I’ve been reading an excellent sci-fi romance by Jessie Mihalik. Polaris Rising (2019) is set in the far distant future. Humankind has spread across the galaxy but remains deeply capitalist. A small number of rich families live like the aristocrats of old, their actions affecting the lives of millions of people.

The lead female character, Ada, is a younger daughter of one of these aristocratic families. When the story begins, she’s on the run from her father and determined to avoid an arranged marriage. She meets Loch, an outlaw with a very dangerous reputation. From the point of view of any romance reader, he’s a very attractive person. He’s capable, knowledgeable, strong, and thoughtful.

However, one thing makes it difficult for me to picture Loch in the way that I would like. And that’s what I want to talk about in this blog post today. It’s his age. The story specifically states that he’s in his mid-twenties.

This specificity made Loch’s character less romantically appealing to me as an older reader. For much of the book, I was able to pretend that he and Ada were somewhere vaguely in their thirties. (It’s reasonable to assume that people might live a lot longer in a space-faring civilisation, meaning that adulthood starts later.)

As soon as Loch’s age was specified, he became someone young enough to be my son. He’s still capable, knowledgeable, strong, and thoughtful, of course. But from my position as an older reader, he’s no longer the same. He’s nowhere near my stage of life, so I can’t see him in “that way.”

In most genres of fiction, the age of the main characters is not that important. It doesn’t matter to me how old the detective is in a crime novel. But romance is different, particularly when the love interest’s immediate physical appeal is integral to the other main character’s motivations. (It isn’t Loch’s mind that first attracts Ada.) In this kind of romance, the love interest should ideally be someone the reader doesn’t feel too distanced from. Otherwise, we can’t immerse ourselves in the other character’s feelings toward them.

Being able to identify with the character who is in love is another important part of the reading experience. Their feelings need to be understandable to us in a visceral way.

In romances where the characters’ ages are not specified too heavily, the reader can imagine them as slightly older than the author perhaps originally intended. When the ages are clearly specified, it cements the characters into a particular life stage and risks distancing readers who are in a very different period of life.

Supernatural romances tend to avoid this problem. When the love interest is many centuries old, it places them outside the usual flow of human life. Readers of all ages can imagine themselves swooning over a 1,000-year-old vampire without the worry of “he’s too young / too old for me.”

All this brings me to two conclusions. Firstly, in romances about adult couples, a little vagueness about age is not a bad thing. Secondly, it’s important that we have romances about adult characters at all life stages.

For me, the issue with Loch isn’t that he’s different to me. I’m not an adventurer in space and he’s not a 21st-century Englishwoman. The issue is that life stages are an important aspect of how humans relate to each other. He’s literally not in the same train carriage as me.