Age Gap

The internet likes creating new terms for things that have always existed. A favorite I came across a few months ago was something called “house burping,” which is literally just opening your windows and airing out your house every once in a while. (Gen Z also seems committed to adding “maxxing” to the end of mundane concepts, but that will remain none of my business for my own sanity.)

A term I’ve seen crop up a lot in the last year or so is “age gap relationship.” Again, not a new concept. Possibly not even a new term, but it feels like I’ve seen this phrase more in the last two years than in the entirety of my previous forty. I am, as the kids say, in an age gap relationship. One person in their 40s and another in their 50s is hardly a scandal, but here we are, somehow a generation apart because our Boomer parents’ generation was so large, they had to split into factions. 

My early ‘80s cohort was briefly considered Gen X before we were deemed the start of Gen Y. Then someone decided that those of us aged 15-20 during Y2K were going to be called Millennials. Why those ages? Why not decide Gen Y will be 1980-2000 and then the babies born in the new millennium will begin a more aptly named Millennial generation? Who knows! But I digress.

With the exception of differing pop culture touchstones in our teen years, Sean and I had largely similar ‘80s-flavored childhoods. For the vast majority of our thirteen-year relationship, our age gap has felt pretty surface-level. “Oh my god you didn’t watch that show?” “What do you mean you’ve never heard this song?” Things like that. 

Recently, it’s presented itself in a different way. As we approach life as a middle aged couple, planning for our not-so-distant future has entered the chat. That means talking about money, which I hate, but more than that, it’s seeing documented evidence that we actually are from two different generations. In that sense, whoever changed the early ‘80s babies’ designation from Gen X to Millennial was prescient enough to know we’d be entering adulthood under very different circumstances.

Of course, as with any generalized groups, exceptions abound and personal circumstances matter. However, it was hard not to confront just how much was simply lost to my generation by the time we entered “the real world.” 

As a Gen Xer, Sean got in under the wire to benefit from things our Boomer parents told us would be there for us after college - a good, stable job with benefits and upward mobility and an ever-coveted 401K. When it came to pool our resources recently, it wasn’t the dollar amount itself that felt like a valley between us so much as just how much paperwork he had compared to my own. 

As a Millennial, my paperwork was pretty easy to put together. Partly because of my own non-traditional career path, but also because a defining feature of my generation was “graduating into The Great Recession.” We had received the same financial and career advice from our Boomer parents too, and had the same societal benchmarks of adulthood ingrained into us. But that advice became, unbeknownst to any of us, pretty moot pretty quickly. Those of us lucky enough to get any decent job with a 401K still had student loans to pay off at a rate no previous generation had to experience en masse, all while the average price of a home tripled without the federal minimum wage doing the same. 

Somehow, I’ve made it work, all things considered, and as a bonus, I am still quite young (all things considered). But still, it’s been a bit surreal seeing what a giant generational pause button looks like on paper. It’s also hard not to think about the fact that our parents, mine and his, did all of this when they were in their 20s because yes, things were cheaper, but also things like credit scores and crushing student loan debt and the expectation of getting an advanced degree did not yet exist yet. 

A newer defining feature of my generation has become known as “Millennial optimism,” another term the younger contingent of the internet has coined to refer to, I assume, how annoying we are. Because the truth is that our twenties were rough, not unlike Gen Z’s are now after their own generational pause button that was Covid. Hope was basically our only means of getting through it. (It helped that the president of our twenties ran on this message; the president of Gen Z’s twenties… not so much.)

As often as I can feel more like an Xer than a Millennial, this (even more than my student loan debt and smaller stack of Important Papers) is what makes me embrace my Millennial status. So far the internet has not decided to rebrand the concept of hope as “Millennial-maxxing,” but I kind of want it to happen. 

FUN STUFF:

What I'm Reading: Discontent by Beatriz Serrano

What I'm Watching: Silo (AppleTV)

What I'm Listening To: This is Glen Hansard

What I'm Eating: these cookies