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Jun 24

The Pros and Cons of Dating Someone 10 Years Apart from You

By Veronica Baxter | Relationships

One common question revolving around modern dating is whether age is just a number. It’s unfortunate that society mostly looks down upon partners with a vast age gap of about 10-15 years in today’s era. This depends on many other social factors, which revolve around a society’s cultures and beliefs.  

The definition of a  May-December relationship is when two people of a substantial age difference are involved romantically. May refers to the spring life of the young, while December refers to the winter life of the old. These relationships go either way. For example, the lady could be older than the man, and the man could also be older than the lady. 

How do May-December Relationships Work?

The longevity of a relationship is reliant on age and the maturity levels of the people involved. In this case, couples with a considerable gap are happier than the same age partners or people with a reduced age gap.

As much as this is true, these setups will often experience societal stigma, which may cause setbacks in a relationship. This is why if you are in this kind of a setup, you have to get prepared for people’s opinions about your relationship and the many other obstacles and societal stigmas that come with it.  

This is why an experienced divorce lawyer from Philadelphia advocates that you ask yourself these questions during the dating phase before you fully commit. 

How Do Your Life Goals and Interests Match?

The older you grow, the reality of this will become more evident. If you’re willing to commit for the long-term, it’s essential to make sure that these align. Look at the hobbies and interests that help you connect, as these will help strengthen your connection in the long run. 

Can You Handle Public Scrutiny?

These relationships are more likely to experience more societal scrutiny than “normal” relationships. The age gap may not be so evident during the middle ages, but it will undoubtedly be once one partner gets into their senior years. If you’re easily affected by public opinions over your life, this may not be the best setup for you. Just make sure that you can handle it before you commit to this; however much it gets into your nerves.

Is There Equality in the Relationship?

It is easy to take up a mothering role, especially to the younger partner, and this is not healthy in building a relationship. If the connection is based on power or who rules over the other, they might not be in the relationship with the right intentions. In such situations, the younger person cannot speak out their opinions or make decisions, which should be a source of concern before committing. Therefore, if you feel small in your relationship, this kind of love would not be the best fit for you. 

The Challenges You’ll Face

In the long run, as much as these relationships are rewarding, they have their common share of challenges. However, these challenges should be addressed and handled like any other relationship. Here are common challenges that you’re likely to experience:

  • Sexual Drive

This is one thing that most couples don’t openly talk about, and it may lead to devastating results later on in the relationship. There’s no doubt that sexual drives also vary in age gaps. Sexual issues may arise sometime in the future, and when they do, it’s essential to know how to deal with them

  • Health Challenges

This mainly affects the older partner, and health issues are never predictable. Therefore, it is vital to have a candid discussion on dealing with these issues once they come up in the future. On the other hand, if you’re the younger partner, be ready to deal with these situations as they arise. 

  • Family Acceptance

One of the barriers to having a long-lasting relationship is the people close to you. These will include; children, if you had some, close friends and family. The idea may not make sense to them at all. 

It gets more complicated when children are involved. It can be challenging for them to accept and respect the younger partner as superior to them. You will need to know how to deal with these situations before they get out of hand. It can take time for people to accept the relationship, but time and growth will undoubtedly yield results.

  • The Child Factor

In such scenarios, the idea of having children of your own may be an issue. Older women may want kids and not get some, while men may not want to have them when they are older. It’s essential to reach an agreement on what to do in such situations.

Modern options such as surrogacy or adoption may come in handy for older women who want kids. However, if you still don’t agree about children, visiting a counsellor may be an excellent solution to help you reach a conclusion that will make both of you comfortable.  

The Benefits of a May December Relationship

As much as there are challenges to May-December relationships, there are many advantages to it. Some of these include:

  • No time wastage

In such setups, each party knows what they want, and they get into it for a stable and long-lasting relationship. 

  • The Money Factor

Money is a central issue affecting relationships. People are more likely to be in stable relationships if they don’t have to worry much about finances. For example, if you date someone older, having money arguments will most likely be a thing of the past, and it can build stability in your relationship.

  • Honesty

When one is older, they have seen it all, and they most likely won’t lie about things or situations to avoid something. This makes the May-December relationships beautiful as petty arguments and openness make the relationship successful altogether.

  • Confidence Booster

This builds a level of pride and confidence mainly for the older person to get someone younger to love them. It gives them hope that they are still vibrant enough for a young person to have loved them. There’s no feeling more incredible than this.

  • Few Insecurity Episodes

The young generation relationships are known be less matured in relational situations. However, in May-December relationships, there will be clarity in what each party wants, and trust is a significant factor in making the relationship sustainable. 

  • Open Discussions and Communication

Since May-December relationships are not readily accepted in society, the age gap will bring about conversations involving the kids or the future setbacks they may face in the relationship. This helps you to deal with conflicts and come up with agreements easier. 

