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“Guess I should try to date men in their 40s now.”
After dating a series of noncommittal 30-somethings, I said the sentence above to my girl in hopes that dating even older would help me find a partner who actually wants to be a partner. Unfortunately, I momentarily fell into the trap that age somehow correlates with emotional maturity. It doesn’t.
“We often expect a person to be mature once they reach a certain age, yet emotional maturity is not guaranteed with any chronological age,” clinical psychologist Dr. Carla Marie Manly, told Bustle. “Emotional immaturity can be present in any person — regardless of age — if they have not matured psychologically.”
But emotional maturity is one of the main ingredients you need in a partner in order to have a healthy and stable relationship. Without it, you can end up feeling smothered, abandoned, berated, or even betrayed.
There are a coupe of ways to figure out if your new boo is emotional mature. For one, they respect space.
“Matured individuals are aware that everybody needs personal space and time for themselves to grow,” dating and relationship expert Celia Schweyer, from DatingScout.com, explained.
If your partner can’t deal with you needing quiet time to decompress after work, or private bath time without interruptions, they might have a problem.
“This kind of thinking is associated with egocentric behaviors where kids think that the world revolves only around themselves,” Schweyer said.
Emotionally stunted folks also take no responsibility for their actions. They lack the autonomy and self confidence to handle life’s ups and downs and instead blame their partner for things not going right.
“Emotionally immature people look for someone to blame when things go south,” Schweyer says. “You can spot this red flag in the way they handle their smallest issues like unpaid bills, missed schedules, or bad restaurant services.”
Last, folks with low emotional IQs are also incapable of listening. That means they have a hard time processing your thoughts and feelings as well as taking instructions from others.
“People who are like this often have a mindset that they are always right, so they don’t need your opinion,” Schweyer says. “They wouldn’t be the type of people who would care about your thoughts, and they might even get offended when you try to suggest a different way of doing things.”
You don’t need to do the emotional labor of trying to get your emotionally immature partner up to speed—emotional IQ is an important compatibility measure that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
