Emotional tone is set at the starting gate.

Does misery love company, or does misery make company equally miserable?

Psychologists have long pondered whether couples and close friends are depressed  in tandem because one person’s mood poisons the well, or because people gravitate toward significant others with the same traits.

Women’s emotional states—positive or negative—are unrelated to changes in their boyfriends’ moods and vice versa.

Moreover, couples that had been dating longer were no more likely to mirror each other’s emotional states than were newly minted partners.

There was evidence of short-lived emotional contagion. Severely depressed subjects were more likely to have a roommate whose mood declined over a six-week period than were less depressed subjects.

But subjects cheered up noticeably when they spent time away from their miserable roommates.

Emotional contagion doesn’t last for weeks. It is more fleeting and transient, because “the idea that you ‘catch’ emotions like you catch the flu is seductively simple and parsimonious.”

Couples match on positive affect as on negative affect. Happy people seek out happy people, and those who are down and out seek the same.

Both men and women seem to be happier with younger, not older, spouses, though this may be short-lived.

Disclaimer: The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensure discussion or debate.

Thank you ….Age-gap relationships are by no means a new phenomenon, but they are something that modern society still struggles to make sense of—often denigrated and dismissed as a fleeting “phase.”

Prejudicial terms such as “gold-digger,” “cougar,” and “manther” are used to describe some of the forms age-differentiated relationships can take.

At the same time, there is a growing movement demanding more respect and inclusivity of relationships that don’t fit the traditional mold, as how we imagine and define the “ideal relationship” is expanding at a rapid pace.

What can we learn from scientific research to help us understand the nuances of age-gap relationships? Here are three insights to guide your thinking.

My Explanation

When it comes to any scientific conversation on sex and relationships, it is important to consider their evolutionary function.

 Perpetuating the species. From this standpoint, it is not surprising that men tend to have a preference for women in their child-bearing prime.

Putting these two facts together, we can see why age-differentiated relationships, when they occur, favor a scenario where the male partner is older than the female partner.

Younger women are more reproductively fit and older men tend to have more resources to invest in their family and children.

Do you want to add a word or two?

What Is the Range of “Acceptable” Dating Ages?

When we look beyond an individual’s “ideal” partner age and instead ask what they deem acceptable, things get more interesting. For instance, that men, on average, are accepting of relationships with women up to approximately 10 years younger and 5 years older.

Women, on the other hand, are accepting of relationships with men up to eight years older and five years younger.

But there’s an important caveat, and it has to do with how these “acceptable” limits change as we age.

Your Comments …..

How Does Relationship Happiness Factor In?

Perhaps the most important question revolves around the happiness people experience in age-gap relationships.

The first and most compelling insight is that relationships of any make or model can be happy relationships under the right circumstances. However, science offers clues on the combinations that seem to work best.

Marital satisfaction declines with marital duration for both men and women in differently aged couples relative to those in similarly aged couples.

These relative declines erase the initial higher levels of marital satisfaction experienced by men married to younger wives and women married to younger husbands.

As men grow older, they accept even younger women, but their tolerated age span regarding the oldest partner they would accept is unrelated to their own age.

On the other hand, women tend to accept younger men as they grow older, but the oldest partner they will accept decreases as they age.

 

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