Analysis: It may be time for contemporary dating shows to catch up with Babygirl, Bridget Jones and 2001's Perfect Match
We've seen more older-woman-younger-man relationships than ever before on screen in recent times, with Nicole Kidman having a monopoly on representing women in age-gap relationships. She plays a widowed writer who begins a relationship with a young actor (Zac Efron) in the Netflix romantic comedy, A Family Affair (2024), and a high-powered CEO having an affair with a younger man (Harris Dickinson) in Babygirl.
Rom-com favourite Bridget Jones is also at it in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Meanwhile, stars of forthcoming Marty Supreme, Gwyneth Paltrow (52) and Timothée Chalamet (28), have been photographed kissing while filming.
Trailer for Babygirl
Vogue journalist Hannah Jackson says there are so many 'May-December' relationships depicted in recent films that we’ve "officially entered a MILF-aissance." While that might be the case with films, what about reality TV dating shows? A recent bingeing of Perfect Match, a Channel 4 dating show from 2001 featuring a heart-warming older-woman-younger-man relationship, got me wondering whether we still see these kinds of pairings in dating shows today.
Season one of Perfect Match begins with 31-year-old Jane's mum, best friend and a relationship expert meeting 50 men who will compete to see if they are Jane’s 'perfect match’. What happens over the course of three hour long episodes rivals Bridget Jones in the romance stakes.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Brendan O'Connor Show, the complicated cultural legacy of Bridget Jones
Canny viewers know that although finalist Fran is in his mid-twenties, he’s perfect for Jane. She can’t see it until the panel conduct an experiment within the experiment, calling back a selection of the 50 would-be Romeos and telling Jane, if she feels a spark with any one of them, she can take him to Paris for a romantic weekend. In the moment of realisation we’ve been waiting for, Jane chooses Fran. After a montage of them romping about Paris, Jane declares that she sees Fran with "different eyes" and "definitely" fancies him.
Unusually, for today’s context, the show ends with Jane wondering whether she’s left it too late and we have to make the ending up for ourselves. No reunion episode, even! The show’s satisfying romantic arc is made all the more pleasing by how real its backdrop is. In almost every shot of Jane speaking on camera in her kitchen, there’s a packet of Fybrogel languishing forgotten in the background, and Fran and Jane get so absorbed in each other (and possibly so drunk) that they seem to forget the camera is there.
This is hardly surprising given that this was back in the days when the camera was a far more innocuous beast than the socially embedded, surveilling one it is today. More positively perhaps, it was also before the days of TV execs having to safeguard their participants by withholding booze.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, are these the best dating shows?
Something else wonderful is that I can't find out whether Jane and Fran are still together. Amateur sleuths, please get in touch if you know as I am aching to find out. Having said that, there’s something of a heart-sinking feeling to finding out that so-and-so broke up with so and so three months after they won the prize money and did several magazine shoots together.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in the increasingly unreal realms of today's reality TV dating shows, where ageing is metaphorically and literally scrubbed out of the picture, age-gap romances don’t feature much. Dating shows like First Dates and Dating Around have a range of age groups, and The Later Daters features singletons in their fifties, sixties and seventies, but it's very rare to see age gap couples put together.
But outliers do exist. Whereas you're obsolete if you're pushing 30 on Love Island, (the oldest male contestant on the UK show was 31, while 30 seems to be the limit for women), men in their thirties and forties compete to be 41-year old Kristy Katzman's romantic and reproductive partner in Fox's 2020 Labor of Love.
From Swell Entertainment, review of Labor of Love
Reviewing the show, Zoe Strimpel says that Labor of Love, is "revolutionary" in terms of "taking a single woman over forty seriously as a potential mother and attractive wife". Dismal as that may sound, Strimpel's description of the show as a "feminist masterpiece" might be upheld given the show's attention to the idea of male fertility decline over age and its references to men’s biological clock.
Although Dating Around, The Later Daters and Labor of Love are refreshing offerings, they are outliers in a TV market saturated by dating shows like Love Island, Married at First Sight and Love is Blind, where there's few older daters and a particular dearth of older-woman-younger-man pairings. Writing for RTE in January 2025, sex educator Dr Caroline West said "more women are dating younger men." If more recent films reflect this, when will reality TV dating shows catch up?
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
