How much of an age difference is acceptable in a relationship? At what point do you draw the line?
Some people say age is just a number. In some cases, I can agree, but when two people are multiple decades apart, things could get a little weird.
I recently heard of a method to decide if a person is too young or old for you. The secret is taking half the age and adding seven. If the guy I’m dating was 42 and I was 22, I’d be about six years too young for him. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb for people of any age.
Last year I went on a couple of dates with a guy who was ten years older than I was. Before the first date, I was mainly worried about one thing: what do you talk about at dinner when there’s a large age gap? Ten years isn’t really that big of a deal, but I came to realize pretty soon the guy didn’t share many interests with me.
As a college student, I don’t think I could seriously date someone twice my age. I would be talking about class and they would be talking about work and mortgages. There would be a huge lack of commonalities due to us being at totally different places in our lives.
On the other hand, some people just really dig dating older people, or vice versa. If you’re into cougars or sugar daddies and that’s working out for you, more power to you.
For anyone curious about finding older guys or ladies, maybe on match.com or the Tinder app, the half plus seven rule is a good gauge. For the rest of us, we can only hope to avoid our old townie neighbors asking us on dates so we don’t have to worry about it.