File:Half-age-plus-seven-relationship-rule.svg

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Summary

Description

Graph of the Half-age-plus-seven rule ("never date anyone under half your age plus 7"), which claims to dictate what age disparity between two people is acceptable in dating/romantic/intimate relationships during the late 20th century / early 21st century (called the "Standard creepiness rule" in the xkcd webcomic). According to this rule, the age of the younger person should not be less than half the age of the older person plus seven years, so that (for example) no one older than 65 should be in a relationship with anyone younger than 39 and a half, no one older than 22 should be in a relationship with anyone younger than 18, and no one under 14 years of age should be in a relationship at all...

From another point of view, the chart can be interpreted as saying that there should not be an age disparity of as much as five years unless the younger person has an age of 19 or more, a ten-year disparity should exist only if the younger person has an age of 24 or more, and a twenty-year disparity should occur only if the younger person has an age of 34 or more. (And people only slightly older than 14 should only be involved with those almost exactly the same age as themselves.)

To read the chart, go to the position along the x-axis which corresponds to your age, and the green range (between the black and red lines) directly above that position corresponds to the range of your partner's ages which is deemed acceptable by the rule. For convenience, the line representing x=y is also shown (in blue). The area between the blue and red lines shows where you are the older partner in the half-age-plus-seven calculation, while the area between the black and blue lines shows where you are the younger partner.

In its first known appearances (in the book Her Royal Highness Woman by Max O'Rell, "The little shepherd of Kingdom Come" by John Fox, and the 1951 play The Moon is Blue by F. Hugh Herbert), it's stated or implied that at the beginning of a relationship or marriage, the woman's age "is supposed to be half the man's age, plus seven", which gives a different (asymmetrical) interpretation to the rule. Similarly, in his autobiography, George Arnold Escher (1843-1939, father of famous artist M.C. Escher) claimed that when he was looking for a wife ca. 1880, he thought that the ideal ages for husband and wife at marriage would be if the woman's age was half the husband's age plus 10.[1]
Date
Source

Self-made graphic, with layout partially influenced by the PD image en:image:Half Plus Seven Graph 2.JPG uploaded to en.wikipedia on 5 May 2008 by en:User:Ccdelt.

Text was converted to paths to improve display (unconverted, the file would have been only 5kb).
Author AnonMoos
Other versions File:Half Your Age Plus Seven Graph.JPG

Licensing

Public domain I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide.
In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so:
I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

Captions

Graphical depiction of a social rule for dating, specifically regarding acceptable age gaps.

Items portrayed in this file

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File history

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Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current18:21, 3 August 2016Thumbnail for version as of 18:21, 3 August 2016755 × 798 (137 KB)AnonMoosReverted to version as of 18:27, 11 September 2009 (UTC) -- unfortunately, changes were not any kind of true "optimization" (see user talk page)
12:29, 3 August 2016Thumbnail for version as of 12:29, 3 August 2016755 × 798 (47 KB)CrazytonyiRan through SVGOMG and this reduced filesize from 137KB to 47KB, so roughly 65% smaller. I suspect using patterns for the grid will eventually lower this down to under 15MB.
18:27, 11 September 2009Thumbnail for version as of 18:27, 11 September 2009755 × 798 (137 KB)AnonMoosGraph of the famous Half-age-plus-seven rule, which claims to dictate what age disparity is acceptable in dating/romantic/intimate relationships duing the late 20th cent
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