fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2609 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2609 ⌋

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A lot of people go by the "half your age plus seven" rule - take the age of the older partner in years, divide by half, then add seven, and the younger partner should be at least that old for it to be not creepy.

I tend to use that, but very lightly - it's like a guideline rather than a solid rule.

So:

40/2 + 7 = 27, which is nearly a decade older than 18. Average 18-year-old and average 27-year-old are such big differences in maturity, stability, place in life, etc., that I would definitely call this creepy. If you up it to 50, the output age is 32, which is an even bigger gap. However, at 18, I would caution said 18-year-old about all the problems of the relationship*, but there's not much I can do so I won't bother trying.

30/2 + 7 = 22, which is still significantly older than 18, but now at least you've got two age groups in the same school (in that, on average, a college student/4-year-degree spans from age 18 to 22). So I would side-eye the relationship, but if it was a mature 18 year old, then I would be much more understanding of the situation and let it go without more than an eyeroll.

* = if they are actually pursuing the relationship seriously; I definitely consider it within the realm of possibility that an 18-year-old would just be in it for some sex or a fling with an older person and doesn't expect anything serious to come of it, in which case, I again roll my eyes and leave them to it. I sure as hell would have jumped RDJ or Johnny Depp at 18 (or even younger) and if someone has managed to find attraction to a person that much older than them that is 'real'/accessible to them, then I sure as hell can't throw stones at them.

Edited 2014-02-24 03:03 (UTC)

I agree with the "half plus seven rule" as a general guideline for what's creepy and what isn't. It tends to work out surprisingly well in most cases.

That's probably a good guideline, but I'm 24 and just felt a little nauseous at the prospect of dating a 19-year-old. nope nope nope, lol. I'm kind of "conservative" when it comes to dating within my age group. Honestly, I'd rather date someone just within a year or two of my own age, but I guess as you get older, there's more flexibility.

I guess it's to each their own, though in this case 19 is more of a baseline/minimum age than anything else. I'm only 20, but I can't really imagine being too hung up on that kind of age difference when I'm older. But then, I've grown up surrounded by defiance of age expectations - I've always been seen as unusually mature and regularly get mistaken for much older than I am, while my parents were, in different ways, both very immature, to the extent I still worry every time my mother enters a new relationship. While I'm in a relationship with someone only a few years older than me, we are acting as parental figures to a friend who is less than two weeks younger than me.

After that, I guess I can't get too hung up on chronological age when far too often, it's the emotional/mental age that has played a much bigger role in my life. The idea of dating the "average" 16 or 17 year old gives me the squicks, but I also know of one or two who are 'old for their age' who I probably wouldn't have much of a problem with if it weren't for the legal ramifications. Conversely, I can think of a few 40 or 50 years old (celebrity and real life) who right now I wouldn't mind engaging with in some manner, even as I'm well aware that I wouldn't let the vast majority of them near me with a 10 foot pole. And in both cases, chronological age doesn't actually have much to do with it - it's just a convenient method of categorization.

/ramble

After that, I guess I can't get too hung up on chronological age when far too often, it's the emotional/mental age that has played a much bigger role in my life.

This, so much. I have friends in their late 20s who are nowhere near mature enough to be in a relationship, period. Conversely, I have known some teenagers who were far more mature than the average college student. Really, when you get down to it, the whole "age of majority" thing has nothing to do with actual physical maturity and is more an attempt to enforce some sort of standard of emotional maturity... which often doesn't work all that well because different people reach emotional/mental maturity at different ages. It's not like people magically start thinking and behaving like adults the moment they turn 18.

I remember once seeing a quote about how messed up our system is that at, you have to make big life-altering decisions about your future and career while still having to ask permission to go to the bathroom. It is kind of a paradox, there, how we view age versus how age actually works in the real world.

Chiming in to say that I'm 25 and 19 reads as "my age" to me, in the broad sense. Early 30s does, too. Not sure if they count as each other's age, but I think we'd all count as the same generation?

I think in many ways, that 11 year age gap is kind of pushing it, but still understandable in many ways.

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