Iām 20 and probably wouldnāt date anyone over 39 or under 18-19. If i date someone who is 18, they also canāt be barely 18, they have to have been 18 for a while so birthday is important if theyāre 18.
And honestly (I will probably be killed for this) I have no problems with others having big age differences as long as the younger person is at least 21. It's not like you are significantly more susceptible than later in your life and don't know what you're doing.
I strayed from this formula by 1 year once (I was 38, she was 25), and there was this strange generational gap where we just had completely different interests, we didn't get each others' references, and things fizzled pretty quickly.
Anyone else I've dated has been within this formula and we've gotten a long quite well. If they're below this number for you, or you're below this number for them, even by a little bit, it'll get weird and you'll run out of things to talk about pretty quickly.
It depends entirely on the person. Some people are intelligent, self possessed adults by the time they're 20, other people are immature shitbags well into their old age. Age is a poor metric for evaluating compatibility.
I've always dated around +- 3-4 years. I usually didn't get along with men who were a lot older or younger. My husband is one year and four month younger.
Hypothetically, I don't have a limit st the high end, and the low end would be based more on the individual, but no younger than eighteen.
In reality, chances of finding someone in their twenties that would mesh well with for dating is unlikely, so thirty-ish is a more realistic lower age.
Upper end is less restricted for dating, but on a realistic level, I'm not going to enter a relationship with someone that's into their seventies just because of life span probability after that.
Luckily, I'm happily married, so I don't have to worry about that shit. But I've never cared about ages for dating, since dating is essentially "trying on" someone for a more committed relationship. It makes it worth interacting with people that are less likely to be compatible on a surface level, when going into it with the knowledge that it's probably going to peter out anyway, so the risks of it having a high price are lower.
Seriously, every relationship has difficulties. You can't predict what's going to arise over decades of being together. So limiting options by age ends up being arbitrary. While I never went looking for people far away from my age, anyone old enough and developed enough to understand what a relationship is was the determinant.
Now, on a practical level, once you're out in the work force, chances are that you'll be interacting with people from their mid-to-late twenties up to their sixties. So you aren't going to end up dating outside of that range often. To date someone you have to meet them, and communicate often enough to ask them for time outside of whatever scope you meet them in. So I never really dated outside that range at any point. But I wouldn't have rejected the possibility if it came up.
In theory maybe 10 years in either direction (I'm old) but in practice I've only had long term relationships with guys within a couple years of my age.
Lovers between times, for whatever reason I always ended up with younger guys, that seemed to be the people into me, but still never more than 10 years difference.
When I was your age? One or two years at most. Absolutely not anyone much older or younger, no.
The largest age gap Iāve been involved with was about 4 years. I was 31, she was 35, and we lasted about three months. Current partner and I are about 1.5 years apart.
If I were single and interested in dating, I think the lowest age Iād be willing to go is half my age plus 7. Someone at the absolute lowest end of that range would need to check a lot of other boxes for me to be willing. Most Iād be willing to go over my age is about 10 years.
But frankly, if I were single, Iād probably just stop the online dating thing and live my best life on my own, and if I met someone who was interested cool, and if not it aināt the end of the world.