Latest news with #ageGap
Daily Mail
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
All of Brigitte Macron's most awkward moments from THAT face grab to encounter with Donald Trump and breaking royal protocol
The relationship between Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte – and their 24-year age gap - has long been a subject of fascination both in France and abroad. Mrs Macron, now 72, was a drama teacher and the President, now 47, was a pupil when they met at a private Catholic school in their hometown of Amiens. A mother of three children, she divorced her husband and began a relationship with Mr Macron while he was in his late teens – before they tied the knot in 2007. Now, interest in their marriage has intensified in recent weeks following an incident in Vietnam where Mrs Macron appeared to shove her husband in the face. Brigitte ignores helping hand from her husband Emmanuel Macron was ignored by his wife Brigitte while he offered her a hand off a plane yesterday as they arrived in Britain for their three-day state visit. The visiting leader was being welcomed by the Prince and Princess of Wales after disembarking his jet before the first lady at RAF Northolt in West London. As his wife walked down the steps towards the waiting royals, who were greeting the couple on behalf of King Charles III, President Macron held out a helping hand. But Mrs Macron appeared to ignore it, instead holding the handrail as she walked down - leaving him to awkwardly drop his hand, before giving Kate's hand an air kiss. Minutes later, the Macrons were seen in a car waiting to leave the base - and relations appeared frosty, with Mrs Macron looking at her phone after getting it out of her bag. Pushing her husband's face on a plane Brigitte Macron sparked a storm in May when she was seen pushing her husband's face away with both hands before they disembarked a plane in Vietnam. The president dismissed the gesture - caught on camera - as horseplay, but it caused a huge stir in France, with daily Le Parisien newspaper asking: 'Slap or 'squabble'?' Mrs Macron seemed to stick out both her hands and give her husband's face a shove, leaving him startled before he recovered and turned to wave through the open door. The couple proceeded down the staircase for the official welcome by Vietnamese officials, though Mrs Macron did not take her husband's arm when he offered it. 'My wife and I were squabbling, we were rather joking, and I was taken by surprise,' Mr Macron later said, adding that it had 'become a kind of planetary catastrophe'. His office said in a statmeent: 'The president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around. It's a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists.' Breaking royal protocol at Normandy memorial Brigitte Macron committed of a faux pas in June 2024 when she tried to hold hands with a rather reluctant Queen Camilla at the British Normandy Memorial in France. Camilla and Mrs Macron, both dressed in white, laid wreaths at the memorial at Ver-sur-Mer, before stepping back to take a moment of reflection. The First Lady then reached out to the Queen, but Camilla seemed somewhat reluctant to proffer her gloved hand. After appearing to give the royal's hand a slight squeeze, Mrs Macron dropped it and the two stood side by side in front of the memorial. Emmanuel Macron also kept the King and Queen waiting when he was 20 minutes late for a showpiece D-Day memorial ceremony during the same visit. The Royals were already sitting waiting when France's head of state finally arrived at the 80th anniversary event at the memorial. Donald Trump telling her she is 'good shape' Donald Trump made his admiration for Brigitte Macron clear back in July 2017 in Paris when he told France's first lady: 'You know, you're in such good shape.' The compliment to Mrs Macron, then 64, was made in front of her husband - and Mr Trump repeated it to him before turning back to her and saying: 'Beautiful.' During the exchange, which was captured on a French official livestream, the reaction of Mr Trump's wife Melania was not seen, because her back was to the camera. However the American first lady seemed to move closer to Mrs Macron and put her hand around her protectively as President Trump spoke to her. The awkward exchange came after an also-awkward lingering embrace with Mrs Macron as she and her husband welcomed the Trumps on the eve of Bastille Day. Mr Trump kissed Mrs Macron Parisian-style, once on each cheek, before taking both her hands for a prolonged grip, in which he appeared to jerk her left arm towards him as she appeared to be struggling to get him to let go. Melania Trump put her hand around Mrs Macron protectively as President Trump spoke to her
The Guardian
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The rules of age gap relationships? Here's what we can learn from famous men
