Significant age differences between partners can cause serious problems in relationships. The word “significant” is important here: If your partner is four or five years older or younger, it won’t make much of a difference. However, if your partner is ten or more years older or younger than you, it can cause difficulties depending on your ages and other aspects of your personalities. I’ve found that age differences mean less as both partners get older. For instance, a fifteen-year age difference between a thirty-five-year-old man and a twenty-year-old woman will probably create more potential hazards than that age span in a sixty-fiveyear-old man and a fifty-year-old woman. The age difference will affect the first couple more, since their maturity and experience levels are usually much more dissimilar than the second couple’s.

      Here are the most common issues couples face when there is an age difference:

       IF YOU ARE THE OLDER PARTNER:

       1. You can become impatient with your mate.

      If you are significantly older than your mate, you may lose patience with his level of immaturity, lack of life experience, and learning process. This will be especially true if your mate is between twenty and thirty years of age. After all, you’ve already gone through a lot of what she’s dealing with; you’ve realized it’s not the end of the world when you go through a crisis, because it always works out in the end; you’ve made mistakes and figured out how to do things the right way. So it’s not easy watching your younger partner stumble through these same life experiences.

       2. You have a tendency to act like a parent to your mate.

      When you have ten, twenty, or thirty more years of life experience than your partner has, you will find it next to impossible not to offer advice, correct, and direct him or her. After all, you’ve been through this before—you know the best way to do it. Of course your intentions are loving; you’re only trying to help. But the effect can be very destructive to your relationship. YOU BEGIN ACTING LIKE A PARENT AND TREATING YOUR PARTNER LIKE A CHILD. Naturally, your mate feels as if you don’t trust her, you don’t respect her, and responds just like a rebellious teenager would—she becomes resentful and pulls away. And this parent-child game will quickly destroy the passion in your sex life, since your relationship starts taking on incestuous overtones.