Basic Trope: A romantic relationship with a big age difference between the lovers.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are in a relationship. Bob is 45 whilst Alice is 20, they both look their age and people sometimes mistake them for father and daughter.
- Exaggerated: Bob is 65 whilst Alice is 20; they are sometimes mistaken as grandfather and granddaughter.
- Downplayed:
- Bob is 45 and his girlfriend Alice is 30, so whilst there's still a gap of fifteen years between them, most people aren't that bothered by it. Still, Alice's friend Charlie asks her if she's okay with that.
- Alice is 20 and Bob is 40, but he's Older Than He Looks, so people mistake him for being in his early 30's and don't really comment on his relationship with Alice. When her parents find out about his age, they are mildly surprised and ask Alice if she doesn't mind the age difference and the fact that he's their peer.
- Justified:
- Bob is wealthy and Alice is a Gold Digger.
- Alice prefers dating older men because she finds men her own age immature or unstable in their personal lives.
- Alice and Bob belong to a culture where it's considered normal for a man to wait until he's older to marry, whilst women are encouraged to find a partner at a young age.
- They just hit off and love each other regardless of age.
- Inverted: Alice and Bob are the same age, right down to being born on the same day and year, at the same time.
- Subverted:
- Alice actually turns out to be closer to Bob's age and just looks really good for her age.
- Alice and Bob actually turn out to be just really good friends, who are mistaken as a couple.
- Double Subverted:
- Bob has a mid-life crisis and ends up leaving Alice for an actual 20-year-old.
- Bob and Alice started out as Just Friends, but end up falling in love.
- Parodied: Alice seeks out older men for the sole purpose of tricking people into believing her lover is her father.
- Zig Zagged: Alice and Bob are involved in a Will They or Won't They? situation, where it's never made entirely clear if they have feelings for each other or if they'll act upon them.
- Averted: No one in the story dates outside their own age category.
- Enforced: Meddling executives discover that Bob and Alice are frequently shipped by fans, and tell the writers to make the relationship canonical.
- Lampshaded: "These two are lovers, not father and daughter."
- Invoked: The Shipper on Deck tries to make Bob and Alice a couple.
- Exploited: Being gay is frowned upon in 20-year-old Alice's society. After moving somewhere nobody recognizes them, she pretends her 45-year-old lover Claire is her mother.
- Defied: Alice rejects Bob's romantic advances because she feels he's too old for her.
- Discussed: "I like Bob, but don't you think he's too old to become Alice's boyfriend? He's twenty years older."
- Implied: A poorly-dressed eighteen-year-old pretty girl sees a forty-five-year-old millionaire and smiles knowingly. In a couple of scenes, she is shown smartly dressed and driving a Cool Car.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice and Bob's relationship becomes strained because at their respective ages, they both want different things out of life: Bob wants to settle down and have children before he's too much older, while Alice feels she's too young to be a parent and wants to focus on building her career and having fun. Both also tend to feel like Fish out of Water when hanging out with their respective friend groups because of the age difference and lack of things in common.
- Things are fine for Alice and Bob for a few decades, but when Bob is in his 80s he starts having health problems and Alice essentially ends up being a caretaker for him, plus she has to deal with the fact she will likely outlive Bob by quite a long time.
- Conversed: "All right, the older suitor is often boring or abusive, but this time, it seems the author went the other way: the older's wise and cool and the younger is an idiot. No wonder Alice ended up with Bob."
- Played For Drama:
- Alice is 15 and comes from a shitty, dysfunctional, and abusive home and sees a bleak future ahead of her, and Bob is a 26-year-old loser who is a pariah in his age group, but knows all the right things to say to a vulnerable young girl who wants an escape from her dismal life. The two have a dysfunctional off-and-on relationship until Alice turns 19 and can no longer deny what Bob is, and he happily trades her in for another desperate young girl who will eat up his bullshit. The whole saga has left Alice with substantial psychological scars, and she proceeds to go through a revolving door of dysfunctional and often abusive relationships with older men, several of which result in kids who will more than likely continue the cycle based on what was modeled for them.
- Alex is a 16-year-old and deep in the closet, and lives in a place where his dating pool is extremely small. He meets Bob, a 23-year-old gay man, who comes onto him strongly and quickly. Alex ignores all the red flags and assumes that this is his one shot at finding love. What ensues is a toxic, destructive relationship where Bob is sexually aggressive and only cares about the physical aspects of the relationship, while Alex is too lovestruck and blind to notice the power imbalance and abuse in the relationship until it's too late. When Alex finally breaks free, he feels violated and used and becomes closed off from other people as a result.
Back to Age-Gap Romance.
