This post is likely to be somewhat controversial. I am merely providing advice from my own experience, as a person in my early twenties presenting female who dated mostly men; I recognize that other people’s experience is different. However, I think that experiences like mine tend to be underrepresented in these discussions, which leads to a lot of absolutely silly discourse like “all thirtysomethings who date people in their early twenties are exploitative and trying to take advantage.” In my experience, dating men who are five to ten years older than you is an excellent life decision with many benefits.
Many of the benefits were individual to me. For instance, I found that older people have social lives that are less monomaniacally consumed by drinking, which I have a phobia of. But some benefits were more general.
First, people who are older than me have more life experience. There are a lot of things you don’t necessarily learn until you’re out on your own: how to fix a toilet, how to dress for a job interview, how to lift weights, how to pay your taxes. Whenever I faced one of those life problems, I simply asked a couple of my boyfriends (to get a good spread of different opinions), who explained it to me. In addition, older people often have excellent life advice, such as “don’t go to grad school”. (Actually, in my experience, it was mostly “don’t go to grad school.”)
Second– and I know this may sound shallow– they have money. Like a lot of people in their early twenties, I was flat broke. It doesn’t require having a lot of money to have more money than a college student; in fact, I noticed this advantage when I was dating someone with a job at Publix, who could do things like “take me out to a nice meal to celebrate passing my classes” (!) and “buy me a book that I’d been wanting but couldn’t afford” (!!). I got several nice vacations out of having long-distance relationships with older men who could buy me plane tickets and put me up in their houses. Unfortunately, about half of them were to Livonia, Michigan, which is not a place that any reasonable human being would want to spend five minutes, but I suppose it’s the thought that counts.
Third, people who are older tend to be more likely to have their shit together. This isn’t a 100% thing– some people can survive being dysfunctional for decades, and it’s not exactly uncommon for people to have a traumatic experience or a nervous breakdown– and certainly younger people can have their shit together. But older people, in my experience, tend to be more self-aware and have more functional coping mechanisms for the ways that their brains don’t work. Personally, as a person with serious mental health issues, I found it a great comfort to be the biggest fuckup in my relationship. When I dated people who were are fucked up as I was, we tended to trigger each other and wind up in huge clusterfucks. When I dated people who had handled their shit, it was more like “hm, I notice I’m feeling triggered. I’m going to tap out and we can talk about this later.”
There is one caution I’d like to provide people in their early twenties looking to date older men. In addition to the ordinary red flags you screen for, be careful to avoid men with a pattern of dating significantly younger women; while one or two may be a coincidence, if he has dated five or six women and not one of them is his own age, tread with caution. The best-case scenario is that, like many men, he prefers the appearance of women in their early twenties; however, unlike most men, he has chosen to prioritize appearance in his dating life to the exclusion of all else, which says poor things about his maturity. The worst-case scenario is that he’s aware of younger women’s lack of relationship experience and he wishes to use that to take advantage of you. Polyamory is helpful for screening, because you can meet his other partners.
skye said:
“The best-case scenario is that, like many men, he prefers the appearance of women in their early twenties … The worst-case scenario is that he’s aware of younger women’s lack of relationship experience”
He might also be developmentally disabled or a late bloomer. Many autistic people relate best to people much older or much younger than they are. Likewise, a man who had his first kiss at 30 might seek out 20-year-old women because they’re more likely to be similarly inexperienced. 30-year-old women are more likely than their 20-year-old counterparts to expect an experienced partner.
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raemon777 said:
I think that doesn’t really hold up – the whole point is “if he’s dated several people a lot younger, that’s a red flag.” If he’s dated several people a lot younger, the by the time he hit the second or third, he is no longer inexperienced.
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skye said:
But his experience level is keeping pace with that of the women he’s dating. If he’s had two partners and women his age have had, say, seven, it makes sense that he might want to seek a complementary experience level. Dating someone who has a lot more relationship experience than you can be really hard. It’s easy to exploit that imbalance: the more experienced partner doing fucked-up things and saying “this is just how relationships work”.
