When it comes to relationships, age is just a number — until it isn’t.
Victoria Peel Yates met her partner, Max, in 2015
At the time, she was 29 and he was 46. But now, while her friends are raising children or building careers, “I worry about things that feel like they belong to someone much older,” she writes in an essay for Business Insider. (1) Must Read Now that Max is 57, “I often find myself calculating how long we have left together, as he’s now just 12 years younger than my mother was when she died.” It’s something she refers to as “grief math.” “Will I still be with the same energetic man in another 10 years?,” she writes. “Or will I spend my 50s or 60s as a caregiver?” Jumping even further ahead, she wonders if she’ll end up alone at 50 or 60. While grief math is based on hypotheticals, it does bring up a few good points about the challenges unique to age-gap relationships.
It also exposes a financial weak spot: caregiving. The age-gap weak spot Nearly four in 10 (39%) Americans have previously dated someone with an age difference of 10 or more years, according to an Ipsos poll on age-gap dating (2). And many single Americans are open to the idea, with 57% saying they’d date someone 10 or more years older.