Heart wants what heart wants...

Jasmine Singh

When it comes to love, heart takes precedence over everything else and it sure doesn’t get down to calculating ‘the age difference’. 

The new love-struck couple Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas certainly didn’t fall for the numbers. And they are not the only ones, many reel and real life couples have kept age limited to a word that might have some significance in official documents, but in the page where everything is written with love and care, an elder woman and a younger man still read as a couple in love.

From celebrities like television actor Parmeet Sethi sharing a good laugh with his wife Archana Puran Singh, who is again a few years elder to him to the new generation of Soha Ali Khan and Kunal Khemu, Bipasha Basu and Karan Singh Grover, Urmila Matondkar and Mohsin Akhtar Mir, the lady precedes in age and rules the heart too.

Mohali-based marriage counsellor Harpreet Benipal no longer finds her search for a perfect bride and groom being restricted by age. “Boys, these days are perfectly okay about marrying girls even 3-5 years older to them, but...,” Harpreet leaves a clause here, which she fills up immediately, “In such a scenario, the boy expects the elder girl to be either exceptionally pretty, exceptionally well settled in profession or with a strong family background.”

This might look like an arrangement with too many conditions, the couples in love consider none. A year or so ago, television celebrity Kishwer Merchant was trolled for marrying a much younger television actor, Suyyash Rai. Kishwer in an interview shared how both of them had to battle innumerable questions raised by their friends because of the age difference of 7 years between them. “But eventually, they did accept our decision to be together,” she had said. 

While society is okay with an elder man and younger woman equation, the reverse doesn’t sink in immediately. Shares Punjabi actress Heena Singh, who is dating a model-actor 7 years younger to her. “Our relation was always seen as frivolous or need-based, people said all sorts of stuff, but today, when they see us together, they have nothing to say.”