And developmentally disabled people are developmentally disabled their whole lives.
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sophiegrouchy said:
Skye- You hit diminishing returns on dating experience pretty quickly. The difference between someone who has been in 3 relationships and someone who has been in 4 is pretty minimal. So once you’ve had a couple relationships there’s no need to stay with younger people for experience-level reasons (not that someone might have OTHER reasons, but I agree that they’re generally red flags)
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Bowman said:
H Y P E R G A M Y
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davidmikesimon said:
The love that by necessity must speak its name.
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sophiegrouchy said:
For a while, my minimum age for dating men has been 25. I get older (I’m 33 now), but that minimum age doesn’t go up much, because the issue isn’t their age relative to me, it’s THEIR ACTUAL AGE. That’s around the time they become adults, and start developing decent communication skills, and figuring out what they actually want, and aren’t so desperate for a relationship (their ego depends on it) that they don’t care about the WHO, etc.
I’ve asked a couple women, and many would say a similar age.
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The Smoke said:
You mean at that point they’ve given up trying to develop a genuine personality and adopt to the consumerist lifestyle that is expected from a healthy adult.
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davidmikesimon said:
Could you taboo “consumerism” and restate? I’m not sure what you’re driving at.
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The Smoke said:
It seems like in general women are more willing to adapt to societies standards without questioning them a lot, while especially young men might have more of a desire to do their own thing instead of conforming, which some interpret as ‘not being grown up’.That our society happens to be consumerist isn’t really relevant, thanks for pointing that out.
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sophiegrouchy said:
Nope, I really do mean that they gain communication skills, emotional maturity, and are less likely to consider women primarily as ego-boosts or sex-needs.
Don’t particularly care if they conform to society’s standards past the basic level that even younger men do.
(Unless you mean, like… the “societal standard” of “not treating women like shit” and such)
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The Smoke said:
I undestand what you mean, still ‘Communication skills and emotional maturity’ is an incredibly relative concept. I guess much of it comes down to being efficient in getting what one wants from the other person, which is of course much much easier if you’re acting inside the same framework, especially if one side insists on sticking to the cultural scripts. And yes, that’s of course accusing you in some way of being normative, which I don’t consider bad if you keep it in your personal life. But since your comment degrades and stereotypes young adult men, I think you should be more aware of it.
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jossedley said:
I have a friend who claims she won’t date anyone who hadn’t gotten through their “starter marriage,” although she died seem to make some exceptions.
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Marcus Seldon said:
” That’s around the time they become adults, and start developing decent communication skills, and figuring out what they actually want, and aren’t so desperate for a relationship (their ego depends on it) that they don’t care about the WHO, etc.”
Isn’t this true of a large number of young women too?
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sophiegrouchy said:
I date way more men than women. But women do mature younger than men, so I would probably date a 24 year old woman with the same level of concern as a 26 year old man (which is about as young as I’m currently willing to date).
There is a lot of evidence/ it is scientific consensus that brain development continues through your mid twenties.
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Lambert said:
‘aren’t so desperate for a relationship (their ego depends on it) that they don’t care about the WHO, etc.’
Too true. Never date someone who is so attached to you they forget that without global collaboration, it is almost impossible to mitigate the growing crisis of antibiotic resistance. 😉
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The Smoke said:
I am wary of giving public advice in the form of ‘avoid people with characteristic X’. I guess you can figure out why.
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Orphan said:
There’s a general principle: If you are smarter than average, date older. If you are dumber than average, date younger. You’re more likely to meet somebody with equivalent maturity levels, and complementary life interests.
But eventually any such relationship may dissolve; smarter people will continue to mature faster, and dumber people will continue to mature slower, and unless you’re maturing together, you’re going to mature apart.
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shemtealeaf said:
Does intelligence correlate well with maturity? I’m pretty intelligent, but I wouldn’t consider myself to be particularly mature for my age.
