Good Material by Dolly Alderton

Author:Dolly Alderton [Alderton, Dolly]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2023-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Friday 4th October 2019

On the walk to the pub, I run through, one final time, all the reasons why it’s perfectly okay that I’m going on a date with a woman who is twelve years younger than me. I make a list of all the things that cross over our culture: yes, it is true that ‘Starry Eyed Surprise’ was in the charts when I was a fresher and she was seven, but we were both adults for the cultural phenomena of Daft Punk and Pharrell Williams’s ‘Get Lucky’. That’s a communal adult experience. And the same goes for world events. She won’t have any memories of the 96 Euros, or Brazilian footballers running through an airport for a Nike ad or anything first-hand about Princess Diana. But by the time Prince William got married, she would have been studying for her GCSEs. So we can talk about that, very comfortably, if it comes up. Easy breezy! No problem at all.

And what’s all this about shared timelines of culture anyway? Why’s that so important? She wasn’t alive when my favourite album was released, but guess what? Bridge Over Troubled Water was released in 1970, so neither was I! What am I meant to do about that? Only date women aged fifty-five and over so we can both talk about the origins of the rhythm recording on ‘Cecilia’? That doesn’t make any sense!

And what about all the other men? Why are you not coming after them, Andy? Why are you only having a go at me? She’s been with men older than you. She likes us, we’re her type. Why we’re her type is not really any of your business, so just accept and enjoy it! If you questioned the reasons why every woman wanted to sleep with you and found satisfactory answers before you agreed to it, you’d still be a virgin.

And the other thing – the most important thing. Her self-possession. All her rules and her wisdom and her progressive ideas about sex and her terrifyingly clear communication skills. That goes some distance to re-addressing the power imbalance of our age gap and the fact I’m a man. And I know I have power in the world just by being a man, I know that, but I also don’t really have any – I’m a balding, failed comedian with no savings who lodges with a seventy-eight-year-old tinned soup collector. So all in all, when you tot it up – add a few years for my thirty-something maleness, shave off a few years for her advanced emotional maturity, plus a few points for ‘Get Lucky’, minus a few for Princess Diana, to the power of her past older boyfriends, divide it by something – we’re about even. If anything, I worry about myself in all this!

(There’s also the fact that it’s been nearly four months since I last had sex which is the longest I’ve gone without it in my adult life, but that’s just a footnote to all of the above and was not a factor in considering the morality of me going on this date.

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