Here's a maths problem for you. If actor Anna Camp (42) has a new girlfriend called Jade Whipkey (24), meaning there's an 18-year age gap between them, is this a) disgusting; b) perfectly fine; c) something I have no desire to think about? If you answered c), then I'm afraid large sections of the internet disagree with you. There has been heated debate about the propriety of the Camp-Whipkey romance ever since the two went public – so much so that Camp recently spoke out on the matter. 'I've dated men exactly my age and Jade is FAR more mature than any of them,' Camp wrote in a social media post. 'We have more in common than anyone else I've ever dated and can literally talk about anything and everything.' Of literally anything and everything happening right now, Camp's relationship with another consenting adult is obviously low on the list of things to worry about. It's probably one step above fretting over whether we're trending towards 'tomato girl summer', 'lavender girl summer', or 'apoplectic girl summer'. That said, it might be wise to use this as a teachable moment and review some important rules about age-gap relationships. First, if you are a 38-year-old adult whose 17-year-old love interest is still at high school, you need to be sent straight into detention. I'm not pointing any fingers here, but I suggest you Google what Jerry Seinfeld was up to when he was 38 in 1993. Second, if you are a 72-year-old man who has a child with a 30-year-old who happens to be the former stepdaughter you first met when she was four, that's … problematic. Again, I'm not pointing fingers, just advising you to research Elon Musk's father. It explains a lot about how poor Elon turned out. Third, if you are middle-aged and everyone you date is under 25, it's less a sign of their maturity than it is a red flag about yours. I was going to cite Leonardo DiCaprio here but, after years of dumping girlfriends the moment they turned 25, he now seems settled down with a 27-year-old. It looks as if 50-year-old Leo has finally grown up. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
The Sun
05-06-2025
- General
- The Sun
My sister and I were both born in 2008 but we aren't twins – peoples jaws drops when they find out how our age gap works
A TEEN has left people scratching their heads by saying her and her sister were both born in 2008 but aren't twins. TikTok user @amber_andjade said how she often tells people that there is a small age gap between her and her sibling. 2 2 However, when people guess that it's around two years, she tells them it is even smaller than that. In a clip on TikTok, she posted: 'Jan 2008 and Dec 2008." One person replied to the video asking: 'How is that even possible…' However, people were quick to explain: 'Her mother got pregnant 3 or 2 months after she was born." The social media user said that they are in the same class at school due to their close age. Others pointed out that she's an 'Irish twin', which is a term often given to babies born less than 12 months apart. The term Irish twins was initially used as a derogatory term aimed at Irish-Catholics who emigrated to America. As Catholics do not believe in contraception, Irish families were often large, with children born close together in age. One person shared: 'damn mom didn't get a chance to relax.' Another added: 'Your father was so impatient.' I'm my own TWIN - I have two sets of DNA, two blood types & different skin tone A third commented: 'mom really said 'wow let's do that again'.' We previously shared about one mum who got pregnant three weeks after giving birth. Jemma McCullough shared details of her unconventional family situation via a video posted to her TikTok channel. Jemma gave birth to a daughter just 10 months after her son was born. In the UK, the average age gap between siblings is around two years and two months. Only a small percentage of pregnancies occur within 12 months of a previous birth. A US-based study found that about 0.2 per cent of women gave birth twice within the same calendar year. What are the different types of twins? TWINS are when two children are produced in the same pregnancy. They can be identical or different, and two boys, two girls, or a girl and a boy. Twins are quite rare, but are usually born completely healthy What are the different types of twins? Monozygotic – identical twins ('one cell' twins) Dizygotic – also known as 'fraternal', non identical twins. Babies are no more alike than siblings born at separate times, and they can be the same or different sexes Conjoined twins – identical twins that are joined together. They are extremely rare, and it's estimated they range from one in 49,000 to 189,000 births, although around half are stillborn, and one third die within 24 hours. Can identical twins be two different sexes? Identical twins are always of the same sex because they form from the same fertilised egg that contains either female or male chromosomes. The single egg is divided into two separate embryos, and they occur in about three in every 1000 deliveries worldwide. Therefore, boy/girl twins are always fraternal (or dizygotic), as their chromosomes are either XY (male) or XX (female). What are Di Di twins? Di Di stands for Dichronic Diamniotic, and they are the common type of twins. They have their own amniotic sacs and placenta, so are just sharing the womb of the mother, and are therefore not identical. There are few complications with Di Di twins, so have a good chance of being born completely healthy without intervention from your doctor. Di di twins are more likely to be non-identical than identical.
Times
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Macron and le slap! What does it really mean?
