Jackie didn’t check his profile before their first date.
She didn’t know what David looked like when she walked into that café in the Philippines in 2016. They had met on a dating site where men from all over the world look for Asian women, and she arrived without having seen a picture, without expectations.
When she saw him, she found herself face to face with an American from Oakland, California, more than twice her age. And yet, as she later said, he surprised her: “He’s a gentleman and very kind”.
After several dates, David returned to his home country. Three months later, he boarded another plane back to the Philippines, this time to pick up where things had left off with Jackie. They got married in 2018 and moved to the United States together. She remembers that day as the best of her life, although her parents and siblings couldn’t travel to be with her.
Today David is 70 and Jackie is 28. They share their 42-year age gap on TikTok, where negative comments come their way every day: that he looks like her grandfather, that she’s after his money.
Jackie sums it up calmly: “People think he’s my grandfather, but we’re very much in love”. He was initially concerned about how the relationship would look, since he’s even older than his in-laws, but now he responds with a phrase that’s become their motto: “Age is just a number”.