The release of “Red (Taylor’s Version)” last Friday, Nov. 12, was the highlight of my Fall semester and I haven’t stopped listening to it since. Considering the album’s release broke two Spotify records and crashed the site, it’s safe to assume that fans across the world have been enveloped by the “Red (Taylor’s Version)” fever too.
And although I could spend the entire column this week talking about the album, I want to draw from one of the album’s biggest songs, “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” and calls for discussions on one important issue: age gaps in dating.
In the case of “All Too Well” — largely believed to be about Swift’s reported relationship with actor Jake Gyllenhaal — fans have been pulling the song apart to understand its meaning. In boiled down terms, the vault song, “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” opened the door for a better understanding of what led to the end of Swift and Gyllenhall’s relationship.
According to the lyrics, “You said if we had been closer in age maybe it would have been fine,” fans theorize that supposedly the issue for Gyllenhaal was the age difference, but considering he is dating a 25-year-old now and he is 40, age difference might not have been the whole issue.
Putting aside what caused Swift and Gyllenhaal to break up, the age issue that is brought up in the song should not be ignored. In verse five of the 10-minute song, Swift sings “‘I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age,’” likely referencing how Gyllenhaal’s future relationships will be with women disproportionately younger than him, but that line can be used to describe a lot of different celebrities.
It’s become a sort of unspoken truth that particularly male actors who are your typical A-list celebrities tend to date women at least 10 years their junior if not more. Yes, Gyllenhaal, but also Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Dennis Quaid and more are among the male celebrity elite who get older as the people they date get younger.
For some time, male Hollywood elites dating just barely legal girls became the norm, and despite some criticism, there haven’t been any long-term conversations about the negative impacts of age gap relationships. These huge age gaps in dating are seen as just that, a big age gap. But in the era of the #MeToo movement and people’s newfound understanding of sexual and relationship grooming, it feels like it’s time to re-evaluate this ancient Hollywood tradition.
And yes, this issue isn’t just with men. One of the most prevalent examples is the marriage between actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson and director Sam Taylor-Johnson. Sam Taylor-Johnson was 42 when she met 18 or 19-year-old Aaron, who she married four years later. So no, it isn’t just men. But in couples with a 5-15 year age gap which makes up 8.5% of the U.S. population, the most prevalent scenario is an older man with a younger woman.
This is usually when some will say, ‘It’s legal, so it doesn’t matter.’ But legal doesn’t mean it is moral or ethical. In an article for Glamour, Chloe Laws put it best by writing, “But let me ask those in that camp this: when has legality been equal to morality, or even a sound gauge of right and wrong? In the UK, until 1841, 12 was the legal age of consent.”
No one is here to say that all relationships with noticeable age gaps are grooming and steeped in power and abuse, but there is a spectrum. Laws writes, “Personally, I see no issue with a 40-year-old dating a 50-year-old. But a 16-year-old dating a 26-year-old? That doesn’t sit well with me, because the gap in maturity and life experiences is too large.”
If 16 and 26 years old is too much of an age gap, then 20 and 43 years old — Cami Morrone and Leonardo DiCaprio when they first started dating — or 18 and 42 years old — Aaron and Sam Taylor-Johnson — definitely are. There is just no way that some level of manipulation or power is not present in those relationships. And if it can even get worse, in some of those relationships, the adult man met their girlfriend when they were children. For instance, in the case of DiCaprio and Marrone, DiCaprio met Marrone when she was 12 years old.
Or in the case of Scott Disick, who usually dates younger women, his previous girlfriend Sofia Richie was 18 years old when they dated, but he knew her for years before that. It seems like these people are just waiting for that 18th birthday to pounce. This isn’t just a celebrity issue, considering regular people can report being told this simple phrase, ‘I’m counting down the days till you turn 18.’
It’s creepy, gross, and not even remotely justifiable. Here is my hope: that other people listen to “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” and do the same deep dive into age-gap dating as I did. Swift lays out her experience perfectly for us. Not only is she not alone in that experience, but it shouldn’t have taken her to release “Red (Taylor’s Version)” for us to pay proper attention to the issue.
