Eileen Kelly, the sex educator and podcaster who writes Vogue’s sex and dating column, says she is dating Anthony Kiedis, the 63-year-old frontman of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In a new column titled “My Boyfriend Is Double My Age,” Kelly, 30, wrote about what she called the “nuanced issue” of inter-generational dating.
Kelly said age-gap relationships often involve power imbalances, but she argued that people tend to have simplistic ideas about how those imbalances show up. She also wrote that she and Kiedis have been mistaken for father and daughter in public, a jarring detail that captures how visible their age difference is to strangers.
The relationship is landing against the backdrop of Kiedis’s long history of dating women much younger than him. Stereogum said he was involved with 16-year-old movie star Ione Skye when he was 24, and noted that his 2004 memoir, Scar Tissue, is full of disturbing stories like that. Kelly, for her part, described a meet-cute at a mutual friend’s party and wrote that “there is something to be said for a man who’s simply had more time to get his shit together,” adding that her much older boyfriend seems genuinely excited to be with her and “is fully aware that he’s one lucky bastard.”
For Kelly, the piece is not a simple endorsement of age-gap romance so much as a public argument that the dynamics can’t be flattened into a single moral. For Kiedis, it puts an old pattern back in the spotlight at a time when Kelly herself is making the case that the relationship can be understood on its own terms.
