he didn’t. He did it, then checked afterwards. Which, as far as safety goes, slightly defeats the point. I know so many younger women who would say nothing, and if I was dating in my 20s I probably would’ve done the same.
And increasingly, quite a few of them can’t actually finish sex at all and have admitted it’s because of how much porn they watch. Some have told me they watch multiple times a day, sometimes out of boredom or habit.
On the very few occasions I’ve dated men my own age, the difference is noticeable. Older men, especially those coming out of long-term relationships or marriages, tend to be better at communicating. They ask, they listen, they’ve learned about women by actually being with them. With younger men, it often feels like they’ve learned about women second-hand, through porn, memes, group chats, Reddit threads and whatever the algorithm has decided to feed them that week, rather than simply talking to actual, real women.
But these men aren’t being radicalised, they’re being socialised. If your sex education comes from porn, your lad mates who are just as clueless as you, and an algorithm feeding you more of the same shit, it’s not surprising the lines start to blur.
And it’s often these men who slip through the net. We know how to spot the extreme ones – the loud, fringe voices, the ones who make their views obvious. They’re easy to avoid, like a walking red flag with loud sirens attached. It’s the everyday guy, the one at the gym, the one at work, the one you actually like, where this thinking quietly shows up.
That’s what makes it harder to see, and harder to challenge, because these aren’t the kinds of men women get their defences up around. These are the ones we like, the ones we date, the ones we try to build something with.
And if you’re a young woman, still finding your voice, it’s harder to push back. You don’t want to seem difficult. You don’t want to kill the vibe. You might tell yourself that if you don’t go along with it, he’ll just find someone else who does. After all, he isn’t saying anything as outrageous as those manosphere influencers. So you let it slide, brush it off, tell yourself it’s not that deep, and so this kind of behaviour continues.
I’m not angry at these men. I enjoy listening to them, understanding why they think the way they do. Sometimes I even feel like their agony aunt, and if I can shift their worldview even slightly, it feels like my own version of public service. A kind of unofficial dating de-radicalisation programme.
And maybe that’s part of it. Maybe meeting women who don’t fit the mould, who challenge the script, even a little, is how those ideas start to shift. But it can’t just be women doing the correcting, the actual “good” men need to talk up more.
It hasn’t put me off dating younger men. If anything, it’s made me understand exactly why I do it.
There’s no pressure, no expectation, no illusion of a future, just honesty about what it is. But it has made me realise how much of what we accept as “normal” in dating isn’t questioned nearly enough. And maybe that’s where it starts.
Not with grand gestures, dramatic change or some guy on TikTok telling you how to be a man but with small interruptions. A conversation. A challenge. A moment where someone says: “no mate, that’s not actually how this works.”
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