S03.33: Age Gap Romance

Silver foxes, May/December, older heroines/younger heroes. Look, Sarah’s buttons were installed young, OK? We’re talking age gap romances, how they played out in the early days of the genre, how they remain popular today, and what has happened (or not!) in the books to make them viable in 2021. We try to keep this one taboo but not dark, sexy but not erotic…but by the end, we’re not making any real promises.

Check all your Content Warnings before you begin with these books!

Whether you're new to Fated Mates this month or have been with us for all three seasons, we adore you, and we're so grateful to have you. We hope you’re reading the best books this week.

Next week, we’re reading Kresley Cole’s debut, The Captain of All Pleasures. Neither of us have read it, so we’re all jumping into the deep end without a mask on this one! Find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple Books. Or find it from your local indie via bookshop.org.

Show Notes

• You can buy Iris Johansen’s mansion in Cartersville, GA for a cool 8 million. 
• Maybe Chaotic Evil isn’t the best writing plan.
• Here’s some pop psychology about the May December romance. By the way, the phrase May-December romance apparently dates back to Chaucer. In The Merchant’s Tale, a young woman named May marries a much older man and a confusing idiom was born. 
• As it turns out the “half your age plus 7” rule is not something Jen made up, because once you google it, you get charts and graphs and articles and everything. 
• Sarah’s reference to “Every terrifying post on that reddit board” is r/relationships, although r/amitheasshole is always available with some new tale of terrifying bad behavior. 
• This problems presented from lack of sex ed are pervasive though historical romance, but how much better are we doing by our kids? 
• Jen was talking about Marvin Gaye when she mentioned "Everybody wants their own piece of clay" shit.
• Diana Palmer has a long, storied romance career, and none of it involves that kind of DP. The first book in the Long Tall Texans series, Calhoun, was published in 1988, and the latest one is #57 in the series, Texas Proud, and was published in October of 2020. 
• All joking about the Pioneer Woman aside, she does have some great recipes. 
• It turns out that the “boiling frog” analogy is just a myth, so keep on reading! 
• The movie Carol is based on Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. 
• The Jessa Kane book with the dirty version of the talk is called His Prize Pupil, in case you want to read it yourself. For science. 
• Our next read-along episode will be The Captain of All Pleasures by Kresley Cole. If you want more Kresley, all of Season One is for you.