According to Page Six, Chris Evans and Warrior Nun star Alba Baptista got married over the weekend in what’s been described as an “intimate, at-home wedding” in Massachusetts. And while no photos from the wedding have yet to be released, and few details have been revealed apart from the names of some of the A-list attendees, it’s already brought a new angle to an old dating debate.
Amid reporting on which of Evans’ Avengers co-stars attended the wedding (which reportedly required guests to sign an NDA and give up their phones) and a chronology of their dating history, some fans were more than keen to bring up the 16-year age gap between Evans, who is 42, and Baptista, who is 26.
People first reported Evans and Baptista’s relationship in November 2022, and at the time, a source said that the couple had been dating “for more than a year.” And while Evans did post about Baptista on his social media accounts, he deactivated them over the summer.
Trying to dissect the age difference between two people has long been a sticking point for people on the internet. Some iterations would focus on how Hollywood ageism would mean while older actors were still being cast in romances, their love interests would still be around the same age (or only go up to a certain age). But it also means dissecting real relationships between celebrities and judge Sofia Coppola over a teaser trailer because they thought it romanticized the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis Presley. Just last week, amid swirling headlines around Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner’s impending divorce, the age difference between the two (along with how young Turner was when the two first met) was brought up a lot.
Some people believe that Evans’ level of celebrity means the age difference between the two is being downplayed. People are also pointing out the hypocrisy of being OK with the age gap between Evans and Baptista while finding the smaller one between Jonas and Turner (seven years) a sign of something nefarious. For some, a large age gap is in and of itself an issue.
Others pointed out that distilling the relationship solely to the age difference is infantilizing toward Baptista, that she can make her own choices. They also argued that those ripping into Evans about the age gap are missing any nuance about the discussion.
Evans and Baptista have yet to confirm their marriage. But actor Scott Evans, who most recently appeared in Barbie (and is also Chris Evans’ younger brother), discussed the special kind of hell that Evans has had to face whenever he’s been in a relationship in a July 2023 appearance on The Viall Files, some of which has played out online as news of Evans’ nuptials spreads.
He noted that it’s not necessarily all media backlash—it would be people on Twitter who felt entitled to weigh in on Evans’ relationships or tag Scott in posts to get them in with his older brother.
“The way people can be, it can make it pretty hard to date someone like that because you think like, ‘Oh I’m just dating a person, he’s a guy,’” Scott Evans said. “And then all of a sudden, it’s article after article after article after post after tag after tag for everybody just being like, you are a piece of crap. To anybody he’s tried to date, and just destroying them. You can only take that for so long, and it makes relationships kind of hard for him.”