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nancylebovitz said:
It seems to me that prejudice against relationships with age differentials has gone up sharply in the past fifty years or so. It’s almost as though there’s a conservation law about the amount of meddling in other people’s lives.
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Sniffnoy said:
In addition, older people often have excellent life advice, such as “don’t go to grad school”. (Actually, in my experience, it was mostly “don’t go to grad school.”)
Reminder that this is very discipline-dependent. If you’re, I will (based on my own mistake) give the opposite advice of “Go and also stick around a while, don’t rush to finish”. 😛
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Guy said:
A critical part of your second sentence appears to have gone missing.
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Sniffnoy said:
Oops, thanks. It should say “If you’re going for math”.
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Zach H said:
The real best case scenario would be that they’re optimizing for a comparative advantage in making their partner happy, no? That is, if they believe many women already think the way you think, then they should date much younger–because the older they are in proportion to their partner, the more of your mentioned advantages their partner receive, and so the more enjoyable (or at least comfortable) the relationship will be, due to having at least one satisfied person in it.
Or, to put it another way, relationships aren’t video games: there’s no need for them to be challenging to derive enjoyment from them, and in fact it’s perfectly sensible to seek a relationship where it’s as easy as possible to achieve the satisfaction of both partners.
That concept could also be phrased as “taking advantage of immaturity”, but I think that would imply that this is somehow a bad trade-off for either partner.
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sullyj3 said:
Aw come on. Us inexperienced sub-25 shit-not-together types have enough trouble getting dates as it is
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ozymandias said:
When I’m thirty, I promise I will date as many of y’all as I can find. 😛
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sullyj3 said:
That’s sweet of you!
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sophiegrouchy said:
The ideal step one isn’t “get dates”, it’s “get your shit together”.
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John said:
Once your shit is together, if you’re still sub-25, date teenagers.
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Marcus Seldon said:
What does “get your shit together” even mean? It’s so ambiguous. And, I have seen no evidence in my personal life that young women are any more likely to have their shit together than young men.
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sophiegrouchy said:
The OP of the thread said he does not have his shit together. So whatever he meant by that, is what I meant when I said the ideal step 1 is to get your shit together.
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Matthew said:
“Second– and I know this may sound shallow– they have money. Like a lot of people in their early twenties, I was flat broke. ”
I notice there isn’t parallel advice for older women to date men in their early twenties, which makes it rather difficult not to take this as an extremely inegalitarian sentiment that lack of resources is an acceptable reason to shun relationships with men but not with women.
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ozymandias said:
Well, I can only provide advice based on my personal experiences from my personal experiences, and I have never been a thirtysomething or a man. When it happens that I am either of those things, then I will be happy to write a blog post on the subject, and I suspect it will turn out that dating people with more money than you when you’re flat broke is still nice.
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davidmikesimon said:
Wait, wouldn’t the inverse you’re looking for be advice to younger men advising them to date older women? I’m confused.
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Matthew said:
Well, trying to imagine someone giving that advice also demonstrates the problem here. Men who tried to date older specifically because they were broke and wanted to rely on financial support from an older woman would face a lot more scorn than the other way around.
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Flak Maniak said:
Where the thirtysomething rationalist women at? (Approximately 50% serious.)
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loki said:
I remember a delightful quote from, of all things, a modern AU Hamilton fanfic;
‘The trouble with older men is that you grow up, and they stay the same age.’
If you’re dating older men because you’re smart and mature for your age and want to feel like you’ve met your match, this is a thing to watch out for.
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Ghatanathoah said:
Your obviously weren’t in Livonia when Bookstock was going on 🙂 It’s awesome.
Seriously, Livonia is only a short drive from Ann Arbor, which has free museums and tons of used bookstores! And from Novi, which has a double-decker mall! And Detroit, which has a four-story used bookstore (and some sports stuff too, I think).
And it’s only an hour from Toledo! Even if there’s not a lot of stuff there it’s a prime starting point for day trips!
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ozymandias said:
Unfortunately, I can’t drive.
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Ghatanathoah said:
Driving seems like another thing an SO who is older than you would be good for.
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