Does Age matter?

Moral of the story: don't listen to other people. Just pay attention to the mutually shared feelings. If the love is a mutually experienced thing, then LOVE. Don't let any third party object to that. As long as no one gets hurt, as long as you and your partner both understand what the possible/potential consequences are if one of the parties is a minor, and as long as you and your partner are happy, then go for it. Your partner just might be the your lifetime partner...or not. You won't know unless you pursue that relationship. All the best.

 

I agree with you. online pokies australia

 

i saw somewhere that the appropriate age to date someone is half your age plus 7...or vice versa. not saying i agree but the formula for the most part makes a bit of sense. i mean a 90 year old and an 18 year old just dont seem to belong to each other.

 

I am married (for the first time) to a woman 26 years younger than myself and we are MADLY in love.

This is the first relationship I have ever been in that was more than 6 years older of younger than myself and when I was first getting to know her I thought she was older than she is because she is mature for her age.

When I did find out her age i tried to walk away but she had other plans.
When I became her "boyfriend" I knew I wanted to marry her right away even though I never thought I would ever be married or want to be my entire life.

I have never felt so in love or so much love from another person in my life and we are very happy.

 

There's an excellent bit of data put together by OkCupid. Basically, it suggests that men aren't very tolerant of older women beyond a small margin, but older women are quite a bit tolerant of a wider range of men. This create an interesting unexplored area of attraction.

Explore the post:

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman/

It's about 3 years old, but the data probably hasn't changed (as this seems like a long-term trend)

 

For a purely sexual relationship, I say no, age does not and should not matter.

However, if it is a full-fledged relationship with hopes and plans for enduring many years, there is something to think about.

What about when you are 83 and she is 55?
Hopefully you will be a strong and independent man up until the day you die but the truth is that it is possible that you won't be. At 83 you might be bed-ridden and incontinent or you may be a hard-to-manage healthy body with a mind ruined by dementia.
If you are committed to each other, she is either going to have to take care of you herself or abandon you so that she doesn't have to.
She might very well end up spending many years of her life not in love with a vibrant mature partner but nursing an invalid.

Just something to think about because it is reality.

Good luck.

 

If I were still single, I would consider dating a woman if she was about 30 years younger than me & If I liked her for different reasons.

 

I've never dated a man younger than myself, and have no intention of doing so. I've always, with very few exceptions, dated men 10 to 15 years older than myself. Too much older, and it seems kinda creepy to me. I don't know why, I guess that is just how I am wired.

 

This gal brings up a very valid argument.

My response would be that it's an issue that should be hashed out clearly during the dating stage of that age-gap relationship and the older party should acknowledge without bitterness that they may as well be abandoned.

Also since my last post on this thread I should say that age doesn't matter if the relationship is completely platonic and no sexual acts are taking place.

If the relationship is just a dating thing, like say a 28 year old is taking out a 14 year old to a movie or dinner and taking them right back home, that's just a public outing, nothing creepy about that. At first glance it looks wrong, but perhaps their relationship is just fine and healthier than thousands of other relationships that are closer in age. There's just not enough information from what you observe with your own eyes to judge others.

---

But I disagree with this guy about age not mattering if it was a purely sexual relationship. I may not like age of consent laws because I think their flaws are atrocious with non-specific gray areas that vindictive parents abuse to the expense of taxpayers, but in no way condone pedophilia. Case in point: age matters in this respect.

 

Just for the record, I'm not a guy. I'm a gal. :gorgeous:

A 44 yr old female in love with a 23 yr old male.
:love:


So I'm speaking from my own personal perspective on the potentials of this kind of situation...something that I have been thinking about lately quite intensely.

:mickey: :wheelchair:


Thank you for your thoughts and comments.

The issue of underage/pedophilia wasn't something I was even addressing because I assumed that we were all talking about two consenting adults of disparate age as given by the OP.
In my own situation, I'm not worried about being abandoned but rather concerned about putting my sweetie in a spot where he would have to make a very hard decision or else be saddled with my old age.
I would be happy to be the victim of an accident suffering an instant death even tomorrow rather than grow old and infirm...but even if I'm not that lucky, I just can't see putting someone I love in a spot like that.
Something I am going to bring up within a week because I do agree wholeheartedly; it is something that should be discussed early on.

 

My take on this is that age DOES matter to an extent when it comes sex exclusively. However, in my opinion it should NOT matter if there is genuine LOVE between the two parties. I've been in consenting inter-generational relationships where my partners would have been considered "underage" in certain countries. But because we loved each other in each situation, we felt like we were simply two people loving each other in respective cases. There were challenges, however, those had nothing to do with age but rather due to our being incompatible with each other as people in the end. Besides, even though in each case we experienced sexual attraction and we definitely were honest about how we felt, our main focus was on the actual loving and solidifying emotional bonds with each other. I'm still a virgin and I've turned away from opportunities to have sex in the past as well because I have a particular idea about my first time sex. Sex is only one of many aspects of a romantic relationship, and I personally believe that love is what connects two people. In such situations, I really can't see how age should matter aside from maybe the example babalon has raised about one of the parties being quite old and nearing the end of his/her life. Even still, I personally believe a couple in such a situation should still maintain their right to be in a relationship.

