Breaking news: Age-gap relationships are back. Maybe. Netflix’s new dating show “Age of Attraction” certainly aims to prove they are.
The premise of the show involves a group of men and women placed together in a large retreat in the middle of nowhere. The singles then have to meet and date each other through various activities and events. Seems pretty basic. The one twist, however, is that they aren’t allowed to tell each other their age, and the ages of the singles range from 22 all the way to 60 years old.
While this unique (and slightly creepy) twist distinguishes the show from others in the dating category, “Age of Attraction” fails to capitalize on its potential, and its failure only exemplifies the fact that age gaps are very much a thing of the past.
The show’s most immediate and obvious problem is the fact that the participants get to see each other. That’s right, there is no “Love is Blind”-esque barrier preventing the participants from seeing each other’s appearance. This essentially defeats the entire purpose of the show. If the intention is to remove age as a factor in attraction, then seeing the other participants eliminates that possibility almost instantly. Humans are very good at guessing age based on appearance, whether it’s through things like skin texture or even posture and hairstyle. You can literally see the participants in the show calculating their dates’ ages in their minds as they meet. Contestants are still trying to fit their partners into an age bracket before getting to know them on a deeper level, which makes the entire concept feel skewed. It’s not really an experiment in whether or not love is blind to age; it’s just people pretending not to care about something they clearly do notice and bracing themselves for the confirmation.
But there’s another side to that coin. While some of the contestants are pretending not to care about age, much of the runtime is spent with contestants who very clearly do, and they have STRONG preferences. This is where the show finds crosses into creepy territory. One of the 22-year-old girls, Libby, mentions many times that she is only interested in finding an older man because they are more “mature.” Another contestant, Tristan, claims he has been attracted to much older women since he was 13. Michelle, 50, claims she has always wanted a young, fit guy with a full head of hair. It’s in moments like these where the show departs from love without the consideration of age and becomes more about the fetishization of age. Conversations about compatibility often circle back to age in a way that feels forced, as if the producers are behind the camera nudging contestants to make it the focal point. Instead of asking, “Do these two people connect despite their differences?” the show seems more interested in “How shocking is a 60-year-old and a 27-year-old dating?”
That shift in focus reduces the show’s relationships to a kind of gimmick, which feels unfair to the participants and uncomfortable for the viewer. The aforementioned 60-year-old and 27-year-old also experience issues in their relationship. Vanelle, 27, tells her partner Jorge, 60, that she is maintaining her celibacy for marriage. However, in what could be the show’s opportunity to highlight the importance of boundaries and respect in a relationship, the show decides not to intervene as Jorge coerces Vanelle to give up that boundary of hers and be intimate with him. This whole storyline ends up seeming like a circus performance of a very unhealthy relationship dynamic. Overall, the show does not protect the interests or comfort levels of its participants. Certain people are very clearly there to find someone drastically older or younger than them, and the slightly predatory behavior detracts from the premise of the show.
Beyond that, the show is just overall inconsistent in where it stands on its own argument. It acts like it wants to tackle this serious topic by challenging the boundaries of dating and changing the culture, highlighted by the hosts Nick Viall and Natalie Joy Viall, who themselves have an 18-year age gap in their relationship. Then, however, it seems to almost make fun of its own concept by keeping in creepy comments made by participants about each other’s bodies, or older participants comparing their much younger dates to their children. The show feels like a constant spectacle; even when it attempts to be serious, shadowed camera angles and melodramatically somber music immediately take away any credibility.
Despite all this, there are some select sweet moments. I have particularly enjoyed watching Theresa, 54, and John’s, 27, relationship blossom. Theresa mentions how she has been emotionally ruined by previous husbands and relationships and how she looks forward to finally finding a man who makes her feel safe. John claims he wants to provide that for her, and in their pairing, I see an inkling of hope. But unfortunately, these moments are rare exceptions rather than common occurrences, and more often than not, “Age of Attraction” seems to be taking advantage of its concept rather than exploring it.
In another world, “Age of Attraction” was a unique twist on the dating show genre and made an attempt to highlight dating with clear differences present. However, the “Age of Attraction” we received is a creepy, stale and overall shambolic case study on why age gaps should never, ever, be “back.”
Daily Arts Writer Tiffany McKalko can be reached at tmckalko@umich.edu.
