Dear Mariella

The dilemma I have a year-old daughter who I believe is in a relationship with a year-old man. It’s been going on since she was around 17, when she began babysitting for his children. When I ask her about it, she flatly denies it, but she is an attractive girl who has never shown any interest in guys her own age, and she lies to me about where she is going.

We have had a troubled relationship for a number of years, although she’s still living at home.

In her latest “Love Essentially” column, Jackie Pilossoph offers 21 dating tips that Editor-in-chief, Divorced Girl Smiling, Love Essentially columnist and author.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man over 30 must be in want of a significantly younger woman. Just because we acknowledge this fact, though, does not mean we do so without a certain amount of derision and judgment. From the Instagram commenter who felt the need to remind Zach Braff that he is 44 after the actor dropped a cutesy emoji under a post from year-old girlfriend Florence Pugh to the collective eye-roll aimed at Leonardo DiCaprio every time the actor steps out with a new subyear-old girlfriend, the internet loves to hate an eyebrow-raising age gap.

The problem with this narrative, as comedian and writer Anya Volz pointed out in a Twitter thread last weekend, is that it tends to paint men at the northern ends of these age gaps as inherently predatory, rendering the younger women on the opposite sides helplessly preyed-upon victims of male exploitation instead of conscious, self-determined agents who are more than capable of pursuing older men as willfully and actively as older men pursue them.

This is not to say that such dynamics are never predatory and older men should feel free to relentlessly pursue younger women because all young women are actively seeking such attention. The first rule of not being the worst is to stop assuming that literally anything is ever true of all women or, for that matter, all people of any gender, race, age, sexuality, etc.

It is to say, however, as Volz expressed in her thread, that while these conversations ostensibly intend to protect young women, they have a tendency to instead strip such women of their autonomy, relegating all women in relationships with older men to a state of presumed vulnerability. Also complicating this already nuanced matter? The fact that while the internet loves to shade older men for dating younger women, it also enjoys mocking young men for … being young men.

Meanwhile, both of these seemingly contradictory views appear to be thriving in overlapping circles of the internet. This idea that women are obviously drawn to older men over their useless something counterparts while the older men who date these women are creepy quasi-pedophiles preying upon a vulnerable population is what we might call a double standard. To be quite clear, I am not here to rail on behalf of aspiring Leo Dicaprios against the great injustice that is men having to face a tiny bit of criticism for reaping the rewards of a societal dynamic that routinely puts them in bed with young, beautiful women.

I am here, however, to suggest that liking and pursuing younger women as an older man is not inherently predatory or exploitative.