As for purely sexual interactions, I personally think age may matter more because you don't want to introduce young people to sexual intercourse in ways that may make them feel like they've been used merely like sex toys. When there is love, sex becomes making love and more than just sex. But when they focus only on sex, they may not spend enough time developing the emotional connection aspect and the sex may be rushed. Essentially, this means(at least in my opinion) that one should proceed with caution regardless of how old one is, if one was to have no-strings attached sex and still not feel used, or degraded, or disrespected in one way or another. But this, in my opinion, may apply to teens even more so because the number of virgins among teens is much higher, and they may have their own ideas of how they would like to lose their virginity. Of course, just because some teens are non-virgins doesn't mean their feelings should be ignored either. In that sense, age should not matter as far as I'm concerned. I don't think most of us like to feel as if we have been sexually taken advantage of, or sexually disrespected, or sexually degraded.

Now, society has conditioned its people in such a way so that, when there's a huge age gap in a relationship, the spectating party's automatic reaction tends to be that of reluctance, uncomfortableness, doubt, even hostility(usually toward the older party) in some cases. This, in my opinion, is because society for the most part assumes that the older party is the one taking advantage of the younger one. Sometimes the opposite happens, but society for some reason doesn't like to admit young people have such abilities. That aside, if two people with a big age gap desided to engage in a purely sexual interaction, they might experience more pressure to show society that neither party is taking advantage of the other. As a man approaching 40 in a not so distant future, if I had sex with my current SO, it would be inevitable that some people would jump to the negative band wagon and would start calling me names. But in our case, we're in a mutually caring relationship. It's a fairly new relationship but we're starting to fall in love with each other. We've talked about our age difference and have come to a mutual understanding that it isn't an issue between us. But what if this was a purely sexual thing? She and I are both virgins, and I would be having sex with her in the near future. Society would perceive that situation as my trying to take advantage of her. And the thing in that case is, I wouldn't be able to say "that's false because our focus is love, not sex" and actually mean it, because the focus would be on sex. What if she was the same age as me, and what if we were both non-virgins? Then most people would just shrug it off like it's some consensual sex between two adults. I personally don't think it should be this way, but society has designed it this way and it's been this way for a long time.

Having said all that mumbo jumbo, I still say age shouldn't matter as long as there's love, trust, honour, and respect.

 

Fair enough, I just say stuff like that because it's an open forum and not everyone who reads this forum is going to understand the context because they weren't part of the forum as the conversation commenced.

As to your specific situation, I can't wait until Bioidentical-hormone replacement therapy becomes common knowledge for older women. Once that happens older women relationships and younger men will have a lot less obstacles to deal with.

1. Menopause could be delayed
2. Women's skeletal bone structure can remain dense and strong well into their 60's

ect...

What modern medicine does now is synthetic hormone replacement therapy which is at a molecular level slightly different but close enough for it to work. This is because this is covered by insurance and bioidentical hormone replacment therapy is not covered and neither is it common knowledge.

(Note: can you tell I'm a nerd? Oh and fyi I fixed the 'guy' to gal. Sorry about that)

 

You're right, the thought has often crossed my mind where the situation where the younger party (the one whom the law favors by default) would understand the law favors them, get into a sexual relationship with an older party and begin a blackmail campaign.

^This scenario is completely possible but nobody talks about it because it's not politically correct to say. It breaks society's paradigm on "childhood innocence" which in my humble opinion is incorrectly adopting teenagehood as well. (Teens can be pretty deviant, manipulative and cruel)

Heck, the law recognizes teenagers who commit violent rapes and murders to be tried as adults in a court of law, why the double standards when it comes to sex that might not have hurt anybody at all and where age gaps could've been as small as 2-6 years?

Also I think whether someone comes from a "broken home" or not is even MORE of a huge indicating factor on what went down in the psyche of a person or in any relationship. Any criminal investigation needs to look at the environment, email trails, phone records, bribes that could've been made on either side, and subtext of relationship dynamics. BEFORE jumping on some bandwagon and saying this relationship broke the law and someone needs jailtime and a sex offender label.

If the relationship was just about sex, then under oath by law, both parties in the relationship should be forced to testify and their answers should be part of the evidence proceedings. If one of the parties says under oath that there wasn't consent then a conflict of interest will make itself apparent in court and the other evidence would back up the truthful person on the witness stand.

 

my husband is 17 years older then me and I love him to death. The sex is awesome and the ommunication is even better. All relationships have issues the question is,
Do the two of u share the same interest? Do u both want the same kind of future? All I know is that in my home age isn't an issue. I'm fully prepared to be there for him if he ever needs me to be. We are a partnership!

 

My wife was born 2.5 years before me. We come from 2 totally different up bringings - she's religious which can cause differences sometimes.

 

As long as it is legal, both parties want to do it, are happy doing it.. I see no issue.
I mean there is benefits to both young and older sexual partners.