May–December Romance - TV Tropes

May–December Romance - TV Tropes

May–December Romance

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"Some say I'm robbing the cradle, but I say she's robbing the grave!"

— Hubert Farnsworth, Futurama

It refers to a romantic relationship where there is a drastic difference in age between the two participants.

These seem to be less common in modern media, perhaps because some now perceive them to be Squicky. However, they still crop up from time to time; they're very common in soaps in particular.

The ways in which these relationships can occur in media can vary:

• Teachers and students. (The teacher must be significantly older than the student.)
• Lover and Beloved. (The mentor can't be very young themselves to count as an example of this trope.)
• An Arranged Marriage between two people of different ages that leads to real love.
• If an Older Sidekick or Battle Butler develops a Bodyguard Crush on their younger ward.
• If a writer is Pairing the Spares or Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends, they may pull a Last-Minute Hookup between two odd characters from two different generations.
• If the Dirty Old Man or Dirty Old Woman somehow manages to score.
• A plot to get in the older partner's will, or control the older/younger partner's estate.
• A person who Likes Older Men and/or Likes Older Women getting the attention of their love interest.
• A man who takes a much younger and prettier Trophy Wife or mistress.
• Or, hey, maybe the two characters just met and hit it off.

Generally, the man is the "December" (elder) and the woman is the "May" (younger), though it can happen the other way around. This can sometimes be a Double Standard in Hollywood, as while older actors get paired up with younger actresses, it doesn't happen so often in reverse.

May lead to cases of Ugly Guy, Hot Wife if the years haven't been kind to him. This is the romantic version of the Intergenerational Friendship.

It is the Real Life, mundane version of the Mayfly–December Romance and the Sub-Trope and extreme version of Age-Gap Romance.

Due to continued confusion over the applicability of this trope, here are the criteria that need to be satisfied to qualify for inclusion here:

• Presuming normal human lifespans, the partners must be at least 25 years apart in age and at different stages of life. Presuming normal human lifespans, the older needs to be at least 50 and of a senior citizen age. Similarly, the younger can be no more than 35, because the younger one is in the spring of their life.
• The ages are from when the relationship started. If a 50-year-old and an 85-year-old are a couple, this trope would qualify if they've been together for 30 years, but not if they started dating last week.
• Age is based on time actually living. Time spent frozen or otherwise in a suspended state is irrelevant. If a character goes into suspension at age 30 and comes out 100 years later, they're 30, not 130, for the purposes of this trope. Time travel also does not count, for example, a romance between a contemporary and a person of similar age but born decades in their future. An arguable exception is if said time traveller falls in love with someone from decades past, returns to the present, and finds out that person is still alive (albeit elderly) and there are still feelings between them.
• The difference has to be noted In-Universe as an unusually large age gap. The ages of the actors are immaterial. Thanks to Hollywood double standards against older actresses, many a film will cast an older male actor whose character's age is deliberately vague, meanwhile his female love interest is played by an actress young enough to be his daughter, but the gap is never brought up within the film itself. This applies to both live-action and voice acting.
• This is a Romance trope. There has to be an actual romantic relationship of at least a modest length to qualify; brief flings or one-off encounters don't qualify.
• For creatures with lifespans different from the human normal (extended or ephemeral), apply the above rules generally. If a 1,000-year-old ageless vampire is dating a 100-year-old vampire, this trope could apply, but not if they are dating a 500-year-old vampire. You might consider Mayfly–December Romance instead, where one creature has a (much) longer life expectancy than the other (but isn't always in different stages of life). For example when one partner is a normal human and the other is, for example, a Human Alien who might age much slower by our standards.

NOTE: This is an OBJECTIVE trope, meaning that it uses explicitly defined criteria; it is NOT a place to put any relationship which feels Squicky due to age differences. 30-year-olds dating 13-year-olds are not this trope.

This is Truth in Television, of course, but wasn't nearly as common in the past as some would have us think. Most couples in pre-modern days couldn't afford to marry until both the man and the woman had saved up enough to set up a household, and that could take years; it's therefore perhaps not surprising that the average ages at marriage for both men and women in Elizabethan England are identical to those in 21st century America where most of all married couples are within two to three years of each other. (It was even worse in medieval times when daughters would have to work for years to save up the customary fee owed their father's lord upon their marriage.)

Most May-December marriages in pre-19th century times were among the aristocracy, whose prominence in the history books is balanced by their small numbers (fewer than 0.5% of the population of Tudor England). Victorian-era historians, however, twisted the narrative, going as far as to destroy and deface records, to justify child marriage. At best their scholarship was unconsciously biased by their desire to justify their own cultural norms; at worst they deliberately lied.

See also Likes Older Men and Likes Older Women. Wife Husbandry is when someone intentionally raises a younger person to be their spouse. When the December is a woman, she may be Mrs. Robinson. Compare December–December Romance for romantic pairings between older characters and Merlin and Nimue for non-romantic partnerships with a large age gap and a gender difference. Often the result of an Unequal Pairing. Compare Age-Gap Algebra when a mathematical formula is proposed for determining when a romance is this (and for which the criteria listed above are one example).