Dear Jana,
I’m 41 and my boyfriend is 29. We’ve been together for a year and, up until recently, I genuinely thought I’d lucked out.
Our sex life is great. Honestly, he makes me feel more desired than I have in years.
But there’s one thing that has bothered me throughout the entire relationship. Despite being surgically attached to his phone, he never posts me online.
Whenever I bring it up, he tells me I’m overthinking it. He says he likes to keep his private life private because ‘social media ruins relationships’. I wanted to believe him because it sounded so mature.
But the problem is, he posts literally everything else.
A few weekends ago, we went to a birthday party for one of his friends and, after a lot of drinks, one of the guys pulled me aside while my boyfriend was at the bar.
He said, ‘You know why he doesn’t post you, right?’
Daily Mail columnist Jana Hocking (pictured) helps a woman who’s worried about her age-gap relationship
He was laughing as he said it, like he was about to share a harmless joke, but what he said next ruined my night.
He said that when men post about older girlfriends, it makes them look like they’re ‘locked in with a cougar’ and therefore not available to younger women.
Not sensing my mortification, he kept going. He revealed all the ‘boys’ have been teasing my partner about dating an older woman since the beginning.
They call me his ‘investment banker girlfriend’ because I dress well and own property (I’m not an investment banker).
This oaf even called me a ‘MILF side quest’ – a stupid reference to porn and video games that I had to Google to understand. I wish I was making that up.
I cannot explain how humiliating this felt to hear.
Suddenly, small things started making sense: why he’ll post selfies at my apartment but never with me in them. Why he angles the camera away when we’re at dinner. Why I’ve never met certain female friends despite dating for over a year.
The worst part is that in real life, my boyfriend acts completely in love with me. His parents know about me. His friends know about me. We spend most nights together. This isn’t a fling.
A woman tells Jana she feels completely humiliated after learning the reason why her younger boyfriend refuses to share pics of her online. (Stock image)
But now I feel like a secret he keeps from other women, because he sees a future with someone his own age.
I confronted him afterwards and he swore his friend was just ‘being a d***head’. But he did say something that bothered me: he admitted that women in his circle can be ‘judgmental’ about age-gap relationships.
I honestly don’t know what to think.
Have I become that clichéd older woman who convinces herself she’s in a serious relationship, while to him I’m only a passing phase?
Hidden Cougar.
Dear Hidden Cougar,
Let me start with the ‘friend’, because I refuse to let him off the hook.
There is nothing harmless about looking a woman dead in the eyes at a party and telling her what he told you. He wanted to blow your relationship up and used liquid courage as an excuse. That’s cruel and gutless.
A man who behaves like that when he drinks is not someone you want around. Ever.
Now. The boyfriend.
*Cracks knuckles*
Listen, he’s not a monster – but he’s not innocent either. His excuse that he doesn’t ‘want the commentary’ is the commentary. That sentence alone tells you a lot. He’s weighing you up against his image, and right now, his image is winning.
But let’s also be real about something nobody likes to say out loud: when you date younger, this is part of the deal. Not the hiding – that’s never okay – but the awkwardness and the immaturity. His hunger for peer approval comes part and parcel with dating a man in his 20s who grew up on social media.
You don’t get the fun of dating a 29-year-old and the emotional security of a 45-year-old in the same body. Pick a lane.
The psychology of all of this is simple: he’s compartmentalising you.
He treats you wonderfully in private, but his behaviour towards you in public seems complicated – almost as if he’s worried it might affect his other options.
That’s a red flag.
That divide is significant. It suggests he hasn’t truly decided what he wants from his life, and he’s keeping you on hold while he works it out.
You deserve to be on the wall, not in the drawer.
So here’s what I’d do. Don’t give him an ultimatum in anger. Step back, give him the quiet scare of actually losing you, and let him see what life looks like without you in it.
If he steps up publicly and properly – great. If he fumbles it, or gives you another speech about ‘commentary’, you have your answer.
He’s either in or he’s out.
Repeat after me: ‘You are not a side quest.’
Dear Jana,
My fiancé is a personal trainer and, to be completely honest, I’ve always had to swallow a certain amount of jealousy around the job. He trains a lot of very attractive women, spends half his life reacting to bikini selfies on Instagram Stories (‘good work, legend!’), and somehow every second client seems to call him ‘babe’.
Whenever I bring it up, he tells me I’m being insecure and reminds me that flirting is ‘just part of the fitness industry’. So I try to be the ‘cool girlfriend’ about it.
Last week, one of his clients accidentally sent a text to a group chat that I’m in that was obviously meant for her other girlfriends instead. She quickly unsent it, but not before I read the alerts.
The girls were talking about my boyfriend and whether he’d hooked up with clients before. One woman replied:
‘Oh 100 per cent. He’d never risk it with the girlfriend around, though. She practically lives at that gym.’
Then came the sentence I cannot stop replaying in my head:
‘She’s not his type anyway. He likes tiny blondes with fake boobs. Everyone knows that.’
Jana, I am a brunette. And after two years together, I suddenly feel physically sick thinking about all the women he follows, trains and spends time with daily.
The worst part is, I don’t even know if the women were telling the truth. But I can’t stop noticing the girls he gives free sessions to and the clients who comment on his posts.
I confronted him and he said ‘gym girls are dramatic’ and accused me of trying to sabotage his business. But he never denied that I wasn’t his usual ‘type’.
Maybe I’m overreacting to a meaningless message – women can gossip, after all. But part of me wonders if it told me everything I needed to know.
Fit Girl Paranoia.
Dear Fit Girl Paranoia,
Giiiiiirrrrrrl. Seriously. Girl.
Your man is a player.
And I want to say something about that group chat message before we go any further – the woman who sent it accidentally is not the villain here. She was just gossiping with her friends, the way women do. We’ve all done it.
The real information is in what she said so casually, like it was common knowledge: ‘Everyone knows that.’
As much as I’m sure you would love to believe it’s a woman with a grudge, it’s not. It’s a simple whoopsie-daisy that would have resulted in her wanting to throw her phone in a pond.
We’re not often gifted with this kind of insight (yes, that’s how I’m choosing to see it) so I have a feeling that years from now you will see it as a blessing.
The ‘flirting is just part of the fitness industry’ excuse is as old as time. Sure, there’s some truth – sessions can be intimate and clients sometimes develop crushes. But there’s a world of difference between a client with a harmless crush and a trainer who actively encourages it.
A trainer who offers free sessions, reacts to every bikini post, and casually calls women ‘babe’ isn’t passively receiving attention; he’s encouraging it.
And when you brought up something that genuinely upset you, he turned it around and made you the bad guy. A man with nothing to hide doesn’t react so defensively.
Once again, red flag.
The trouble is, as women, we’ve been conditioned to doubt our own instincts. Every time your gut spoke up, he called you ‘insecure’ and you swallowed it, unquestioningly.
Two years of that will have you questioning your own eyesight. But there’s nothing wrong with your gut. It’s been right the whole time; you’ve just been talked out of listening to it.
Are you spiralling? Maybe. But there’s a difference between spiralling over nothing and spiralling because something is wrong. I’m sorry to say this is the second one.
So no, you are not crazy. You’re a brunette engaged to a man who prefers blondes. He has a ‘type’ that everyone seems to know but you, a job that conveniently lets him meet attractive women, and gets highly defensive when asked a simple question.
The question now is whether you trust yourself enough to act on what you already know.
I think you do.
