The Age Gappers

They say they're happy. Why is it so hard to believe them?

- By Lila Shapiro. Self-Portraits taken by the subjects

Jessica Moss met Kevin Hardesty in the summer of 2000 at a feature-film production company in Los Angeles. He was a 37-year-old executive; she was a 19-year-old intern.

Moss first spotted Hardesty while she was doing paperwork in the operations department: He strolled by wearing a silm maroon Prada dress shirt tucked into a pair of perfectly cut trousers and had thick horn-rimmed glasses. On the last day of her internship, she followed him to the elevators as he was leaving to go home and asked him out to lunch. As the elevator doors closed, he shrugged and said, "Well, I'm listed." Moss looked him up in the white pages, and they went out a few times after that, but ultimately Hardesty told her it couldn't happen. "You're too young," he said. "You need to go live your life."

Moss moped through her first trip to Paris that Christmas. She talked about him constantly with her friends. In 2004, she ran into him walking down Larchmont Boulevard, and they eventually had dinner. She'd just moved into an apartment with a boyfriend her age, soon to be her husband, and they shared a puppy. By 2013, that marriage had fallen apart. That year, Hardesty reached out on Facebook to wish her a happy birthday. "We've been inseparable ever since," Moss said. They got married in 2017, when she was 36 and he was 54.