We’ve covered Olympian Tom Daley’s relationship with Oscar-winner Dustin Lance Black before. Daley is only 21 years old now, but he got together with DLB back in 2013, when Daley was only 19. At the time, DLB was 39! Now DLB is 41. Considering they’ve been together for two years, maybe we should stop making a big deal about the age difference? Except that now they’re engaged. Dustin Lance Black, a 41 year old, got engaged to a 21-year-old. There’s a whiff of Stephen Fry to this situation, right? Except in Fry’s situation, he was 30 years older than his new husband.
British Olympic dive champion Tom Daley is engaged to his screenwriter boyfriend Dustin Lance Black — and they announced their happy news in the Times of London newspaper.
As Us Weekly reported back in December 2013, Daley, 21, and Black, 41, started dating in the summer of that year. The Olympic champion came out as bisexual to fans via his YouTube page on Monday, Dec. 2, revealing that he’d fallen in love with a man, but not disclosing Black’s identity at the time.
“My life changed massively when I met someone, and they make me feel so happy, so safe and everything just feels great,” Daley gushed. “That someone is a guy. It did take me by surprise a little bit,” he continued, noting, “I still fancy girls.”
Sources told Us that the 20-year age gap between Daley and his Oscar-winning Milk scribe love wasn’t something that bothered him at all. “Tom told friends he ‘doesn’t care what people think,'” our insider revealed. And it looks like this relationship was meant to be! Because the couple are now engaged to be married, and proudly announced their exciting news by placing an article in the Times of London’s Births, Marriages and Deaths section.
The announcement was titled, “Mr T.R. Daley and Mr D.L. Black,” and continued, “The engagement is announced between Tom, son of Robert and Debra Daley of Plymouth, and Lance, son of Jeff Bisch of Philadelphia and Anne Bisch of Lake Providence.”
Daley and Black moved in together in London in May of this year.
If this makes them happy, then God bless. They’re both adults, although Tom was just barely an adult when he first got with DLB, so that makes me uncomfortable. I actually think it’s probably a good sign that DLB moved to London for Tom, although if we’re being honest, I don’t really think this will last more than a few years. Still, I enjoy the fact that LGBT couples are now free to put their engagement announcements in conservative newspapers only to have it fall it apart in a few years. We’ll see, gentlemen!
Photos courtesy of WENN.
That dude looks incredibly good for 41!
right?! i’m not really familiar with either of them so when the article said 41 I was like “which one!?!?”
Ha! Me, too. I looked at the header photo for a second and was like “huh, could go either way.”
I was trying to figure out which was which as well. 41 looks good on him.
No facial expressions = no wrinkles.
Yeah, I was about to say that he looks creepy AF.
LMAO.
I’m seriously judging.
Ditto. 19 is way to young to start dating anyone that much older. 21 is too young to get married. If you got married before 25 and it worked, kudos, but most people are not that mature or set in their careers.
Also sorry but all a 21 year old Olympian can talk about is training, high school and maybe college. There aren’t enough years in there to gain experience. So why exactly is a 40s dude interested?
I think regardless the gender, a 20 or 30 year older is interested in something different than the conversation which is why I will always say it and I don’t care how politically incorrect it is. I’m not gonna pretend these two or Fry and his kid are unicorns just cause they are gay.
Yes, exactly.
At 21, a lot of people *think* that they are all grown up and mature enough to make a serious commitment, but in reality, most are not. I think a lot of people are caught up in the romance of an engagement (and wedding, marriage) without the reality of marriage. At least I was and most people that I know that married young. And, at least my first husband and I were the same age. Fairy tales aren’t true. To be 19 and to date someone so much older and then engagement? That is a huge discrepancy in life experience and I definitely side-eye the 41 year old.
Hopefully, they are truly happy and it is an equal partnership. I wish them well, but yeah .. yeesh – 21 year olds seem like babies to me now and I’m only 34.
Maybe in this day and age some will consider 21 too young to get married and have doubts about adults under the age of 25 staying married. But years ago our grandparents married young and most of them stayed married until the end. I guess modern day society is different where no one stays in a marriage because divorce is evil, for the kids or if they are not happy.
@V4Real
I think there is even more to it than that though. When my grandparents were young, they had careers already by 21. My grandpa had seen his friends die in the war and my grandma had lived through the harsh realities of the depression. They had gained far more life experience already because that was how life worked. Now, we’re lucky if we’re set in a career by 30. We have to gain far more education to have access to the same types of jobs and that often delays our opportunities to gain real world experiences. Society just doesn’t work the same way. And I say this as someone who married at 24 and is still very happily married to the same person.
V4real: it was a different time, different expectations and life experience acquired much, much earlier. They also couldn’t divorce or if they did, it was with difficulty and society shunned them for it. Women needed to be married and everyone was encouraged to be married by 21 or else forever be shamed as an old maid.
And the generation before than had to be married off by 18. And the one before that by early-mid teens. 40 being considered old age if you lived that long.
The highest rise in divorce statistics is actually our parents. Married at a time when the world was changing such that a person could wait a little bit longer and perhaps marry at 23. Divorce was still problematic. Now they are allowed to divorce, plus we are all living longer – why live with a person who makes you miserable for 40-50yrs, they are divorcing.
We are waiting to marry because we are living longer, and are taking forever to acquire a life experience that is equal to previous generations.
Well , Tom’s parents got married at 21 so it’s not like he hasn’t seen it work .
