When He Moves On With Someone (Much) Younger
I find out my ex has a new girlfriend the way nearly everyone in 2024 comes to find ghastly information — social media.
In his ineptitude to delete all mutual friends from his Instagram (a move he boldly proclaimed was to ‘cleanse’ us of knowing about the other, and of which I now suspect was an elaborate ruse), a friend was made privy to the social announcement this past weekend and informs me.
“I’m sure you already know, but I did see a new young girl already on {ex’s} Instagram feed,” she mentions. “Predictable, innit.”
She says it like I would know this information, which of course only causes me to pause flat-footed in my Airbnb kitchen, Swiffer in hand.
New girl. Young. Instagram feed.
What.
For three whole seconds, I attempt a murky benefit of the doubt: “Like, a girlfriend or just … a girl?” I ask, the octave in my voice rising at least one decimal.
It’s at this point my friend likely starts regretting the conversation’s derailment.
“Girl I’m sorry, yeah it does look like a girlfriend. He’s posting pictures in his feed of just them and she’s commented a bunch of new love feels.”
“Screenshot it,” I ask, more beg, as my friend hesitates.
“Are you sure? I feel like…”
“Positive.”
Moments later, I hear my phone ping in my ear. Income three photos - of which I’ll spare the unnecessary details. What is clear is my ex openly embracing a woman in a location I stood with him the year prior.
She is smiling gingerly as he towers over her. And while my ex himself is nearly 8 years younger than I am, this woman is clearly much … and I stress much younger than even he.
Call me an aging millennial (I am), but it takes one glance of the outfits and selfie poses to ascertain that she is barely of drinking age in my country.
With my original doubt erased (couldn’t it just be his sister, who is in fact beautiful and could be mistaken as a gf!) my stomach flips with this new, unexpected truth:
My ex - at record speed - has moved on publicly with someone whom I will later confirm is 14 years my junior.
He is dating someone I could biologically claim as a daughter.
Age gap relationships, as I have spoken to in other posts, are the relentless topic of ongoing social commentary; the argument of what’s appropriate and what’s predatory being the focus of essays that appear in publications ranging from The Cut to Cosmopolitan Magazine.
When I first embarked on my age gap relationship with my ex, while feeling very Mrs. Robinson I scoured the internet looking for assurance that I was not in fact weird.
He was 25 when we met at an event. I was 32. I instinctively knew he was too young and left him mostly on read in my DMs. When we reconnected the following year and he confirmed he’d turned 26 - something about that number felt less … cringe. Less Leo DiCaprio. Less scrutiny I’d face from family and friends. When he mentioned he dreamed of kids, well bingo. Shots fired — I was in.
Later, I found through exhaustive online searches that we as society have a general rule to determine if someone is too young (your age, halved, plus 7) or too old (your age, minus 7, then doubled) for you. My range now is 24 to 56. But, I’ll note what I really go after these days is any emotionally mature human who I don’t have to financially support or explain what the best 90s cartoons were (Wishbone, Arthur).
My ex’s age range would be 21 - 42. I’ll leave that there without further ado.
Armed with the knowledge of this new woman, I spent the next hour oscillating between social snooping and trying to determine the rationale of why and what my ex is doing with his life when less than 6 weeks prior we’d seen one another and he’d prattled on about taking time to heal.
As I whined to my brother, he - always one to ground my delusion - stopped me mid-sentence:
“It’s just so him,” I’m ranting. “Feed the ego at whatever cost! He knew what he was doing finding some foreign child bride! Where did he even find this woman - at a middle school dance? The ball pit in McDonalds?”
“Linds,” my brother interjects (though I will say he gives me a chuckle on the McDonalds dig.)
“Well, first of all she’s the same nationality as him so I wouldn’t call her ‘foreign’ or a child bride, but I get what you’re saying. And I mean this not in a dick way, but does it really matter why he’s doing it? Both of you could barely understand each others decisions in your actual relationship. Why start trying to make sense of his now?”
And to that, I say touche.
He’s right. The truth is I’m not (or I shouldn’t be) really interested in the psychology behind my ex’s decision to now date someone as significantly young as he is to me. We had a remarkably difficult time understanding one another while we were living together, so why begin to understand someone who I no longer have the opportunity to observe at face value.
An even more unsavory reality I must contend with is that there are few young 20-something women who would not happily date someone who is objectively an attractive, tall, and innately protective and relationally-loyal man. Of course I know what this 21 year old sees in my ex. I saw it too - only from the more skeptical viewpoint of 14 years her senior, which unfortunately forced me to contend with whether this person really was ready to be a husband and father at the timeline I need.
Where she is likely happy to be adored by someone with (debatable) more maturity, I was miserable trying to force his junior to my senior.
