22/05/2024
I met my partner when he was 28 and I was 40 — we’re still together three decades later
While pop culture has arguably put age gap relationships on the map (think The Graduate, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, and, more recently, The Idea of You), there’s still a lot of stigma surrounding them – especially when the older person in the couple is a woman.
At the age of 41, Lis met Conrad McDermott (who was 28 at the time) at a soul club in Cheltenham. She was out with a girlfriend who was also 10 years younger when she noticed him from across the dancefloor.
Having recently gotten divorced, Lis wasn’t necessarily looking for anything serious – and little did she know then that the handsome stranger would become her life partner of over 30 years.
‘I said to my friend, “Oh, he’s cute”. Then I went to the toilet and came back. I wasn’t aware, but she knew the guy he was with and she’d gone over and told him,’ she tells Metro.
‘It was like we were all teenagers. It was ridiculous, really, but Conrad came over and said, “your girlfriend said you fancied me”.’
The pair shared a dance and then he disappeared. ‘I thought, “okay, he thinks I’m too old”,’ Lis adds.
At the end of the night, she came across him again at the bar. She took a chance and asked him for his name (a detail they hadn’t covered in their previous exchange), before he asked for her number in return.
Conrad, now 60, rang her the next day and, after a year of dating, he moved from Birmingham to Cheltenham to live with Lis.
For the next nine years, Lis worked as a school music advisor and Conrad worked renting cars, until one day they decided to take the next step.
‘He kept joking saying “I’ll marry you on your birthday”, and I brushed it off because he never wanted to get married,’ Lis says.
‘He said “you organise it and I’ll be there”. We got married on my 50th birthday… He’s not a romantic soul really.’
Their happy story hasn’t come without its fair share of judgement from others though,...........
