News of twenty-seven-year-old actress Sydney Sweeney’s breakup with her forty-one-year-old fiancé, Jonathan Davino, broke last week. Within a few days, I saw countless TikToks and Instagram reels criticizing their fourteen-year age difference, saying that their relationship was “inherently problematic” and “doomed from the start.” It got me thinking about the ethics of age gap relationships: what’s problematic, what’s not, and who decides? The biggest issue most people tend to take with age gap relationships is a difference in maturity that comes from where each person is in life, which can lead to a power imbalance.
Maturity is important for both partners when approaching a relationship with an age gap. Younger partners have to understand that the older partner has more life experiences. Your place in life has a huge impact on your mindset towards life. For example, someone in their early thirties may be much more ready to get married and have children than someone in their early twenties, who could still be in college. This would obviously have an effect on the compatibility between those two people. Wanting different things from life is a damper on compatibility for partners of any age, but it is a more common problem for those in age gap relationships.
A maturity difference can lead to a power imbalance when one partner (usually the older partner) uses their life experiences as leverage against the other partner. This can be something as simple and harmless-looking as dismissing the opinions of the younger partner to something as large and outwardly abusive as controlling the younger partner’s finances and living situation.
As someone in a relationship with an age gap, I have plenty to say. I had my first date ever a couple of weeks after my eighteenth birthday with a guy from my hometown who was twenty-two. Our families knew of each other, but we never really got to know each other until we matched on Tinder (which I had downloaded as a joke, but that’s a different story). We survived my move to college, and then his college graduation and subsequent move halfway across the country. We’ll celebrate three years together this May.
Some may think it’s a little sketchy that we started dating so soon after I became a legal adult, but I don’t. As stated earlier, the parts of age gap relationships with the most potential for problems are the power imbalance, maturity difference, and stage of life difference. I think our situation lands firmly in the “Not Problematic” category.
I have always felt and acted older than most of my peers. I have struggled to find my place socially for most of my life. My emotional age is one of the many reasons why I didn’t date until I was eighteen years old. When it comes to our places in life, we could talk about professors, on-campus events, and how we couldn’t wait for payday because we were both college-age young adults when we started dating. Almost three years later, we still have so much to talk about. He can offer me advice from his job-search experience, and I can share the research I’ve done on where we can live based on the cost of living and career opportunities for both of us.
Additionally, our constant communication has ensured that I have never felt like I have less power in our relationship. We can express ourselves freely when issues arise. We have our own incomes, our own friends, and our own interests. When one of us goes out with friends, we let the other know when our location changes. We don’t control each other, we just care deeply about and for each other. I believe that’s exactly how it should be.
If you or someone you know is experiencing an abusive relationship, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.