Valentine’s Day has just ended, and whether you were cozied up to someone special, venturing out with someone new or drowning your sorrows in chocolate, you were thinking about relationships on Feb. 14.
Relationships are tricky, for two people to decide to become exclusive requires a lot of elements to align. So does age factor into one of those elements? Are we confined to dating the people born within the same year as us, or can we venture out of that scope by two, five or 20 years?
As John Mayer and Katy Perry recently sang on their duet song “You Love Who You Love”, sometimes that’s a person 20 years older or a couple years younger. Age doesn’t matter, what matters is the chemistry between people. All’s fair in love and war.
When it comes to relationships it should matter more about who the person is, not what their age on a piece of paper is. Recently my sister stopped seeing a guy because she believed he was too young. She would say it’s a shame he is too young, he’s a great guy. I could not wrap my head around why she would let something as small as age get in the way of her having a potentially beautiful relationship.
On the other hand, I have a friend in a relationship with a guy two and a half years younger than her and she does not think she could find a better guy if she tried. She says that sometimes she sees the age difference, but in the end they are in love and age doesn’t matter one bit.
So how can my sister find it weird to date a guy one year younger, yet my friend finds she has never been happier?
It comes down to a matter of chemistry. If you click with someone, you click with them. Age is not a determining factor in any relationship. It all matters if the people in the relationship fit together.
Sometimes it comes down to a matter of chemistry, but it also matters where the two people are in life. In my friends case she is in college and her boyfriend is still in high school, their chemistry is strong enough that even though they are at different places in life, their love is stronger.
My sister on the other hand, dating a guy a year younger, had to pick him up on dates and she could not get over how weird that was. Case in point, their chemistry was not strong enough to over come that.
My own parents, who met in their late twenties, are a whopping six years apart. That means that when my mom was graduating high school, my dad was just starting the seventh grade.
This may seem like a huge age difference but when they met, they both had graduated college, both had steady jobs, and both were looking for a relationship. Since they were both in the same place in life, age was the last thought on their minds. Why should age have mattered if mentally they were on the same page?
The answer to if age matters is no. What matters is where the two people are in life. I know plenty of boys my age who act a lot younger than me, I would never be able to date them, even if we are both the same age. It all comes down to chemistry, you love who you love, whether that’s a person two years younger, or someone 16 years older.
