If you’ve got a problem with Ranvir Singh’s age gap relationship, you might want to ask yourself why

Famous men do this all the time. So why are we so taken aback when a woman does it?

TV presenter Ranvir Singh has revealed she’s dating a man 18 years younger than her – and the world is shocked. But why?

After all, both are consenting adults, who were single when they met. Singh, 45, first encountered partner Louis Church on the set of Strictly Come Dancing when she competed on the show in 2020. Church, 27, was working as a production secretary.

So far, so standard – Singh was free to date, having ended her marriage shortly before taking part in the TV series. The pair have done nothing wrong. So why are we so quick to judge her for it?

I’ll tell you my theory: we are shocked because we have come to believe that an older woman isn’t (or shouldn’t be) sexual; that to be “mother” (Singh has a 10-year-old son with her ex-husband, Ranjeet Singh Dehal) should be her sole goal and aspiration; that parenthood defines her in a way that men who are also fathers are never exclusively defined.

We are socially conditioned to do a double take when we see a slightly older woman romantically involved with a younger man. It feels incredibly subversive.

What’s going on? Well, we need look no further, I’d guess, than the response on social media to Singh’s relationship revelation. It provides the perfect example of what happens when we are confronted with our own latent prejudices. We stare desire in the face and we don’t know how to handle it – because we are hypocrites.

When a man dates a younger woman – yes, even one more than two decades his junior (here’s looking at you, Leonardo DiCaprio), we sigh in a sort of, well, “exasperated aunt” way. It’s so obvious, we intone. “Typical man.” Eye roll. There’s a long list of famous men who do (or have done) exactly the same: from Eddie Murphy to P Diddy, Johnny Depp to Jim Carrey, Joaquin Phoenix to Al Pacino, Bruce Willis to Jeff Goldblum, Rod Stewart to Donald Trump.

But while we might think it sort of seedy, we still aren’t horrified by it. Not in the same way. Not enough for it to become a talking point or a notable rarity; until (and it is an “if” and “when”) it becomes noticeable by its consistency (DiCaprio, 47, and Camila Morrone, 25, split last month – the actor is now rumoured to have a new and even younger girlfriend, Maria Beregova, a 22-year-old Ukrainian model living in London).

Still, when men do it, it takes a while to gather our attention – whereas with Singh, the moment her relationship status was revealed, it became breaking news. Why? Why is it that when women date younger men, it captures our collective imagination like nothing else?

Just look at Brigitte Macron’s relationship with the French president, Emmanuel Macron – the pair have almost 25 years between them; have been together for a decade – and we are fascinated. Look at the coverage of the movie Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, starring Emma Thompson, which was (predictably) labelled “groundbreaking” precisely because it looked directly in the eye of the age-gap relationship, where the older party is a woman. Would the same movie have been so significant if the protagonist was just another older man?

No, because we aren’t quite sure what to make of these pairings that transgress social norms; we stumble – it feels a little like a glitch in the matrix. And the reasons are complex. In my view, it has much to do with misogyny – because women simply aren’t “supposed” to be sexual once they pass the arbitrary threshold of 40 or so – and it also has a lot to do with power.

We have become so comfortably entrenched in the idea of patriarchy; that age-gap relationships the other way around – where a man is older than a woman – don’t really bother us that much (unless the gap is so wide as to be nakedly inappropriate). We expect the power dynamic to be skewed in favour of a man; we (almost) celebrate it. At the very least, we aren’t particularly shocked by it. We let it slide. And there are a whole host of other emotions, too: indifference, acceptance, even envy.

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But we are taken aback by a case like Singh’s, because she is subverting what we expect from women of her age – this isn’t what we think middle-aged women should be doing. And so we stand in judgement; we do a double-take, we are shocked.

We shouldn’t be, because it is irrelevant. The gender gap persists. We know that regardless of what the particular age gap is, the power dynamic is still in place; because she is a woman and he is a man. And whether or not these anomalies rustle the fabric of our expectations or not, the patriarchy is our constant.

Some will cheer Singh on for turning the age-old power play on its head – and we should let them. Because she isn’t the problem, here. We are.