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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 333 - Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 19: Age Gap - transcript

(Originally aired 2026/01/17 - listen here)

I confess this is going to be a bit skimpier than my usual trope episodes. I had planned an entirely different topic for this month’s show, but it’s turning out to be far more involved and elaborate than originally intended. And on top of that I’m about to be traveling for a couple weeks, so I needed something I could put together quickly without a lot of background research.

So today we’re going to talk about age-gap romances. The “Our F/Favorite Tropes” series examines popular historic romance tropes from the point of view of female couples and considering both the similarities and differences from other types of couples. In literature, a trope is a recurring motif that is understood to carry a certain expected structure and meaning. The trope could be a situation, such as forced proximity, or a character type, such as the lovable rogue. It could be a type of relationship, such as a second-chance romance, or even a mini-script, such as a Cinderella story.

I tend to see discussions and tags for age-gap romances mostly in the context of contemporary lesbian romance, and there are solid historic reasons for that—but not because age-gap relationships don’t exist for male-female or male-male couples,  but rather that they don’t tend to be viewed as noteworthy in those contexts.

Historically, the combination of patriarchy and the valorizing of female virginity at marriage has meant that male-female marriages default to the man being older than the woman. “Older” doesn’t automatically get classified as an age gap—a number that gets hotly debated and is variable depending on the absolute age of the participants. Patterns in age at marriage could differ considerably across time and geography. Europe tended to fall into two general patterns, the so-called “Mediterranean pattern” where women married relatively young, usually to significantly older husbands, leaving young men often in a lengthy unmarried state waiting to acquire sufficient wealth or social power to be competitive. A number of other economic factors tended to accompany this pattern, but we’ll stick to the age factor for now. The other pattern—the so-called “northern pattern”—involved the man and woman being of roughly similar age (though still the man was typically older), with women marrying later, typically after working outside the home to help accumulate a nest egg to set up the married household. But even in regions where the northern pattern held for middle and working classes, it was often the case that the upper classes married their daughters off younger to significantly older men.

Combined with the tendency of historic romance to concentrate on upper-class characters, this means that—whether it’s a classic by Jane Austen or written by a contemporary author—it’s normal to see a pairing where the woman is just coming out into society in her late teens or early 20s and the man is mature and established and well into his 30s. Austen’s Emma is 20 years old while her eventual groom Knightley is 37 and the near-parental relationship between them is considered unremarkable.

All of this is to say that an age gap in a heterosexual historic romance is not noteworthy enough to be considered a trope…unless it’s the woman who’s older, and then it becomes an entirely different trope, the “cougar” or “older woman.” It’s not the difference in ages that is noteworthy in that context, but the reversal of the expected difference.

I’m far less familiar with the typical patterns in male-male romance novels, whether contemporary or historic, but within history itself, from ancient Athenian pederastic relationships up through the libertinism of the 17th century, the standard expectation was for erotic relationships between men to involve a hierarchical difference, most often based on age, but also including status. The asymmetry aligned with expected sexual roles, with the older, more socially powerful man taking the dominant, masculine-coded role and the younger, lower ranking one taking the “passive,” feminine-coded role. This made for a dynamic and shifting framework in which younger partners “aged out” of their former role and were expected to take up the dominant role with a new, younger partner. In individual instances this alignment might not hold, or one might find a stable age-matched pairing, but such arrangements were a “marked state”—the non-default—and it was egalitarian relationships that were considered transgressive. Of course, this pattern is also driven by patriarchal dynamics, where only the dominant partner is considered truly masculine. Around the 18th century there also developed, in parallel, a culture of male-male eroticism that focused more on mutual desire and something resembling the idea of sexual orientation. In this context, age and status dynamics became less of a defining feature, though the hierarchical pattern still held in many contexts.

When we come to consider female couples in history, we have neither the socio-economic politics of patriarchal marriage dynamics, nor the tradition of aged-based hierarchy for male partners. Bernadette Brooten (in Love Between Women) takes the analysis farther than the evidence can likely support in concluding that female homoeroticism in the classical and early Christian world was rooted in non-hierarchical, egalitarian relationships. (In contradiction, there is that one, tantalizing reference to Spartan women engaging in something equivalent to male pederasty.) But throughout European history the two primary patterns for relationships between women are not based on age difference, but either on similarity—of age, status, background—or on the reflection of a male-female relationship with one partner performing masculinity to some degree, but where age is not a component of determining who takes that role.

When there is a significant age difference within a specific couple, it may affect the types of models they use to enact and understand their relationship. In a different trope episode I discussed how some couples—particularly in the 19th century—adopted maternal symbolism in the context of age difference. In literary examples from at least the 16th century onward, age differences often appear in the context of mentorship, where an experienced older woman initiates a younger one into sexuality. Of course, these examples aren’t necessarily intended in a positive light! But it’s one context in which an age gap is made meaningful in the establishment and maintenance of a female couple. (It’s also a context that can be turned on its head to interesting effect, if a more experienced younger woman finds herself mentoring a “late bloomer” who is otherwise more established in life.)

As I’ve discussed in various other trope episodes, various scenarios carry with them the default expectation of maturity: the widow, the established businesswoman, the wealthy spinster taking on a companion. While these roles don’t require that a potential partner be significantly younger, including an age gap in the set-up changes the basic dynamics in systematic ways.

In each of these cases, the inclusion of an age gap is a choice, rather than a default expectation, which is what makes this element a trope rather than a part of the literary wallpaper.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

• The historic and social context of age-differentiated pairings of various genders
• Why the “age gap” trope tends to be restricted to f/f romance
• Historic contexts for age-gap relationships

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop
• Bluesky: @heatherrosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)