Chronophilia

An age preference is not the same as an attraction to ageing.

Consider two men, both currently forty-five, both of whom would tell you they are attracted to women in their thirties.

The first has been attracted to women in their thirties since he was twenty-two. The target has not moved. When he was young the women he wanted were older than him; now they are younger; in fifteen years they will be substantially younger; and none of this represents any change in him whatsoever. His preference is a fixed point in the world, and his relationship to it changes only because he is drifting past it.

The second was attracted to women in their twenties when he was in his twenties and women in their thirties now that he is in his forties, and if you check on him at sixty he will be attracted to women in their fifties. His preference is not a point at all. It is a relation — roughly “people around my age”, or “people at my life stage” — and it will travel with him for as long as he lives.

These two men will give an identical answer to any survey conducted this year. They are not remotely the same. One of them has an age preference in the way that a person has a preference for a particular latitude; the other has one in the way that a person has a preference for the present.

And there is a third case, rarer and much more interesting, which is the person attracted specifically to the difference. Not to thirty-year-olds, but to people fifteen years younger than themselves, whatever they themselves happen to be. Or fifteen years older. For this person the erotic object is the gap itself — the asymmetry, the structure of the thing — and the ages are only whatever the gap is currently made of.

Fixed target, sliding target, fixed gap. Three completely different erotic temporalities, indistinguishable in cross-section, distinguishable only if you follow someone for thirty years, which almost no study does.

There is a fourth arrangement which is the most common of all and gets no attention because it is not a preference at all. Two people meet, at whatever ages they happen to be, and stay together, and the ages go on changing, and neither of them ever exercises a preference again. Most human erotic life, statistically, is this. The whole apparatus of age preference is a description of the marketplace, and most people are in the marketplace for a small fraction of their lives.

from Chronophilia (2026)