There can now be few people who aren't aware that Brigitte Macron, the wife of President Emmanuel Macron of France, has been caught on film striking or pushing her husband. The video was taken on the tarmac at Hanoi airport on Sunday night, moments after the presidential plane landed on Vietnamese soil and the door was opened. In the Airbus's interior Brigitte, just out of view — only her outstretched arm is visible — can be seen raising her hand to her husband's face and shoving him. The slap (although it's really more of a one-handed shunt) went around the world within hours, and now we're all calling it Le Slapgate. Members of the president's entourage were quick to play it down. 'A moment when the president and his wife were decompressing … a moment of togetherness,' was their somewhat implausible explanation. Macron himself claims he was 'simply joking with my wife, as we do quite often'. But anyone who has watched the video can see him visibly recoil, and that red-jacketed arm meant business. It's hard to spin the incident as mere horseplay. In any case, however much they protest, this glimpse behind the curtain will not be so easily dismissed. The real issue here is that the Macrons have fascinated onlookers from the moment in 2017 he became France's youngest president at 39 when his wife was 64, and now the world has been thrown a titbit, a morsel of something sinister or not, that's sent the slumbering rumour mill into overdrive. The quarter-of-a-century age gap is intriguing, but more controversial is the circumstances of their meeting. He was a schoolboy of 15 and she was his drama teacher, a 39-year-old mother of three, one of whom, her middle child Laurence, was his classmate. Her eldest son, Sebastien, is two years older than Macron. History does not relate at what point their relationship became public, but Macron's parents removed him from the school in Amiens and sent him to Paris to finish his education in the hope that the separation would end their liaison. They hoped in vain, and the couple married in 2007 when he was 29 and she was 54. So far so weird. • I waited ten years to marry Emmanuel Macron, says Brigitte On top of that unusual beginning, or because of it, there have been rumours about Macron's sexuality. ('To say that it is not possible for a man living with an older woman to be anything other than a homosexual or a hidden gigolo is misogynous. And it's also homophobia,' Macron has said.) But the gossip that, perhaps inevitably, has gained the most traction is that their relationship is more like that of a mother and son than a husband and wife. She is said to organise everything from his diary to his clothes, and it is not unusual for her to 'scold him for doing something wrong'. There are many theories about what goes on in this marriage, and now we've all got a theory about Slapgate and what's behind it. These are the top nine conversations we've had since. 1. To be fair it wasn't a slap, it was more of a chin push, and we've all been there haven't we? Not to say that normal happy couples lash out at each other, except for, they occasionally do. We're not talking about taking a swing, to be clear, but if you are inclined to playfully push someone who is amusing/annoying you, or give them a light jab to the upper arm (No! You cannot be serious!), or push their face away when sitting next to them on the sofa (Why aren't you listening!), then you are also capable of the less frequent shunt of exasperation, the barge past, or the most French of them all, now we come to think of it, the hand-off. If aimed at the head (as Brigitte's was) this is pretty full-on but also not astonishing. It looks a lot like a 'No I am still furious with you … Va-t-en!' move. Or maybe 'Don't come near me, I hate your job!' Or there could be an element of 'Don't speak to me' going on there too. We've all clapped a hand over our partner's mouth to stop them talking, haven't we? Usually when they were saying 'and just when I thought you'd finally stopped, you poured yourself another drink and started to tell Geoff he needed to lose three stone'. 2. This proves they're a regular couple We're slightly surprised to find Petit Macron and Mrs Macron exhibiting marital frustration because we rather assumed this was more of a slick arrangement involving two people who support each other professionally, whose union is mutually desirable, but who are not (how shall we put it) passionate about each other. We thought they were a team, not so much a fighty couple who sometimes really get on each other's nerves. 3. It's Melania and Donald all over again There's a private plane, a hand-hold rejected, two stony-faced people standing on foreign tarmac looking as if they want to be anywhere but there with each other. It is all familiar. But Melania Trump (others might venture) would never raise a hand to Donald because she would go quite a long way not to have to touch him. And there's something about this moment that suggests a passionate argument not yet resolved to Mrs Macron's liking, whereas with M and D it's more like 'you booked me for three publics and two foreign trips and this was not in the pre-Flotus document'. 'The job demands upbeat smiles and flesh pressing and endless meet and greets' NHAC NGUYEN / AFP/GETTY IMAGES 4. She's fed up with the job Never mind the packed tour of southeast Asia stretching ahead, the job demands upbeat smiles and flesh pressing and endless meet and greets and wardrobe changes and long, long dinners sitting next to minor dignitaries, and she might just have been expressing her wish that he could do all this on his own for once. 5. They are French They are French, and the French, as all Brits have been brought up to believe, do things differently, especially when it comes to men and women. We're a bit blurry about the details but we know this much: French men are rogues and philanderers and all have a bit of cinq à sept on the side and they don't like feminism and are very much not on board with égalité. Your basic nightmare. French women are long-suffering but also the older ones (Brigitte?) quite like the old-style 'dance' (see the established French actresses coming out against MeToo and the tacit support for Gérard Depardieu and the like) and they all believe man-pleasing to be a basic feminine duty. They also will happily slap that man hard across the face if he transgresses and then all hell will break loose and there will be shouting, extravagant gesturing, lots of storming about (her wearing his shirt, him smoking a Gitane). We're not sure if any of this is true IRL but it's part of the French myth and there is no doubt that we expect fireworks from this lot. Slaps at the very least. • So the 'French paradox' was actually a fallacy 6. If it was the other way around and he'd pushed her you'd be horrified You would. Absolutely fair. 7. Things happen on planes, don't they? Well they do if you drink all your duty-free allocation, you are delayed on the runway for four hours and then the airline tells you they have been unable to load the meals and the loos are locked. Not so much on the French equivalent of Air Force One. But also it is true that 16-hour overnight flights do not bring out the best in people, especially people who need to be on parade the second they hit the tarmac. 8. Maybe it was 'horseplay' We've all got an actual horseplay story that didn't end well. The time you threw a potato (raw) at him and it chipped his tooth, for example. But look, if it genuinely was horseplay, we know how this goes: he would have grabbed her wrists and she'd have lurched forwards, they'd both have lost their balance and ended up sprawling on the floor and then we'd all be asking: is Macron the new Biden? So no point trying that one. 9. Is she the (very) scary power behind the throne? Macron did look taken aback, but did he maybe also look a bit like someone who was used to getting a clip around the ear if he displeased his handler? Very hard to say, of course, but factor in the mother-son stuff and bear in mind that middle-class French mamans are absolute tyrants, and you might be onto something.