What I suspect more than anything is that she also makes him feel good about himself. Adored, wide-eyed, and unabashedly chosen (as it would suggest from the Facebook cover photo), which was often inaccessible in our relationship as our varying cultural and age differences cemented into unspoken grievances and resentment.
At 35, I am no longer one to ramble on in a Instagram post about my dearly beloved, especially if the relationship shows multiple signs of instability. You have enough break ups, watch enough of your friends relationships dissolve, and you wise up that maybe posting paragraphs of eternal love could potentially look at best a bit silly - at worst, flat out manic and embarrassing as you’re forced to archive them.
My ex hated my reluctance to post him on social. It was a source of bitter age difference contention. My guess is he is thrilled to now be someone else’s centerfold. And how can I fault him for that?
—
Ultimately, the real reason I grew fixated on the age of my ex’ new girlfriend these past few days has had nothing to do with the psychology behind his choice - and everything to do with my own crisis of self this year and how it has forced me to reconcile with my own past, the choices I've made, and the person I've become because of them.
The last couple of days, I can’t stop thinking about myself at 21-22: the ages I got a DWI, studied abroad in London, moved to Spain, had a raging eating disorder, and dated a pothead named Adam who left his phone in a couch for 10 days and didn’t call me and yet I still continued to see him. I think of who I was, how young I was, and mostly the time I’d still have to figure it out.
In some ways it feels like by starting over with a younger woman, my ex has found a way to get the time back that I preciously lost with him: the fertility time that gnawed at my brain while freezing my eggs this summer like some ticking time bomb you hear but can’t find.
I’m indignant with jealousy because it feels like he gets the closest you could get to a do over without a genie in the bottle or boarding the Michael Fox Back to the Future time capsule. He gets time back, of which he already had more than I objectively have (to bare children that is) and on the flip side, I feel I am scraping the barrel of what’s considered in our society as the remaining ‘good years’ for a woman.
Society’s messaging is overt and brutally clear, I am stretching the final years of attractiveness, appropriate free spiritedness and crop tops. Essentially, I am counting down the final years of ‘being wanted’, if we attach being wanted to vanity, and without fail, we do. Of course, women all know better - in fact I feel way hotter now at 35 than I ever did at 15 or 25 - but it is hard to hold tight to the truth about ourselves when the media and men act astonished at a “how does she do it still” sexy 49-year-old Angelina Jolie.
Armed with this cultural cruelty, it’s difficult to be in my newfound single reality and not let my mind wander to the rewind button, the masochism of would I undo it all if I could: to go over all the times I told my own mind to stop overthinking and roll with the risks of an age gap relationship so I could move forward with choices I knew could bite me in return: move to Montreal on a whim for him, ignore our vastly different financial values while paying off his debts on my credit card, overlook the gut feeling that I could not trust this person’s pattern of emotional immaturity, the list goes on.
If I were to hit the rewind button and rewatch - how many times would I be forced to remember when my ex and I did things that were so beyond questionable to one another over the last couple of years that we could have been full features on The Maury Povich Show.
It forces one (me) to worry whether I’ve learned anything at all since the days I was young, 21, and heartbreakingly naïve. Or have I just repeated the same version of shit I thought I got away from in my late 20s only to now experience it again far into my 30s. Am I now destined to be panicked with time while my ex gets to wear horrifying Gen Z jorts and drink jungle juice out of a paint can at his girlfriend’s uni party?
Time will tell I suppose.
As we fought with petty malice this morning over the debts and the timeline I’ll be receiving them — I mentioned a toxic condescending dig that insinuated that by dating a child he’ll need to provide for her and I want to have my money back before that happens.
In return, he made sure to quip:
“So what if she’s younger — just means I have more time now and we have more time to figure shit out.”
What he didn’t say, but I well understood was lurking behind that cutting statement: “She has time — therefore I have time. You don’t.”
Touche.
All weekend and into this week, I have felt the pull towards indignation and I want to scream from the rooftops “It’s not fair.” It’s not fair that these last few precious years of my youth have gone to waste with an even more youthful man, and now he’ll get to siphon off an even more youthful woman’s. That I spent precious time caretaking a man who, as we broke up and moved out of our home, couldn’t be bothered to pack up his own things and instead spent the final nights of our lease making out with a woman at a music festival while I folded his clothes into a suitcase. And then had the audacity to call me for a ride.
It’s not fair, I stamp my foot, that these are the lessons that I paid for on his behalf in collagen and fine lines via the stress of our in-predictability. (Granted, my own culpability in our demise has a way of fading into the background when I’m throwing a tantrum. Convenient, I know.)
It’s interesting what the fear of age does to a woman. And maybe that’s the point of this whole essay. And the whole crutch of my existentialist fixation.
Would I have stayed so long had I been he or his gf’s age? I knew our communication styles were vastly different and that our arguments were unmanageable early on and though I hired separate therapists, couples counselors, and bought all the books one can on Amazon on how to communicate with love — we never so much as made a dent in our relationship pattern: one I hope we both never live through again.
