Are you my daddy?

A strange inversion has occurred regarding (heterosexual) age gap relationships, in contemporary fiction as in life. An idea that was once considered normative throughout Western culture—older man, younger woman—is now viewed as transgressive, a novel dynamic to explore. It’s all a far cry from the days of Jane Austen, who believed that love, money, and marriage could co-exist. It’s no longer a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Sometimes, he just wants a younger woman... to call him daddy.

Today, to be a woman who desires an older, more settled and mature partner, a “daddy,” in contemporary parlance, goes against some vaguely progressive, vaguely neoliberal paradigm: that young women should seek independence, move up the corporate ladder, attempt to earn as much as their male peers, and only enter into heterosexual relationships that feel entirely equal. 

Congratulations to the women who have achieved this. For the rest of us still scrambling to take care of ourselves, get our social and sexual needs met, weather the contemporary workplace, and make rent, a sexy, older male benefactor can be a part of a number of fantasies: to form a romance that looks different from the models around us, to feel taken care of despite systemic inadequacies, and to find validation that we’re okay and worthy of being seen. 

Over the past decade, these ambient desires have found their way into contemporary novels and story collections, where (millennial, female) writers explore their possibilities and pitfalls. Emma Cline, Raven Leilani, and Sally Rooney are three of the most popular and critically acclaimed promoters of this literary motif. Their “daddy” tales boldly present characters whose yearnings raise larger questions about what it’s still taboo to want. 

In Cline’s work, daddies offer care that characters’ fathers can’t. In the short story “Marion,” published in her 2020 collection (itself aptly titled Daddy), under-supervised adolescent girls cultivate crushes on older men at a hedonistic California compound. Speaking of Roman Polanski’s rape of an adolescent, the narrator says: “We were jealous, imagining a boyfriend who wanted you so bad he broke the law.” She desires harm, believing it’s better than no attention at all. At the end of another story, “What Can You Do With a General,” a young woman texts her older boyfriend instead of engaging with her own formerly abusive father. This character displaces her desire onto a distant object who seems like a safer substitute.

If these stories opt for a more traditional understanding of “daddy issues,” Cline veered in a different direction with her 2023 novel The Guest. The book elides any familial backstory for its protagonist, Alex, a sex worker who enters into a transactional relationship with an older man. When he dumps her, Alex’s life gradually dissolves. Yet there’s no dad to blame for the chaos that ensues; Alex is who she is, and she wants what she wants, even if it leads towards destruction. 

Cline indeed presents age gap relationships with a dark edge, though the source of that darkness has matured as the writer herself has aged. A new anxiety appears in her 2023 story “Upstate,” in which a young woman faces the sudden corporeal decline of an elder partner. The change isn’t a result of his advanced years, but it may as well be. The young woman who once thought she’d be taken care of by her lover now plays caretaker to an invalid. Contemporary women, appropriately therapized, may be wary of the ways in which they take care of men. Cline’s story demonstrates a fear that the role may be inescapable, no matter which man you choose.

While Cline writes these relationships with unease, Raven Leilani presents hers with downright brutality. Her 2020 hit novel Luster features a masochistic protagonist, Edie, who dates Eric, an older, married man in an open relationship. The affair turns kinky, then violent. For Edie, dehumanization is baked into the daddy dynamic, which is made more complex by the fact that she is Black and her paramour is white. Leilani writes: “Beyond... older men having more stable finances and a different understanding of the clitoris, there is the potent drug of a keen power imbalance. Of being caught in the excruciating limbo between their disinterest and expertise. Their panic at the world’s growing indifference. Their rage and adult failure, funneled into the reduction of your body into gleaming, elastic parts.”

Yet as the book progresses, Eric gradually disappears from the narrative. It’s his wife and the pair’s adopted Black daughter, in fact, who most appeal to Edie. As Edie spends more time with these two, rethinking her own understandings of race, womanhood, and family, the daddy plot gives way to a very different kind of story. Leilani is ultimately rethinking not the limitations of romance, but the traps and possibilities of the nuclear family. 

In Leilani’s Luster and across Cline’s work, young women mistake an older man for a gateway to fulfillment. These characters never achieve the pleasure or security they seek. Not so in Sally Rooney’s latest, in which a younger woman is quite fulfilled in her arrangement. Rooney’s 2024 novel Intermezzo features a young sex worker named Naomi who finds an early-30s man, Peter, to both offer companionship and fund her lifestyle. Naomi doesn’t care that Peter’s obsessed with his ex-girlfriend. In fact, she welcomes the diminished pressure on her own relationship that this other woman allows. By the end of the novel, Naomi is laughing and eating chocolate digestives with the ex-girlfriend. “My girlfriends are unionising,” Peter thinks. “I think I’m going to die.” In this scene, women are not in competition for male attention, but content in each other’s company—a fantasy of mature femininity, of transcending culturally prescribed roles.

This is a very different plot from that of Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), in which a young woman takes up with an older married man who loves her, provides her pleasure and comfort, but, because of his marriage, can’t ever offer her the commitment she craves. 

The progression of Rooney’s novels offers insight into the fantasies and hang-ups of an aging generation. In her earliest work, a 30-something man is the unattainable lover; by the time Intermezzo comes around, it’s a millennial protagonist who has, himself, become a daddy. Notably, it’s his own shame about this association that’s the greatest threat to the pair’s happiness. Peter’s misguided sense of morality conceals a greater misunderstanding that providing for another does not, in itself, simply relegate him to the position of a disembodied wallet.

As in the work of Cline and Leilani, the real conflict is never the age gap itself, but something much more difficult to pin down: a lack of intimacy. In these transactional relationships, older men offer financial support to their younger partners because, for different reasons (they’re actually married, they’ve got vague psychological issues of their own, or they’re hung up on an ex), they can’t offer much emotionally. The female characters accept this dynamic, for varying reasons and with varying degrees of success. To share the self is difficult and intangible, and money is easy in comparison. You either have it, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you might find someone else who does. 

Cline, Rooney, and Leilani are hardly the only contemporary writers to cover this topic, but they’ve all found unusual, widespread success for their literary work. They’ve struck a chord in a young readership who seemingly identifies with their characters’ struggles. Happy romances are passe; it’s easier, in the age of dating app debacles and economic turmoil, to align with messy female characters who bumble as they try to get what they want, even as they misunderstand the nature of their desire. But is it possible, at the end of the day, that we’re all still looking for Mr. Darcy?