George and Amal Clooney have a seventeen-year age difference. Actresses and lovers Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor have a whopping 32-year age difference. Johan Derksen’s wife is nineteen years younger, and Patty Brard’s husband is twenty years younger than she is. When is an age difference really too big?
Take half your age and add seven years. That should be the maximum age difference, is a commonly known rule of thumb. So if you are fifty, your partner should not be younger than 25 plus 7 = 32 years. Do you deviate from this rule? Then not much happens. Of course, there is no law that dictates how old your boyfriend or girlfriend may be.
Unless you get close to the age of sexual consent. That limit is sixteen years in the Netherlands. Someone sixteen years or older can consent to sexual acts, regardless of the age difference between those involved. But if the older partner is more than five years older than the younger one (for example, someone of 22 who is in a relationship with someone of 16), this can be punishable, even if consent has been given by the younger one.
Young people of sixteen and seventeen can have a relationship with someone older, but if there is exploitation or abuse, the older partner can still be prosecuted for sexual offenses. Only when both partners are over seventeen, there is no longer a legal restriction on the age difference.
“Is it love?”
Then the way could be clear to build a blissful relationship with someone who could be your son, your mother, or grandfather in terms of age. But that, of course, depends on a lot of factors, says relationship therapist Jeremy Heshof.
If a couple with a significant age difference comes for help, the question that is asked early on by him is: what is the basis of your relationship? Heshof: “Is it real love? Or are you looking for things like attention, recognition and validation because you didn’t get that from your parents? Is your relationship mainly filling a void? Or have you unconsciously chosen a status-enhancing younger partner and vice versa someone who can support you financially?”
Much Judgment from the Environment
Looking for and finding what you missed in your youth in a relationship can work out well, but in practice, these relationships can go wrong faster. If there is also a large age difference in which the life phases do not match, then breaking up is often a more logical choice than staying together.
Then there is also our social environment that likes to judge and gossip, says Heshof. “We really like to look at others. Then we don’t have to look at ourselves. In a relationship with a large age difference, we feel curiosity, jealousy, and perhaps also the fear that our partner can also leave us for a younger person. We are going to disapprove and condemn that.”
In social science, these types of relationships are called PAGs; Problematic Age Gaps. An age gap becomes problematic when society condemns, rejects, and considers a relationship unacceptable. People suffer from that, which in turn affects the relationship itself. So apart from how happy you are in your relationship at that moment; rejection from the environment can put a stamp on it.
Is ‘Age Just a Number’?
A CBS (Statistics Netherlands) study from 2019 shows that relationships are most stable when partners are close in age. For example, a couple with an age difference of no more than two years has a 25 percent chance of divorce after twelve years. This percentage rises to 30 percent with an age difference of five to ten years, and larger differences increase this risk even further.
That partly has to do with a lack of acceptance in the environment, and especially applies to relationships where the woman is older than the man, explains CBS spokesperson Tanja Traag. The negative social attitude towards these relationships contributes to their reduced stability.
Dismissing everything and shouting *age is just a number* is a bit short-sighted, says Heshof. If your partner is under twenty and you are over forty, it is a fact that there is a difference in emotional maturity – even if there will certainly be outliers on both sides.
Catching Up In Sex Milkometers
“If your partner is twenty and you are forty, the difference in life phases may not be so noticeable so quickly,” says Heshof. “As a forty-year-old, you are still fit, and on an emotional, social, and sexual level, you can probably keep up with each other well. That can change when you become less enterprising, after your fiftieth.”
“You may become infirm, go through menopause, your sex drive decreases – in short, a different phase of life presents itself. A desire for children can play a role and also an important predictor of whether such a relationship will make it, says Heshof, is the number of ‘sex kilometers’ – the extent to which you have gained sexual experience. “If that varies enormously, in practice I see that the person with fewer ‘kilometers’ feels the need to catch up.”
In Heshof’s practice, solutions come along that are still taboo, says the therapist, such as hiring an escort, lover, or swingers clubs. “It also happens that one of the partners wants nothing to do with it. If the person with more sexual experience immediately forbids that need of another out of pride or resentment, that is a predictor for me: this relationship is not going to work.”
Make no mistake, says Heshof; relationships are more often than we think ‘a tolerance construction’, regardless of the age difference. We do not find everything we desire in it and sometimes it can be a deal: you support me financially and I largely do what you say. “Maybe you would like to add a lot to your relationship, but that is simply not possible in the phase of your life. The expectations we have of our partners are sometimes sky-high and not achievable.”