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Parent-Aged Paramour

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Most people tend to date and marry others their own age, as such, most of the time, your mother and father-in-law will be old enough to be your parents, and in fact, when they're not the hostile type, they can even see you as a surrogate child.

But what if your SO is significantly younger, or was conceived when their parents were very young, or a combination of both, and so you and your in-laws are much closer in age? In some cases, the child-in-law can be even older, making for an awkward situation when they meet or when they have to introduce each other to friends and other family members. Someone might even assume the son-in-law is actually a brother-in-law or a cousin. These tropes can cause or contribute to that:

  1. Absurdly Youthful Mother: If one of the parties was born when the parent(s) were very young, and the other is slightly older, then the age gap between the in-laws will be remarkably short.
  2. Adoptive Peer Parent: If one was adopted and raised by someone close to their age, making their guardian and their similarly aged spouse this.
  3. Age-Gap Romance: A significant age gap between the soulmates means the younger party's parents are close in age to their SO.
  4. May–December Romance: One is about the same age as their mother/father-in-law due to being old enough to be their spouse's parent, or even grandparent.

This trope can overlap with Obnoxious In-Laws (when the in-laws are baffled by the proximity in age to their child's spouse and so don't think this relationship can work) and Relative Error (when others assume one's son or daughter-in-law is related in a more age-appropriate way, such as a sibling or cousin).


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 40 Carats: Assuming they are about the same age as their actors, Ann's ex-husband and mother are only nine years apart (played by a 61-year-old Gene Kelly and a 70-year-old Binnie Barnes, respectively). Also JD Rogers, a man about Ann's age initially implied to be in love with her, turns out to be in love with her 17-year-old daughter Trina.
  • How Stella Got Her Groove Back: 40-year-old Stella falls in love with 20-year-old Winston while vacationing in Jamaica. Winston introduces Stella to his mom, who is just one year older than Stella, and expresses her disapproval over the relationship.
  • Something's Gotta Give: At the start of the film, 63-year-old Harry, who only dates women under age 30 due to having Commitment Issues, is only 7 years older than his girlfriend Marin's mother Erica. Played for laughs when Erica mistakes him for an intruder at the family beach house, and is actually more freaked out when she discovers he's not an intruder but instead is dating her daughter. Subverted when Harry breaks up with Marin and finds himself falling in love with the divorced Erica.
    Erica: [into phone to police] Yes. I have an intruder in my house. 29 Daniels Lane, Sagaponack.
    Harry: I'm dating your daughter, Marin. She invited me here for the weekend. She's in her room right now, changing.
    Erica: [gasps even louder, really scared now] You're dating my daughter?!
    Harry: [amused] Now who would've thought that would be worse news?

    Literature 
  • The Sharing Knife: Eighteen-year-old farmer girl Fawn marries fifty-five-year-old Lakewalker Dag. When she finds out his age, she notes, with a little horror, that "Papa is fifty-three." Fortunately, thanks to Lakewalkers' extended lifespan, they will likely avoid the more tragic aspects of May-December Romances.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire:
    • Lord Walder Frey is a Dirty Old Man who kept remarrying young women well into old age. It's safe to say some of his first wives' parents were about the same age as him, though given how young nobles marry and that his current wife is a teenager, it's possible that his latest parents-in-law are close in age to his oldest grandchildren
    • There is a forty-year gap between Jon Arryn and Lysa Tully, and they married when she was sixteen years old and he was around sixty. It was a political marriage, as Jon desperately needed an heir and Lysa's father wanted to marry her off as soon as possible after she had previously gotten pregnant and so would be considered Defiled Forever, not caring if his son-in-law was about the same age, or even older than himself.
    • Tyrion Lannister, in his mid-twenties, is forced to marry Sansa, in her early teens. Her parents are in their mid-thirties when the story starts a few years earlier, so her mother Catelyn Ned having been executed long before the wedding was planned is only about a decade older than her son-in-law.
  • Tower and the Hive: In Damia, the title character falls in love with, and eventually marries Afra Lyon, her mother's best friend and right-hand man. Afra is only a few years younger than her parents and, in fact, was in love with her mother, The Rowan for years, previously.
  • In the Twilight book Breaking Dawn, Jacob, a shapeshifter, imprints on Renesmee, the newborn Dhampyr baby of his ex-girlfriend Bella. This means that they will ultimately get married, once Renesmee is an adult—which means 7½ years old in the case of a Dhampyr. At which point she will stop aging, as Jacob did when he became a shapeshifter.

