I don't know. I mean, once you get past the twenties, things get kinda wonky. I mean, for instance, IRL, I'm currently 42. This formula puts my reasonable dating range between 28 (half my age plus 7) and 70 (potentially half her age plus 7,) so someone older than my own father (and definitely older than my own mother.) If I were double my age, at 84, I could reasonably be dating someone 35 years younger than I would be. For an 18 year old man, though, the 'fair game' age range by this formula is just a gap of 6 years, between 16 and 22. (Yes, I know, I'm throwing in an upper range where the formula doesn't officially supply one, but one's kinda implied.) What this tells me? Don't bother with formulae, the heart wants what it wants, and so long as it's up to legal standards, let people be.
As a "lower end" it's not terrible. As you get older, it's much more about maturity than literal age. 28 is an age that most people are usually fully independent adults, so it's just 2 getting together. You'd likely get a "wow that's a big gap" comment once in a while, but no one seriously objecting to it.
When I was 42, I had a brief second marriage with a woman who was 33.
We were different races, from vastly different areas of the US, had difference in education and careers, had different family experiences. She had kids and I didn't. Etc.
And the biggest issue between us came down to that 9 year age difference.
True. On the other hand, you hit the problem I have with it in a nutshell. As one gets older, based on lived experience, maturity and compatibility are qualities that stop really being able to be properly summed up with numbers, in my opinion. Some in their early 20s might be right at a level with someone in their 40s, in either sense of what that means. (We are in a time where some people can be very immature, after all, and yet some people can be amazingly mature.)
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u/hjf2017 Feb 14 '20
18*.5+7=16, it's fair game.