Babygirl. All Fours. The Idea of You. The culture has spent over a year arguing about whether a woman in her 40s with a man in his 20s is a power move or a midlife thing or, finally, the obvious thing. Nicole Kidman is licking milk off a saucer for Harris Dickinson. Anne Hathaway is letting Nicholas Galitzine ruin her tour schedule. Miranda July put it in a novel and the novel sat on the bestseller list for a year. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is married to a woman 23 years older. Emmanuel Macron is married to a woman 24 years older and is the actual president of France.

The original was Demi Moore, who married Ashton Kutcher in 2005 when she was 42 and he was 27 and was treated like a national scandal for the entire eight years they were together. Twenty years later, Nicole Kidman gets a Golden Globe nomination for the same arrangement, fictionalized. The Atlantic and The Cut each published a piece on the “trend.” The New York Times published two. Every single one treated it as a fresh shock that women might want sex with younger men. But the more so-called “cougars” are talked about, the more they are normalized. Somewhere along the way, despite that fresh shock, the discourse has gone from “is this allowed” to “are we doing this now” to “are we still pretending we weren’t always doing this.” Younger men have always wanted older women. The culture spent a hundred years insisting they didn’t and is now spending a year admitting they did.

Before anything else: this is not about older women being better than younger women. I was a younger woman, recently and at length, and I was great at it. Women are not in competition with each other across decades like racehorses lined up at different gates. We are the same horse at different points in the race. Nobody is getting dragged here except possibly me, and I can take it.

The men I called are in their late 20s and early 30s. They have apartments, jobs, ex-girlfriends. None have yet been married. They each, separately, ended up dating a woman more than 10 years older than them and decided to keep doing it. They were eager to talk about it. I asked them to explain. Not defend. Explain.

Sam, 28, finance:

“I dated a 39-year-old who fell asleep on me during a movie on our second date. She woke up 40 minutes later, said ‘sorry I had a 6am,’ kissed me, and went back to sleep on my chest. She had a whole job and a whole life I wasn’t the center of. I drove home and thought, ‘oh, I’m allowed to be tired too. I’m allowed to just be here.’”

Marco, 33, photographer:

“She told me at dinner that her left nipple was too sensitive to touch and to leave it alone. Between bites of pasta. Then she went back to talking about her sister. She’d been married, she’d been on her own, she’d had time to figure out what was going on with her own body and she didn’t see why I needed to find out the hard way. I have never been so relaxed in my life.”

Patrick, 30, contractor:

“I broke a pipe in her bathroom last month. Water sprayed across her ceiling. She’s 47. She laughed so hard she had to sit down on the floor in her work clothes. Then she made me a grilled cheese and called a plumber. She didn’t make me feel like I’d ruined her night. She’s been married, she’s been through the version where everyone screams, and she’s not interested in doing that again.”

So the culture is finally admitting it. The thing it spent a century treating as a Mike Nichols plot twist turns out to be three guys describing a movie nap, a too-sensitive nipple, and a grilled cheese. Sam is not slumming. Marco is not looking for a mother. Patrick is not running a hustle. They are dating women who already had the marriage, already cried about the marriage, already split the marriage with a lawyer in sensible shoes, and walked out the other side knowing exactly which version of Sunday they refuse to repeat. The 39-year-old fell asleep because she was tired. The left nipple was sensitive the whole time. Patrick broke a pipe in his girlfriend’s bathroom and his girlfriend laughed because Patrick is, professionally, a contractor. There you have it.