Sky News
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sky News
Classroom crush to face push: Key moments in the Macrons' relationship
French President Emmanuel Macron has dismissed a video of him being pushed in the face by his wife as "nonsense". The clip, which shows Brigitte Macron place her hands on her husband's face as they prepare to exit their plane, sparked suggestions that the French first couple were caught in the middle of an argument. But Mr Macron said afterwards it was a case of "simply joking with my wife, as we often do". The pair's relationship has been in the headlines since Mr Macron's political career put him, and his loved ones, in the public eye. Both have been quizzed about their 25-year age gap - he is 47 and she is 72 - as well as their unconventional meet. Use our slider below to look through some of the key moments of the Macrons' relationship. When Emmanuel met Brigitte Mr Macron met Brigitte Trogneux, as she was then known, in 1993 when he was 15. At the time, she worked as a teacher at his secondary school in the French city of Amiens. As a student, Mr Macron was not in the classes his future wife taught, but the pair spent time together while working on a school play and during theatre workshops she ran. She was almost 40, married to banker Andre Auziere and had three children, Sebastien, Laurence, and Tiphaine. According to biographer Anne Fulda, who interviewed the Macron family, the French leader's parents initially thought he had a crush on Laurence Auziere, who was in his class at school. But in fact it was her mum. Mr Macron's mother, Francoise, is quoted in Fulda's book as saying: "We couldn't believe it. What is clear is that when Emmanuel met Brigitte we couldn't just say: 'That's great!'" His parents also allegedly told Brigitte to stay away from their son until he was 18, to which she replied: "I cannot promise you anything." Years later, she would confide in a friend that being with the young French president was like "working with Mozart". 'I will marry you' Defying the orders from Mr Macron's parents, the pair kept in touch, even after he was sent to Paris to complete his education at one of France's finest schools. Now around the age of 17, Mr Macron told his future wife: "I will be back for you. Whatever you do, I will marry you." In a 2017 interview with Elle France magazine, Mrs Macron said there was "nothing between" the two of them at the time he went to Paris, but it "all unfolded very slowly". She said: "The great distances that separated us physically until 2007. But we wrote to each other all the time during that period. "It all unfolded very slowly. I gradually brought my family to realise that. Emmanuel gradually brought his family to realise that." She admitted at the time she was concerned for her children as "spiteful gossip" had been "making the rounds". The couple eventually got married in 2007, a year after she divorced Mr Auziere. At the time of their wedding, he was 29 and she was 54. Life as the French first lady Nearly a decade after tying the knot, Mr Macron made a bid for the presidency, which he won in May 2017. From the moment Mr Macron started campaigning in 2016, his wife was with him on the election trail, during which he said he would "clarify" the role of the head of state's spouse. Shortly after becoming the first lady, Mrs Macron was asked about the relationship with her husband, and their age gap - which is the same as Donald and Melania Trump. She told Elle France that the difference in their ages is a "joke between" them, adding: "Anything anyone might say about the 20 years' difference is just a big nothing." She said: "Of course, we have breakfast, me with my wrinkles, him with his fresh face, but that's how it is. If I had not made that choice, I would have missed out on my life." Dispelling rumours As a couple, Mr and Mrs Macron have had to dispel various rumours that have emerged about them both. In 2017 Mr Macron laughed off rumours of a gay affair outside his marriage, saying: "If you're told I lead a double life... it's because my hologram has escaped." Then in 2022, Mrs Macron launched legal action over the spread of false claims that she was transgender. In September 2024, she was awarded €8,000 (£6,000) in damages by a Paris court after it found two women guilty of spreading the false claims.