  • Extra Effort on the Relationship 

These kinds of relationships are prone to public scrutiny, and opinions make the couple involved put in the work to make it work against all odds. This kind of motivation gives more reason to avoid petty arguments and handle the challenges that may come your way, however complicated and get over them. In the long run, they set an example that these set-ups work.

  • More Freedom

The older party may have missed a lot in their younger years, so at this point, when they start a relationship with someone more youthful, it may bring a needed energy boost to their life. This experience allows them to travel or take part in hobbies which make them feel younger and happier. It also enables the younger party to experience the things they have missed before without worrying much about the bills. 

No one has the right to define how your relationship is supposed to be. You two are the ones who will determine what your relationship will be like and how to overcome the storms that come with it. There’s no reason you shouldn’t date someone older than you just because society dictates so.

Dec 22

How to Reject Someone When You’re Not Interested

By Ellen Orton | Self Improvement and Social Skills

It’s impossible to create and maintain relationships with everyone we cross paths with. True, being rejected is a bottom-tier feeling, but it doesn’t mean the other party is excited about it. So what happens when someone you’re not interested in starts making advances? How do you reject someone without causing a backlash?

How to Reject Someone When You’re Not Interested

Bring It Up

In most cases, ignoring the situation and your pursuer only tends to complicate and strain the existing relationship. That is because your admirer believes you are yet to notice them or their advances, or you are just shy to reciprocate. Dragging on will only make it worse for them, and there is really no need to torture them with ambiguity. Bring it to an end as early as you can, especially if it’s a friend.

Preserve their Dignity

The goal is to let them down easy, not to tear their heart out or humiliate them. If you’re looking for how to reject someone nicely, it means that they are not bad or shameful people to associate with. If anything, their qualities are what make this tough. 

Even if you once met a boring person, you should not further limit yourself in communicating with others, look through dating sites and risk going on a date. 

Assume Responsibility

This might seem tasking and unnecessary, but when planning on how to politely reject someone, it is only fair you relieve them of any fault. To reject someone is a brutal task, so it would be kind to take fault. If possible, suggest that you share mutual attraction; it’s just that you want to protect their interest and feelings. You just seem to notice the flaws from your standing point should your relationship develop further.

The Friend Zone

Social media has somehow managed to turn friendship into the ugliest bonds, especially when one party harbours deeper feelings for the other. However, offering your friendship means you did not reject them as a whole, and you would like them to be in our life.

Some people make better friends as opposed to lovers, and friendship is not a consolation prize.

Using Cues and Hints

In most cases, not everyone can hold such a conversation or have the guts to be straight up about their lack of interest. So what happens now? If you’re looking for how to nicely reject someone without being upfront, then you should try sending cues instead. There are several things you could do to get your message across. Here are a few tips on how to politely reject someone.

Tips on How to Politely Reject Someone

  • Say You’re Seeing Someone Else

Even though lying about your relationship status is ill-advised, sometimes it is the only way to go. This is especially helpful if your pursuer is insistent on their advances. Telling them you’re already in a committed relationship makes it less awkward and personal. If you’re the witty kind, it won’t hurt to look up funny ways to reject someone, but be careful with your delivery.

  • Suggest Hanging Out in Groups

Inviting other friends to hang out with you means that you are not interested in them that way, and you had not considered going out with them in the first place. If anything, friends act as buffers to prevent awkward situations and topics.

  • Say You Have Plans

Now, you can’t use this card more than twice, but it can really save the situation. Someone who likes you will want to spend time with you, so choosing your plans over them gets the message across. The goal is how to reject someone nicely, so please don’t go posting about how bored and lonely you are.

  • Ask to Introduce Them to Someone Else

It’s only fair you learn how to reject someone over text, especially if you don’t meet often. Thanks to texting, it is less awkward rejecting someone, and you can always change the topic.

You can ask to set up your pursuer with a friend. This will prevent them from being hung up, and it also helps to shift the attention away from you. Of course, you want to ask the said friend first to avoid them being rejected twice.

  • Steer Away from Jokes and Sarcasm

The point is to avoid being a jerk, so be very careful with your choice of words. Even when working on how to reject someone funny, be careful about the jokes or quotes you use. They might seem funny or witty to you, while your pursuer might feel insulted.

If you’re trying to keep light on rejecting someone nicely via text, keep your sarcasm in check. It will help from further complicating the situation. Naturally, when someone is being rejected, their response will not be reacting to humor.

  • Be Careful With Your Lies

Naturally, a poker face will complement your lies perfectly, but that doesn’t mean you have to lie about everything. Keep it minimum – it is easier to sell a smaller lie. You can be blunt with your lies as well, especially if your pursuer is insistent. You can use your religion/culture card to get out of most situations. Some lies might be petty, but they will get the message across.

