Most of us have at least a few preferences when it comes to dating. Maybe you’ve sworn off partners who don’t want kids, only match with people who share your political views, or are picky about more surface-level traits like height and fashion style. But where do we draw the line when it comes to age?
This question has become a hot topic on the current season of The Golden Bachelor, when the show’s lead, Mel Owens, 66, revealed he wouldn’t date anyone over 60. (“Well, they got to be fit because I stay in shape,” Owens justified at the time.) These specific, age-based “dealbreakers” aren’t just fodder for juicy reality TV drama—they’re baked into real-world dating standards too.
“I see a lot of very rigid discrimination when it comes to age,” Ivy Kwong, LMFT, a Seattle-based psychotherapist specializing in relationships, tells SELF. Especially on dating apps, Kwong says, where “people will draw the line at the zeroes. So they’ll go up to 29 or 39 or 49, but won’t date 30 or 40 or 50.” Dating apps make it easy to reinforce this, where you can literally “filter” out prospects based on age, setting a cutoff at any arbitrary number you choose.
To some extent, having a general preference when it comes to age is understandable: You want to avoid mismatched life stages, like steering clear of someone still in school or seeking out someone who’s looking to buy a house and settle down. But age doesn’t tell you everything about a person—someone older may still be in school, and someone younger might want to start a family. And assigning any meaning to age can be futile: What’s the difference between someone who is 32 and 10 months and someone who is 33 and 2 months? When these preferences harden into automatic dealbreakers, the question becomes: Are we really filtering for the perfect match…or masking ageism under the guise of “personal preference”?
When does age preference become a problem?
It’s one thing to have a sense of where you want your partner to be in life—say, emotionally ready to start a family or still open to travel on a whim. That alone doesn’t make you close-minded, Kwong points out. Where it gets tricky (and more ageist), however, is when “your biases are rooted in negative stereotypes rather than genuine compatibility,” she explains.