    Live-Action TV 
  • CSI: NY: "YoungBlood" centers around older, sometimes married, men dating high school or college-aged girls. When one of the men is murdered, Stella and Danny question a young woman who is concerned about them keeping her statement in confidence because her mother is friends with the wife of the man she's seeing.
  • Dark (2017): The final episodes reveal that Claudia Tiedemann conceived her daughter Regina with Bernd Doppler, who was an adult when she was a child and her father's friend.
  • Downton Abbey: Lady Edith pursues a relationship with family neighbor Sir Anthony Strallan, in his 50s and implied to be about the same age as her father. Edith's parents aren't too bothered by that at first, since Edith is seen as a plain-looking unfavourite with few options for suitors... until Sir Anthony comes back from the war with a crippled arm, making it clear that she'll become his nursemaid in the future. Realizing this himself, he jilts her at the altar, subverting the trope.
  • The Drew Carey Show: At one point, Drew dated Celia, a woman (portrayed by Shirley Jones, and whose adult son is played by Danny Bonaduce — sound familiar?) who was several decades older than him. When Drew's parents went to visit, his mom and Celia tried to have a conversation, and when his mom complimented a piece of jewelry she was wearing, Celia said she got it from a department store that was torn down some time ago, which Drew's mom only remembers because she was pregnant with him that year, a statement that makes them both cringe.
  • Friends:
    • In one story arc in the second season, Monica ends up dating ‘Dr Richard’, who is not only about the same age as Monica and Ross’ father, but actually a friend of his as well. This comes to a head at a party at their parents' house, where Monica confides in her mother that she is dating an older man while Richard confides to her father that he is seeing a young girl in the city. When the truth comes out, after the initial shock, the parents support the couple as each sees how happy their daughter/best friend is feeling.
  • The Golden Girls:
    • Dorothy's son Michael falls in love with and marries Lorraine, a woman in her mid-forties. Dorothy is in her fifties by then, meaning Lorraine is only about a decade her junior.
    • "Mother's Day" has Blanche telling her elderly mother about how she was once dating a man in his 40s while she was still in high school and almost married him, not out of love, but so she could be the stepmother to his daughter, her cheerleading rival to be captain of the squad.
  • House of the Dragon: King Viserys chooses Alicent Hightower, daughter of his similarly aged Hand of the King Sir Otto Hightower and about the same age as his own daughter from his first marriage, Rhaenyra, who happens to be Alicent's childhood friend.
  • In the Brazilian telenovel Novo Mundo, villain Sebastião Quirino tries to solve his daughter's rebellious streak as she rejects his slaveowner business and has a romance with a Black man, by marrying her off to an elderly man, implied to be old enough to be his father-in-law's father. Thankfully for her, her fiancee dies during the ceremony.
  • Studio C: In "Twilight Age Gap", a Twilight parody, Edward reveals he has been '17' for 30 years (making him 47). Bella is disturbed and points out that a Mayfly–December Romance is more attractive with a much larger age gap (like a few centuries), as that's "magical", whilst a smaller (yet still large) age gap makes it feel "weird". When it's revealed that Edward went to school with Bella's dad, the mood is fully killed.
  • Trail of Lies: Dr. César Khoury has an affair with his secretary Aline, but she turns out to be the niece of another mistress from the past, Mariah (whom he conceived protagonist Paloma with), and they're in cahoots to get revenge for past events they believe to be his fault. He eventually marries her when she reveals she's pregnant, much to his family's dismay, unaware that his former mistress Mariah, who raised his new wife (and appears to be a bit younger than him), is his aunt-in-law.
  • Wings: Brian dates a woman who has a son who's college age but Brian thought he was a little kid. Brian's on-again, off-again love interest Casey dates the son of Brian's girlfriend. In the end, the awkwardness of their relationships causes both couples to break up.
  • Young Sheldon: Sheldon's parents, George Sr. and Mary, met when she was in high school and he was in his early-20's (George Sr.'s tombstone reveals that he died in 1994 at the age of 42, by which time Georgie was 19 and it's implied Georgie was a Teen Pregnancy as he was conceived shortly thereafter when Mary was about 18/19. Later in the series, a 17-year-old Georgie meets and impregnates 29-year-old Mandy McAllister, and despite her initial reluctance to keep a relationship after he lied about his age, they eventually get married shortly after their daughter is born, at which point Mandy would be about 30 and her mother-in-law would be in her mid to late-30s.

    Music 
  • In the song "I'm My Own Grandpa" by Lonzo and Oscar, the narrator describes how he married an older widowed mother, and his father then married the widow's adult daughter, immediately resulting in a Tangled Family Tree.
  • Referenced in the song "The Oldest Swinger in Town":
    When you score with a chick in a disco bar,
    Take her home in your hairy little car,
    Then you find you went to school with her ma and pa,
    You're the oldest swinger in town!

    Video Games 
  • Echoes of the Plum Grove: Villagers can get married as long as they are both single and in their Adult phase, which lasts twice as long as childhood. This means that if a villager marries during the second half of said Adult phase and has peers who became parents on the earlier side of their adulthood, their new spouse can be the fully grown child of said peers.

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