Folks of that generation also weren’t supposed to have premarital sex, which really tends to speed up that whole marriage issue. And just because they got married young didn’t mean that they were happy marriages, so much as it was at a time before many people divorced.
I seriously side eye because not only was Tom 19 when they got together, but he was also a young Olympic athlete. It’s not like he had an opportunity to live a normal life and have normal life experiences, and the pressure put on young athletes like him is notorious.
I got married at 21 to my husband who is only 9 months older than me. We’ve been married for nearly 4 years now, are expecting twins this month and just bought our very first flat yesterday! We were together for about 8 or so months before deciding to marry. He had a shitty job at the time and actually quit a few weeks before our wedding which freaked me out (I was also not working), but now he’s working in a high position in a large company and things are pretty good 🙂 So it definitely can work if both parties are serious.
Now, my mom and step dad are 16 years apart so 20 years doesn’t freak me out too much, but the fact that a 19 year old was going out with a 39 year old person is a bit… It’s not horrendous, but it’s not that great, either.
But people need to keep in mind that Tom Daley isn’t like your average 21 year old. I’d imagine him to be at least a bit more mature, especially being an Olympic athlete. You aren’t able to get to that level if you’re too simple-minded! That takes hard work and dedication. Then again, he might just be candy for Dustin Black… 😀
Yeah I think 21 is too young to consider marriage, no matter what the partner’s age is.
As for the age difference, my friend is with someone 25 years younger (!!) and after 2.5 years there are serious issues between them. It’s really turning ugly and heartbreaking, as has been my fear all along.
Judge away. We grow and change so much in our 20’s as we’re living on our own and learning to navigate adult situations, that I don’t think this is going to last more than a few years.
I was a very different person at 30 than I was at 20. I had a much better sense of myself and what I wanted in life.
Seriously, Dustin is a predator. He began dating Tom when he was a teenager, and had just come out as gay.
It’s super creepy.
Becoming engaged is easy, getting married and actually staying married is hard work(this goes for both straight and gay btw). But I do wish them all the best. Good looking couple
Yep. Good luck to them! 🙂
I want to say “If it works for them great” and fully believe that but…the age difference, Tom only being 19 when they got together, and the fact that this is his first relationship after coming out at bisexual (he still identifies as Bi right?) makes me side-eye this one. If they are happy that is wonderful but the pessimist in me does not see this lasting a lifetime. You are right though that it is nice to see a same-sex couple able to announce their engagement in the paper just like anyone else.
What worries me about this type of relationships is that sometimes the young one gets seriously messed up, to the point where they’re forever incapable of forming a nice and healthy bond with another partner.
Just see Demi Lovato, she’s now much older but still completely obsessed with that pervert Valderrama.
Yup, the age difference is too much. Doesn’t matter who the couple is and who is older or younger. There isn’t enough life experience to share. What would these 2 talk about?
What ever is on TV. What they’re going to do on the week end. Their football teams. The books they’re reading. Shopping. People they hate that they both know. Politics. Where to go on holidays. How their day was etc.
My husband is younger by a dozen years. We’ve been married a long time…. But it hasn’t been without its challenges. Mostly it’s been judgement from the conservatives we’re surrounded by (We live in the Bible Belt: might as well be lost in time). To this day, there are still eyebrows raised by an older woman married to a younger man. Of course, positions reversed, nobody would say squat.
I can’t imagine being a same sex couple in that situation. I wish them the best of luck!
Why would it be any different for a same sex couple?
Makes me emotional that we’ve come so far that I can now roll my eyes at a same sex couple with a ridiculous age difference and one spouse likely marrying way too young, in the same way I’d roll my eyes at an opposite sex couple in the same situation. Sweet equality! 😉
i find this uncomfortable as a gay 20 something guy. I had been see someone who was turning 40 when i had just turned 19!! I ended things because as i stated i found it uncomfortable for so many reasons. like he had been in a relationship longer than I’d been alive…he was so into settling down ( I just turned 19, I was not) and he would try to please anytime we did something and I would be in embarrassed going out with him due to the age difference. Even in just conversation we didnt mesh well, he’d be talking about things my mom, dad and stepdad talked and about related too. Maybe Daley likes feeling like someones one and only but this is not it; all that affection from an older man will run its course! When I ended things he was quite aggressive and hateful… didn’t see it coming saying things like i wasted his time and so on…dont know why i wrote all this. Anyways watch out Daley
Interesting to hear your story but it makes me wonder what you saw in this older man to begin with and why you stayed when it seems like you were incompatible all along.
Stephen Fry’s husband was 27. There’s a huge difference in maturity between 21 and 27.
While I admit that I’ll side-eye any relationship in which one party is conceivably old enough to be the other’s parent, that is very true. I’m in my mid-late 20s now, and I am basically an entirely different person from who I was at 21. I’m still side-eyeing Stephen Fry, but I’m side-eyeing this one a lot harder.
I wonder what age Tom’s parents were married at because that tends to affect the outlook. Mine were wed around 18~20 and have been going strong for 30+ years so far so at the age of 24, I’m not really that weirded out by young marriages. It also may be a regional/cultural thing. So many of my high school classmates are married with kids that I’m starting to feel like an old crone.
I said it above , they were 21 .
Ah, I must have missed it. Yeah, then I definitely get why he has no hesitation jumping in to this.
Tom Daley isn’t just a regular 21 year old either, he’s a 2 time Olympian before he was 20. He hasn’t exactly led a normal life, and I side-eye him jumping into a really serious relationship like this.