Don’t Leave Room for Uncertainty

Lastly, you will want to ensure that you leave no wiggle room in the situation. Establish your boundaries. Some people make advances because they misinterpret your actions and behavior, meaning you might be sending out mixed messages.  Rejecting someone is not a pleasant activity, and some will want to put it off as long as they can. Be sure that this will make it any easier for the people involved, so be done with it as soon as possible.

Dec 02

The Virtues & Downsides of Online Dating

By Joseph Bryson | Relationships

If you think about it, the fact that a huge number of modern relationships start on an online dating app isn’t really that surprising.

The internet has allowed for us to be more connected than ever before. We’re using it for business, we’re using it to shop and we’re using it to communicate with our friends and family, so why wouldn’t it also be used for romance? It makes sense considering it motivates out actions perhaps more so than anything else.

It’s not a new thing anyway when you think about what the actual function of it is. The internet has made it easier, but this sort of thing has kind of been around for over 300 years.

Even some 17th Century newspapers had personal ads for those seeking romance, and is that really any different from modern online dating? So really, it’s an entirely expected result of the internet becoming more advanced and more widely used.

Some people think it’s the best thing in the world and has made finding someone much easier, and others think it’s a waste of time and some believe that only the most desperate among us would resort to that.

Now, those who call it desperate are obviously just being jerks, but there are points to be made from both sides of the argument. Let’s have a look at some virtues and some downsides to online dating.

 

Virtue: The Options are Endless

You know the feeling when you’re single and you walk into a bar expecting to find someone you could potentially date or at the very least go home with for the night. Even if you’re confident, there’s only so many women there.

Even among the ones that are actually single and are looking for someone to meet that night, there’s still going to be many that you’re not compatible with. And as for the ones you are compatible with, are you going to talk to them that night?

How can you be sure that’s going to happen? Are you going to talk to every single woman in the bar? You won’t be able to, and that will turn what should be a fun night into a very stressful one. Online dating is not like a bar that has fifty women in it.

Now, there are over 30 million people in the United States alone using online dating sites and apps. That’s three times the population of Sweden. Let’s throw out a rough estimate here and assume that in your area, there are 5-10 thousand women on dating sites that you could potentially talk to.

That’s more people than you’ve spoken to in your entire life. And even if you are only genuinely compatible with a fifth of that number, that’s still a thousand women. Under what other circumstances are you going to find a thousand potential partners?

Online dating is unquestionably the path that will give you the most options.

Downside: Face to Face Communication is Always Better

It’s great that we are well past the days when if we wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t in our immediate vicinity, we had to send them a letter and not hear a response for possibly weeks. We can now write a message and have someone on the other side of the world respond in a matter of seconds.

Nobody will deny that this level of connectivity is indispensable and very useful for making new potentially romantic connections, but humans communicate most effectively when we are actually face-to-face.

This probably dates back to the earliest humans who could only communicate in person but it’s not like we’ve evolved past that, body language, tone of voice and facial expressions are still a huge part of how we express our thoughts and feelings.

And you get none of that in text form and even if you’re talking on Zoom you’re still not getting it entirely. So if you spend a lot of time communicating with someone through text before actually meeting them, you won’t know what they’re actually like.

You might end up with unrealistic expectations of them that they can’t fulfil. Or conversely, you might think that someone isn’t right for you, when you would feel the opposite way if you had initially met them in person.

Virtue: More Upfront information

Whilst it does generally depend on the app or site that you are using, you are going to have access to more information about the person you’re talking to. Some people will say that this is actually a downside, but I personally find it difficult to agree with.

Yes, there is a certain excitement to mystery and if you already know a lot of stuff about someone then it leaves you with less to talk about and discover, but at the same time, the more you know the better you can judge the likelihood of you actually being compatible.

You could have a conversation with someone and not realize until you’re an hour deep that they have a view which you find bigoted, or go on a couple of dates before realizing that you want completely different things out of a relationship. Online dating makes this less likely.

Downside: Cat fishing

You meet someone in person, you can see them and hear their voice. Online they could be anybody. They could be a different gender who is afraid to openly admit their sexuality or someone old and lonely who feels like they’ve missed their chance at love.

Sometimes cat fishing is very sinister and predatory, and sometimes it’s just a case of someone using older pictures of themselves or lying about their age, career or level of fitness. Either way, you don’t truly know who you’re talking to until you’ve met them.

That’s a downside for sure. Hell you might even be tempted to do this on some level yourself. But that’s not fair, you should be truthful and the stuff you feel compelled to lie about probably isn’t as big of a deal as you think anyway.

But if you do feel like you’ll get more responses if you were more in shape, get some exercise equipment and get to work. Or if you feel like you’re in the wrong line of work, start exploring your options. Don’t waste your time lying because the truth will come out eventually.

