PERSONAL FACT: Leonardo DiCaprio Only Dates Women Who Are 20 to 25 Years of Age
Tabloids, rejoice! After a whirlwind six-month romance and reported engagement with Sports Illustrated rookie of the year Kelly Rohrbach, 41-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio is back on the market. After the actor nurses his wounds and does the inner processing work a failed engagement demands, he’s bound to start looking for another chance at love. Who might she be?
We have a guess. DiCaprio “definitely has a type,” Hollywood Life gushed last summer. “After dating a bevy of beauties, the Oscar nominee has maintained a pattern of going after supermodels.” It’s true: Over the past decade, all of DiCaprio’s confirmed romantic partners have been traditionally beautiful, blond, and models.
They’ve also been 25 and under. Casual flings and rumored trysts aside, to public knowledge, DiCaprio has never had a relationship with anyone who’s been old enough to avoid a military draft. In fact, about half the time, his romances have ended when his girlfriends have hit that fateful mid-20s mark, aging out of DiCaprio’s love like they’ve hit the upper threshold on the kid’s menu at Cracker Barrel.
DiCaprio started out dating women his own age. In 1996 and 1997, he was partnered with Kristen Zang; they were both 22. His next two girlfriends, Gisele Bündchen and Bar Refaeli, with whom DiCaprio shared his longest relationships, dated him while they were each 20 to 25 years old; DiCaprio was in his mid-to-late 20s and early-to-mid-30s, respectively. In 2011, DiCaprio, then 36, dated 23- to 24-year-old Blake Lively. In 2012, he dated 22- to 23-year old Erin Heatherton. The actor had a literal May-December relationship with Toni Garrn, who DiCaprio dated from May 2013, when he was 38 and she was 20, to December 2014. His most recent romance was with Rohrbach, who turned 25 during their half-year stint.
Older men—especially rich older men, especially rich and famous older men—date much younger women all the time. It’s one of those accepted, ubiquitous social cues that tell women they get less fuckable as they age, but men don’t. DiCaprio seems particularly committed to the 20-25 age range, though; maybe it’s a very specific trophy-girlfriend archetype he’s looking for, or maybe he’s scared to date someone as grown and wise to the world as he is. Probably both. He could also be nostalgic for that time in his own life, which was when he hit the big time in Romeo + Juliet and Titanic.
But there could be a more complex explanation for DiCaprio’s narrow sexual orientation. In October, we wondered if DiCaprio, who has an eerily identical 21-year-old Swedish doppelgänger, had tried to safeguard his youthful visage in a Benjamin Button–type scheme. It could be that dating DiCaprio is a rite of passage for models, a common point of reference to help women of a certain age in a certain industry bond with one another as they pursue their late-20s careers. Perhaps DiCaprio’s an advanced driver’s ed instructor, shepherding women through their training until they’re old enough to rent a car. Or maybe he doesn’t want to risk dating anyone who’s just using him for his health insurance because she’s been booted from her parents’ plan. In that case, the 20-25 set is the perfect age for true DiCaprio love.
