Older women want younger boyfriends in 2025. Cougar labels don’t bother them

The older-girlfriend-younger-boyfriend stories in my inbox are nauseatingly cute. A 29-year-old lover girl in Delhi has a 24-year-old boyfriend who writes her lengthy love letters.

Illustration by Manali Ghosh | ThePrint

The rules of dating are flipping in 2025. It is the promised year when women might ditch guys for robots, and AI chatbots. And while robo-boyfriends are stuck in factories, the other juicy forecast is that more women will be swiping right on younger men. The charms of ‘dating up’—someone older, richer and a tad patronising—are fading. Don’t get excited; it’s not a feminist uprising. The girlies are simply prioritising emotional availability, and they don’t mind if it comes in a younger package.

Words like ‘cougar’ and ‘Mrs Robinson’ are relics of the past. The internet is currently obsessed with Nicole Kidman’s 2024 film Babygirl. She plays a CEO lusting over an intern. A much younger man. In fact, love stories of older women and younger men are the flavour of the season. Apparently, women now earn enough for themselves and aren’t sweating about finding a ‘provider’. Millennial women are hooking up with Gen Z men and flaunting them on their Instagram grids.

The grapevine also tells me that a lot of women are wrestling with the moral conundrum that comes with dating someone younger. Something older men in age-gap relationships never have to lose sleep over.

When a 33-year-old creative director in Thane (the Noida of Mumbai) was set up by her friend with a 28-year-old cutie, she quickly rejected him. It felt wrong. After much chasing around and convincing, she’s finally accepted the older girlfriend role. Unlike men her age who act tired and retired like pre-mature middle-agers, her boyfriend takes her out on adventurous bike rides, chai and vada pao dates. They even played hooky on a Monday and drove two hours to Vandri Lake. Ah, the romance of spontaneity. On regular days, he gave her tech training and she helped him deal with the horrors of approaching one’s 30s. After two years of high-energy, wholesome public displays of affection on the streets and at house parties, the creative director is glad she overcame the age gap jitters. Turns out, it’s better to be the partner with heavier emotional baggage.

Better to catch them young?

To be honest, the older-girlfriend-younger-boyfriend stories in my inbox are nauseatingly cute. A 29-year-old lover girl in Delhi tells me she has never been happier—she’s got a 24-year-old boyfriend who writes her lengthy love letters. Six months ago, they matched on Hinge only because she forgot to adjust the age bar. She teases him about his underdeveloped frontal lobe, and he hits back with geriatric jokes—but really, it’s just pillow talk.

While ‘dating’ is a strong word to describe a Bengaluru-based 26-year-old’s escapades with younger men, her insights are worth something. She thinks that dudes in their early 20s tend to be more devotional in love, and they mansplain less (a shocker). Unlike the older lot, they don’t mind stepping out of their comfort zone.

So, is it better to ‘catch them young’? Not if you trust a Delhi-based 34-year-old policy strategist. dating younger men in the development sector only gave her a headache and nicknames like cougar in her friend circles. Her last 20-something boyfriend was exciting but too much of a wild child for an adult. He had a real passion for doing drugs in public and no interest in saving money for the future. The reckless abandon with which he moved through life wasn’t cute at all. Now, the bride-to-be (engaged to a financially compatible man her age) only has one thing to tell her young exes—grow up.

Never have I ever met a man who actually acted his age, so clearly, I can’t date the younger ones. My choices of torture are 30 or older who still haven’t got their act together. What sins did I commit in my past life to end up emotionally regulating a man four years older than me? Men are such babies.

Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)