Keanu Reeves' girlfriend walked a red carpet, and made Hollywood look ridiculous.

Keanu Reeves is no longer single.

Finally, Hollywood’s nicest man – proven time and time again – has found love.

Reeves, 55, walked the red carpet at the LACMA Art + Film Gala in Los Angeles on Saturday night with his longtime friend, business collaborator, and visual artist, Alexandra Grant, 46.

It’s the first time in decades that the famously private Reeves has posed on the red carpet with a woman. They held hands. They shared loving looks. It was lovely to see. And the world was thrilled.

Mamamia’s daily entertainment podcast The Spill discusses the background of Keanu Reeves’ new girlfriend and why we’re all so happy for him. Post continues after. 

Because nobody deserves this more than Keanu Reeves.

His life has been tough and marked by much sadness. His good friend River Phoenix overdosed at 23, his sister Kim battled leukemia for 10 years, his partner Jennifer Syme died in a car accident at just 28 – about a year after she gave birth to their stillborn daughter, Ava.

In a 2006 interview with Parade magazine, Reeves said of Syme’s death: “Grief changes shape, but it never ends. People have a misconception that you can deal with it and say, ‘It’s gone, and I’m better’. They’re wrong. When the people you love are gone, you’re alone”.

So when Reeves and Grant were pictured together on the red carpet, the internet lost their collective mind.

"Sad Keanu" is no longer sad. "Lonely Keanu" is in love. Keanu is finally happy.

But the reaction to the news has revealed an uncomfortable truth.

There's been the predictably hateful online commentary that Grant is "too old" for Reeves - that she looks "old enough" to be Reeves' mother or that he should be with someone who can "give him children".

Grant is 46. She is nine years younger than the 55-year-old actor.

The not-so-subtle subtext is Reeves deserves better. After everything he's been through, he should be with a woman who's young (or at least looks younger than Grant's silver mane signals to the world), who's fertile, and who meets Hollywood's impossibly strict beauty standards.

Then there's the other side - the groundswell of excitement for Reeves, the praise that's being heaped on him for dating someone who isn't half his age, the commentary delighting in how refreshing it is to see a male star dating a 'natural-looking' woman who's his own age (even though Grant is almost a decade younger than him). Grant's even been compared to Helen Mirren. As legendary as Mirren is, she's 74. Grant is nearly 30 years younger than her. But there are so few grey-haired women under 60 in the public eye, that it's no wonder some assumed the grey-haired Grant must be Mirren.

The very fact that Reeves dating a woman within the vicinity of his own age has commanded such an overwhelming response (some negative but mostly positive) shows just how rare a Hollywood relationship that looks like this is to us:

Instead we've been conditioned to see the cliche of famous middle-aged men dating younger women as the norm.

Just a couple of weeks ago Dennis Quaid, 65, announced his engagement to 26-year-old Laura Savoie. That's a 39 year age gap. There were murmurs and jokes but it did not attract the amount of inches that Reeves and Grant's red carpet foray has. Then there's Leonardo DiCaprio, who at 44, has never once dated a woman who's older than 25. Richard Gere, 70, and his wife Alejandra, 36, are reportedly expecting their second child. Alec Baldwin, 61, and his wife Hilaria, 35, will welcome their fifth child next year. There's Hollywood golden couple Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose husband of 19 years Michael Douglas is 25 years her senior.

Of course, these relationships are really none of our business. If they're happy, then that's all that matters. But they're just a few of the many examples that instantly come to mind. Because a man with a young woman is commonplace, so utterly unremarkable, that we've become inured to it.

Yet here we are with Keanu Reeves at 55 dating a 46-year-old causing such noise. Hollywood has completely warped our sense of what a 'normal' relationship looks like that a man with an "age-appropriate" girlfriend is so out of the ordinary, that it's not only something that dominates online chatter, it makes front page worldwide news.

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