The Case for Marrying a Man 15 Years Younger

Creative writing professor Rachel Toor finds her true match in Toby

Rachel Toor,

AARP

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Published June 19, 2024

Illustration of man picking woman up off ground over an hourglass shaped gap in the ground

You only live once — live it with the one you love, even if your age gap gives others pause, writes Rachel Toor.

Christine Rösch

For a few months, I nursed a ridiculous, hopeless crush. First, some backstory. Married and divorced in my 20s, I’d lived with a few good men and dated for decades. My sharp brand of humor and athletic shape led some tolerant dudes to put up with a bunch of less appealing stuff, including pickiness. For those brave enough to want to go out with me, I had a long list of requirements.

Including zero interest in getting remarried. Life was good, and I knew how to be alone. The secret: books. Another secret: nonhuman companions. A serial monogamist, I’ve been in love with dogs, cats, horses, a donkey, a mouse, a rat and a pot-bellied pig.

In my 50s, I had a relationship with a kind man with multiple graduate degrees who dressed in cashmere sport coats and had the chiseled good looks of a movie star. He loved me, but I could not commit. Before I figured out how I really felt about him, he died in a car accident. Grief-addled, I paid full price for a pair of pants for the first time in my life. Carpe freaking diem, I thought.

My crush on Toby was ridiculous because he checked none of the boxes on my list, and hopeless because no way would he ever be interested in me. A hipster with colorful tattoos, a shaved head and earrings, Toby wore thrift store clothes and commuted by bike to his job as a cook in the tiny bakery where I went every morning to write.

He was tall, hot and fit — and nearly 15 years younger than me.

“Nothing like catastrophe to help you understand how true the cliché is: You only live once.”

I admired him from a distance until we discovered we had the same taste in literature. I fell hard. Then COVID hit. The bakery shuttered; Toby emailed me: The libraries had closed. Did I have books he could borrow?

Did I have books. We got together for an epic walk.

Remember when every day was Blursday? During that weird, scary time, we had to negotiate if Toby could come inside my house. We chided each other: “You’re touching your face!” We had to talk about whether we were seeing other people. Literally seeing: “Who’s in your bubble?”

We chatted about everything — values, politics, families, favorite candy. So much in common. The least important discussion had to do with our age gap. When I asked Toby what he thought about it, he said it wasn’t an issue. It was for me, at first. I had a major Zoom freakout with college friends. “People are going to think I’m his mother,” I wailed. “Don’t be silly,” they said.

So I stopped being silly. How wrong I was about what I thought mattered. I left my list of relationship must-haves outside on the stoop. After our first long walk, we spent every single day — and soon, every night — together. Toby moved in that August, and in October 2020, we married.

When we met, he was a cyclist and I was a distance runner. He started running; I got an e-bike. We camp, hike up and down mountains, and love the same movies and shows (though his brow is higher — I’m on my own for Love Is Blind). Toby cooks and cleans and takes our dog for early morning walks. I gush appreciation and strive to provide comic relief.

The only time I feel our age difference is when I come home and he’s blasting hip-hop. Over teenager-deafening volume, I giggle and bellow, “Will you turn that crap off?” While he could identify all the singers in a recent documentary about the making of 1985’s “We Are the World,” I was shocked to discover he’d never heard the Steely Dan song “Deacon Blues.”

A college friend likes to quip, “Rachel won the pandemic.” Nothing like catastrophe to help you understand how true the cliché is: You only live once.

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Rachel Toor is a professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. She is the author of six books of nonfiction and a young adult novel.

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