larry3344
Well-Known Member
We have a 16-year age gap — can our relationship last?
When Grace Ackroyd fell for her young neighbour she thought it could only be a fling, but after two years she asked a therapist if it could be something more
Grace Ackroyd and her boyfriend Joab
CIRCE HAMILTON FOR THE TIMES
Grace Ackroyd
Tuesday May 04 2021, 12.01am BST, The Times
This past year of being stuck indoors more has prompted me to write a list of what needs fixing. My skirting boards and teeth need filling, my bedroom door needs a lock and the carpet needs a skip. Thankfully, my love life’s all right. Joab and I have been together for more than two years, and I often describe our relationship as my most grown-up ever, even though there are 16 years between us.
If I’d listened to my mum, I might never have entertained a first drink with Joab. “Try being single,” she said to me after a year-long relationship ended abruptly. Before that, I’d been married for 11 years. Single didn’t mean free, though. I had a full-time job and three children tokeep me busy so, much to my mother’s relief, I wasn’t planning on any Hinge dates. Love pays no attention to good timing, though.
Joab didn’t exactly appear out of nowhere because he is my neighbour, but we had our first proper conversation outside my house as I was getting out of the car. I’d just dropped my daughter at a gig down the road and hadn’t bothered changing out of my slippers.
“Hey,” came a voice from the pavement. Looking up, I saw him. We had nodded and said hello as neighbours do, but I’d recently learnt from a mutual friend (my younger kids’ babysitter) that Joab thought I was hot.
“He must know how old I am,” I said, laughing. I am 43.
He could certainly guess. My daughter was only a few years younger than him — he is 27 — yet Joab took no time asking me out to the pub. Hot, I thought, as I watched him tap my number into his phone before looking down at my sheepskin hooves. I didn’t move out from behind my car because now that a date was on the cards I felt under pressure to be better than the woman who wears slippers outside.
A couple of months later — after several pub dates — we went to Brighton for the weekend. I can’t remember exactly what my question to Joab was as we walked along the seafront, but his answer came quick: “I don’t think this is going to be a long-term thing, is it?”
My stomach, which waltzed when we kissed, felt heavy. I was almost ready to start calling him my boyfriend. When I recall that moment now, though, I wonder whether Joab had been testing the water. I’ve started sentences with “I don’t think . . .” when actually I’ve been thinking the opposite.
We’ve trumped that early prediction, but the age gap has been an issue. Not for some of the more common things I hear about, such as we don’t like each other’s friends/habits/music taste or sense of humour. The problem is much more abstract and hard to define or talk about: the future.
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Joab wants to be a dad one day, but not now. We haven’t really delved into the possibility of having kids together, but “the science” says that if my eggs aren’t already fried, they will be very soon. If I were a man and he were a woman then I might not see a problem, but I come from a family who could catastrophise the peeling of a potato, so worry is in my DNA.
“Do you see a future together?” my friend asked me at lunch on my birthday last year.
“Maybe,” I said, unconvincingly. I did, really, but when I’d told Joab this he hadn’t said anything. My response to my friend was a way of trying to manage my disappointment.
Ackroyd: “Joab wants to be a dad one day, but not now”
CIRCE HAMILTON FOR THE TIMES
As if picking up the conversation we hadn’t finished two years previously in Brighton, I asked Joab later that week, “Do you see a possibility of us being together long-term? If you don’t, I understand, but the intention is what I need.”
It took some time for him to respond. He is a careful thinker, which is irritating and admirable. I cursed myself in those waiting days, thinking that if I’d ignored any question about the future then we could still be happy in the vagueness.
Clarity has saved me from financial ruin. After my divorce, I had to take my money seriously for the first time. I started working out my income and outgoings, and now check my bank balance every day, even though I sometimes do it through squinted eyes. However, relationships cannot be broken down into numbers, and in this scary moment of reckoning it felt as if I’d held up a road sign in front of Joab that said: “I’m old. Turn back.”
Of course, he didn’t need to be reminded of my age and in the end did see a future with me. He wasn’t sure what that looked like and he couldn’t promise anything other than intention. Was that enough?
It was. When I asked him, “So you want to carry on?” and he answered, “I do,” it felt more exciting than any imagined moment at the altar.
Yet this didn’t make me immune to worry. I still fantasised that I could fiddle time and wake up as a 35-year-old because we’d have wriggle room to have kids, maybe, later on. If I were 35, in 50 years’ time Joab would be waiting for the same Stannah Stairlift that had just dropped me at the top of the stairs, to carry him up to bed too.
