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Dating someone five to 10 years older is not a huge deal, after a certain point in life. Obviously, when you’re 16 and want to date a 19-year-old, your parents aren’t having it. And when you’re 20 and meet a 30-year-old, there may be too many differences there to make it work—your parents still pay your bills and your boyfriend is well into his career. But later in life, a five-, 10-, and sometimes even a 15-year age difference doesn’t really matter. A 45-year-old can easily connect to a 57-year-old. They may both have kids, careers, divorces, property—the whole thing.
But what about those couples with a massive age difference? Think twenty years or more. We’ve already explored how women feel about dating men much younger than themselves here, but what about 30-year-old women with 55-year-old boyfriends? What about these 28-year-old women (girls?) getting involved with men in their late forties? You see it happening! Living in a big city, I see it all of the time. Big cities really embody the saying, “60 is the new 40” and “40 is the new 30.” You wouldn’t believe how often men in their fifties and sixties hit on me, a woman in her early thirties, like it’s nothing. It’s clear that society has told them there’s nothing weird about that!
The thing is that…60 isn’t the new 40. Sixty is 60, and all that comes with that. And 40 isn’t the new 30. Forty is 40 and 40-year-olds should, I hope, feel that they are different (read: far more mature) than someone who just left her twenties. As much as we can pretend that age is just a number and it’s that human connection that counts, age will catch up to you. Biology doesn’t care what you feel about age. On that note, here’s what the future holds if you date someone much older than yourself.
Health advisories apply to him
Many young people right now have the luxury of looking around at the current coronavirus pandemic and saying, “My friends and I will be fine. We’re young.” But if you date someone much older, you may find that when certain illnesses go around, your partner is in the most vulnerable group. He isn’t young. And if he becomes ill, he may not be fine.