The most important thing to remember, is that online dating is not the only option. If you feel like the downsides are more significant, then meeting someone in a bar or through your friends or a hobby hasn’t gone away. You can still take that path.

These days, millions and millions of people are using online dating, and you can basically guarantee that you’ll be able to find someone through that method. So even if you are skeptical, it’s worth looking into.

Nov 18

The Difference Between Love and Affection

By Joseph Bryson | Relationships

Love and affection are two words that are intrinsically linked. They are of course similar in many ways: they are both feelings that we harbour for those of us in our lives who are most important to us. 

The Difference Between Love and Affection

Most of us don’t really think too deeply about it when it comes to these kinds of words, and we do have a tendency to just use them interchangeably. But they are actually quite different from each other in definition.

Although they are just words and we can kind of use them as we choose and be a bit liberal in our personal definitions, but when we look a bit more deeply into these actual sensations, we can see that there are two distinct feelings and that the different words are warranted.

This doesn’t mean that you are using the words wrong or that you should alter how you express your personal feelings, but it is interesting to note why we feel a certain way towards certain people and differently towards others.

Both of the words are expressions of endearment, and positive sensations which are based around strong relationships, so what exactly is it that differentiates the two from each other?

It’s somewhat complex:

Love is perhaps a word that we all use a little bit too liberally. We throw it around like it means absolutely nothing, when in truth, love is a feeling that means a whole lot, and that should be reserved for our deepest inclinations.

There are different kinds of love of course. The one we think about most is the love that we have for romantic partners, and the interesting thing about that is it’s the only one with which the use of the word is deemed very important.

When it comes to love that we feel for our family, our friends, or even for things that aren’t human or aren’t living, we don’t make any kind of big deal about saying it. We tell our family we love them from the first moment that we can speak.

We tell our friends that even if we don’t necessarily mean it, and that’s okay because a friend isn’t really a lifelong commitment or an obligation. We even say it about food. “I love Peking duck, even though I only tasted it for the first time five minutes ago.”

And that’s all fine, nobody really questions it, and if they do they’re kind of just being a pedantic jerk. But for your partner, when you choose to say the words “I love you,” it’s intended as a turning point in your relationship.

It’s the moment that it goes from something that’s primarily based around discovering shared interests and personality traits, going on dates, doing fun things together and probably a whole lot of sex, to a genuine commitment and an expression that you’ve fond something you want to last.

And all of us are capable of feeling that, though for some of us it takes a bit longer to find it. That all depends on a few different factors, like maybe it’s just because you like playing the field more than you like settling with one person and that’s absolutely fine.

Or maybe it’s because you are more guarded with your emotions and you struggle to let people in and that’s also not something to be ashamed of. But regardless of any of that, it’s a word that has power in romantic relationships.

Unconditionality

And why is that? Well that brings us to what I believe sets love apart from other feelings such as affection, and that’s that it is reserved for something that is unconditional. What are you really saying when you say that you love your partner?

You are telling them that you want to commit to them, that you feel strongly that if you share your life with them, you will be happy. And going a little deeper, you are acknowledging their flaws, insecurities and whatever differences you have and accepting that you can look past them.

Love takes you over those hurdles, it gives you strength to resolve problems that you might face in the future which you may not be able to resolve if you didn’t feel so strongly for the person. It is constant and impossible to shake no matter how hard you try.

And you can feel this for your friends in a way that’s non-romantic and built on a foundation of trust and companionship, and you can feel it for a piece of entertainment or a work of art in a way that makes you feel like you can appreciate the beauty and enjoyment of it over and over again.

So in a way that is unconditional, but it doesn’t have the responsibility of a romantic relationship. You can drop friends you thought you loved if you don’t feel like they’re a positive presence in your life anymore, but that’s not as easy with someone you have a family or a home with.

In that way, it’s understandable why the word love is so much more powerful when it’s attached to romance than it is when used in any other context. And this brings us back to affection and what differs here.

Because affection is not unconditional. Affection is what you feel in those early days of a relationship that we discussed above when it’s not about all of the commitment and compromise that comes with a truly loving, romantic union.

Affection is light and fun. It’s hugs, it’s flirtation, it’s a one night stand after a few too many drinks and it doesn’t have to mean anything. That initial attraction you feel when you’ve been talking to her for a few hours and you want to reach out and hold her hand or make a joke so you can hear her laugh.

That’s affection, and that’s not unconditional. You want to hold her and kiss her but if you leave the next morning and never see her again, you won’t be hurt by that. And if you have an argument, you don’t feel an incentive to work through it. 

That’s the real difference here, and it’s important for you to be able to separate these two feelings in your own mind. Love is lasting, patient and resilient in the face of adversity, whereas affection is spontaneous, energetic and can slip through your fingers with little consequence.