I want to learn how to tame my more crazy thoughts. I visit Naomi Cambridge, a relationship coach, whom my friend rates highly because after a few sessions she ended a three-year relationship. She really wanted to marry her boyfriend, and he had no intention of marrying her. “There was no use shopping for bread at the ironmongers once I knew what I wanted,” my friend says.
On Zoom I almost start googling the price of veneers because Naomi has a great smile. Perhaps if I get shiny new teeth I’ll give my relationship with Joab a better chance of surviving, I think. The crazy thoughts are still very much alive.
With feet flat on the floor, she tells me to relax every bit of me before asking why I’m here. I tell her that I fall prey to anxious looping thoughts followed by a strong desire to have a talk with Joab about where we’re heading.
“When you go into the future, do you think you’re searching for something to make you feel secure?” Naomi asks. Well, yes. “Have you always done that in relationships?” Yes. “And the outcome is never happy, right?” Well, no.
Naomi advises me to name how I’m feeling in these moments because beyond the sensation, or feeling, is a thought, which is something I’m conjuring up.
When I’m in the park with my youngest son later that day, I see what she means when I walk past a couple with a baby. That will never be me and Joab, I think. And before I know it I’ve zoned out and my son has lost my attention completely. Not only that. I have lost all sense of what I’m incredibly lucky to already have: my health, three children, friends, a job and a great boyfriend.
In our next session I tell Naomi about my park experience. The day after, when I’m in the park and I see another trigger (a smiling, older couple), I try to name the sensations. “Cold toes, heavy stomach, light head.” Soon I’m tuned back into the present and I walk on by. This “pattern interruption”, as Naomi calls it, is working.
On our final Zoom she asks, “Has Joab ever done anything that convinces you you’re not secure in this relationship?”
No. The opposite. He is reliable, kind and loving like my closest friends. I say that in previous relationships I’ve never been careful like I’m being now. Not only because I’ve been with incompatible men, but because I’ve never really known when to hold on and when to let go.
Anything can feel like a threat when I’m feeling insecure, I realise. My friend relates: “I’m sometimes jealous of the chair that my husband sits on because it seems to have more contact with his arse than I do.”
Naomi tells me that once I stop obsessing about the unknown and being honest with Joab about the things I’m scared about, the desire to get him to commit to something I haven’t even really thought about yet will dissipate.
“The living together, the baby, the marriage — all of these external conditions are things that you think will make you feel safer,” Naomi tells me, “but you have to work on yourself first.”
Damn. I knew it started with me. I have kids, so they’re not a deal-breaker for me. And if they are for Joab, he can tell me when the time is right and we can see if we can make something work. Besides, I’m reminded by Naomi that we don’t even live together, so there’s not much point in going further into family planning. I need to learn to express my desires, but only when I feel them strongly. They don’t need to be forced.
The next step might be then, “I want to live with you, Joab” (and equally, he might say it to me), but it has to feel right. It cannot come from a place of panic. Simple, right? If only we didn’t have this age problem.
Naomi says that there’s no relationship in the world where there isn’t “something”. There will always be something. So there’s no need for a big talk, then? “No couple has ever benefited from talking about their relationship. You need to live it.”
I think about how lucky I’ve been to have Joab in my bubble during lockdown. Walking across the park. Making playlists. Sending each other cat Gifs. Dancing in the kitchen. Having a beer in the garden after work. Everything — from conversation to sex to cooking — gets better the more we carry on.
I make a joke to Naomi that I should only talk with Joab about the things that I can put on my wall calendar. “Exactly!” Naomi says. I glance at the wall. So far we have a weekend in Brighton, a holiday in July (our second with his family), a festival in September and a gig in October. We don’t need to write down the multiple Goggleboxes on the sofa with my children and the Below Deck episodes in my bed that are part of our happiness.
If I want to dream I can go into literature (Nick Hornby’s novel Just Like You was refreshingly on the side of older women and younger men getting it on). Celebrity romances such as the ones Sam Taylor-Johnson and Lisa Bonet have with their younger husbands buoy me up too, as do the less-Hollywood successes. A guy I work with whom I’ve never met recently told me about his partner of seven years, who’s 22 years older than he is. “It’s the best ever. Love wins.” I want to print that on a brooch and pin it to my chest.
Enjoying what we have now is what I’ve learnt not just from my sessions with Naomi, but from spending time with Joab. He knows how to live in the moment and he’s available for me, and that’s a first for anyone I’ve ever been with.
I cherish what others (often strangers) have said to Joab and me because we must appear like a regular couple with the same chance of success as anyone else walking down the street. I’d like to say thanks to the guy with the bottle of Strongbow outside Tesco who said to us recently: “Do I get an invitation to your wedding?” Marriage is not on the cards now, but who knows about the future?
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