Ultimately, I left relationships in my 20s for far less sound reasoning than this one. So at night I thumb through the perplexing whys of why I didn’t leave this one when I think I would have sooner ten years ago.
I could say love - and there is part of that that is true, too. I did and do still love my ex, in spite of the hell we caused one another.
Oddly, when a couple is as extreme in their ups and downs — the highs are the highest while the lows are the lowest. In turn, it leaves a weird collection of memories.
On the days I miss him, I know exactly what I miss, and what I miss about feeling loved specifically by this man. A therapist would argue these highs are adrenaline and quick dopamine fixes in a cycle of instability but in truth, I don’t really care what science speak we use - it doesn’t help my aching heart when I remember how much I love his family or when I try to dismantle the very clear, very vivid image I had of what I hoped our life would be and what our kids would grow up with.
The same goes for the days I don’t miss: I know exactly why I left and exactly what I left from. And I am only ever one shifting memory away from these completely opposing emotions.
So while I could peg ‘love’ as a reason for why I didn’t leave sooner — the truth is I also know it was rooted in fear.
I truly did not want to start over again at 35, a reality so daunting it now regularly keeps me fearing if I’ll actually have children or if perhaps I should accept that maybe that’s not the path I’m meant to take. Again, time will tell.
Overall, when I get to the girth of what this experience is - the revelation of my ex’s new partner is really just a symbolic light shining on my biggest fears in the form of a 21-year old who can pull off tube tops while I’m over here pulling out grays.
Annoyingly, I am forced to let go of the self-centered notion that my ex’s decision to date this new girlfriend has anything to do with me. After all, I am not planning to select my new partner with him in mind. I wish him happiness (well, kind of. Check back with me in a month.) and it’s really not a surprise that our versions of new peace would appear differently, even if I am personally befuddled by the hastiness in his choice. Like, maybe let the ink dry on our apartment rescind or pay me back the large debt you owe first — but to each their own.
What I have learned this week?
I can be in the trenches of what feels like a badly acted Netflix melodrama and still have insanely loyal friends checking in, or call my family for their ever-present support and advice and be met with sound reasoning. I’ve been notoriously not great at romantic relationships, but objectively this experience has shown me me that I have been successful at picking and maintaining great friends and family.
As for myself? At 35, I’m an oddly pieced together woman — a mismatched puzzle of decades of big risks that didn’t pan out and also big risks that superseded my wildest expectations.
Because of it, I can balance throwing a hurt tantrum while somehow still closing a new dream client this week for my business. In my current self-pitying, I see how I still wake up every day armed with a fierce sense of independence, ambition, and a “get up, dust yourself off and go” mentality.
I attribute all that to my age.
With time, I have the benefit of feeling confident and shrew, while also being sentimental and sensitive. I’ve taken risks that have flattened me (say, this one … or 8 years ago when at the height of my writing career I published an article about having a crush on my ‘work husband’ that would roast me online) and risks that also resulted in the big, juicy life I have now (rehab, my recovery blog, starting a business, the van, moving countries and states) —
And all of it has been fueled via the gift of time and experience. For that, can I be anything but grateful?
Ultimately, I understand that life will move along and I’m destined to experience more risks which will pan out or flail out, just like this year. You siphon what you can from experiences, and the rest fades whether you wish it to or not.
I hope I have a child with a partner one day, but if that doesn’t happen — so be it. I’ll go at motherhood alone and I know I’ll be damn good at it, too.
I’ll be fine. I’ll be free. I’ll get what I desire in part because I have always wrestled for that which I want the most.
In two years I’ll re-read this essay and I will no longer connect with the pain I feel today. Hurt diminishes, life changes, anger has nowhere to go but to recede.
And I also know that I possessed none of this comfort or knowledge at 21. I fought for it, was knocked over the head by it, and have woven my way to it in the 35 years I’ve been on this planet.
And to that, I say back to my ex: touche.
This is a really good article to help men like me comprehend just how different the time scales feel for men and women for reproduction. I hope you get what you want - and I hope it makes you happy, too!
Man. Every bit of this. My ex moved on rapid fast with a woman 10 years our senior. Proposed to her a year after he dumped her and rekindled our relationship. Proposed to her in the EXACT way we always said he’d propose to me . I can’t instagram snoop for a shot of the ring bc I KNOW I’ll vomit. I found out about the engagement via the ex we spent our entire relationship fighting about bc he couldn’t move on from her and with whom I’m now semi-friends with. Ha. I’m stuck with the soul-sucking grief, implacable rage, waves of denial, toxic jealousy, and relief that I’m not her whole simultaneously wishing I was her.
I miss the days of no social media where we didn’t know anything about our exes. Thank you for putting my feelings into words—and helping me realize I’m not alone. Breaking up and moving on is shitty and hard and I hate it.