What It’s Like to Be in a Relationship with an Age Gap | Full Episode | SBS Insight

Jun 5, 2023 | Around eight per cent of heterosexual couples have an age gap of more than 10 years. Social disapproval and negative family reactions can be commonplace. In this episode Insight talks to couples, some with age gaps of more than 30 years, about how they navigate the age difference within their relationships, and with those around them.

I Finally Quit Monogamy – and Found a Romance I Never Expected

THE GUARDIAN: I used to think open relationships were not for me because I would have to give up my romantic side. That just wasn’t true

When you have rules you agree on openly and honestly, as we do, no party feels hurt as long as they are followed.’ Photograph: Lev Dolgachov/Alamy
If you asked me a few years ago whether I’d ever quit monogamy, I would have laughed in your face. I identified as a classic romantic before I even knew I was gay. The idea that someone was out there somewhere, waiting for me to find them and become their everything, got me through my (often unbearable) adolescence.

In conservative Poland, where I’m from, many bigots see being queer as a purely sexual thing. Even the more liberal ones view it as something that should remain “in the privacy of their own homes”. As if being gay was a fetish that doesn’t make any sense outside a sexual context. Deep inside, I knew that wasn’t true. I had my first crushes in primary school, and the purely sexual portrayal of queerness made me want a truly romantic relationship even more. And what’s more romantic than only having eyes forone person only, right?

Despite this desire for a fairytale love story, gay men in my circles never quite shared the excitement. One of my first ever hookups, an established orchestra conductor, told me that the older a gay man gets, the less realistic monogamy seems to be. Before moving to the UK in 2016, when I was 20, I had my heart broken by several young gentlemen who all promised me a happily ever after, only to then hook up with someone in a club or invite a guy over to stay when I was away. » | Tomasz Lesniara | Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Use Jubilee to Restore Moral Values, Says Bishop

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: One of the country’s leading bishops has called for people to use the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee as an opportunity to restore the nation’s moral values.

The Rt Rev Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, said promiscuity, separation and divorce have reached epidemic proportions in Britain and that the Jubilee was an opportunity to think about the kind of environment being bequeathed to future generations.

He said although people were better off since the Queen’s accession to the throne in 1952, material progress had come at the expense of equality and communal life.

Writing in a Bible Society pamphlet, Dr Chartres says: “Britain is indeed a better place today materially than ever before, but that material progress has been at the expense of our relationships with one another, our communal life. Within families, within communities, within society as a whole, our relationships are more strained, more fragile, more broken than we care to recognise.” » | Patrick Sawer | Saturday, June 02, 2012