Ever heard of the rule that men should date women who are half their age plus seven?
Some celebrities – think Leonardo Di Caprio – take this to extremes with a roster of 20-something models regularly appearing on their arm, but do you know where the saying comes from?
It turns out to be relatively well established, dating back more than 100 years to a book by Max O’Rell written in 1901, and the 1951 play The Moon is Blue.
But does it stand up to scrutiny, or is it just a baseless rule perpetuated by men who want to justify dating younger, and less mature, women?
We asked three relationship experts to weigh in on the rule – and their responses were surprising.
1/10 10) “Up Where We Belong (An Officer and A Gentleman, 1982)
1982 was a year of blockbuster movie songs and “Up Where We Belong” pipped “Eye of the Tiger” to Oscars glory. Buffy Sainte-Marie, Will Jennings and Jack Nitzsche wrote it for the Richard Gere movie An Officer and A Gentleman. It was sung as a duet after Jennifer Warnes suggested a collaboration with Joe Cocker. Warnes had been a fan of the late Cocker since her teenage years and said she cried out with joy when he accepted the invitation to work with her. Their version was a worldwide hit and also won a Golden Globe and a Grammy.
Rex
2/10 9) “The Way You Look Tonight” (Swing Time, 1936)
In Swing Time, Fred Astaire sings the gorgeous ballad “The Way You Look Tonight” to Ginger Rogers while she is washing her hair. The sentimental lyrics were written by the brilliant songwriter Dorothy Fields, whose credits include “A Fine Romance” and “The Sunny Side of the Street”. The song, with music composed by Jerome Kern, was up against some terrific competition in 1936 – beating “Pennies from Heaven” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” to an award in its third year. Billie Holiday, with jazz maestro Teddy Wilson on piano, had a hit with “The Way You Look Tonight” that year and the song has since been recorded by hundreds of best-selling singers, including Frank Sinatra. “The Way You Look Tonight” is popular, romantic songwriting at its very best.
RKO Radio Pictures
3/10 8) “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” (Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, 1955)
Sammy Fain’s formal love ballads epitomised the style of movie music in the 1950s. Fain won the Academy award for best song twice – for “Secret Love”, from the 1953 Doris Day movie Calamity Jane and, two years later, with the title song for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. Fain, a trained pianist, started out as song promoter in the 1920s and he was pragmatic about delivering the song studio bosses wanted for this William Holden movie. Fain and lyricist Paul Francis Webster constantly tinkered with the words in “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” to keep 20th Century-Fox happy. The song, performed by The Four Aces on the soundtrack, has remained a favourite of crooners, from Sinatra to Barry Manilow. The song has also been referenced in numerous modern films, including Grease and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.
YouTube/20th Century Fox
4/10 7) “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” (The Lion King 1994)
In songwriting terms, it was essentially Elton John v Randy Newman in 1994. Newman was nominated for “Make Up Your Mind” for The Paper and John for three songs from The Lion King (his other nominations were for the songs “The Circle of Life” and “Hakuna Matata”). “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”, co-written with Tim Rice, was a popular winner and the single sold 11 million copies.
5/10 6) “My Heart Will Go On” (Titanic, 1997)
Canadian Céline Dion’s power ballad “My Heart Will Go On”, the theme song to James Cameron’s hit film Titanic, has been bought more than 20 million times. “My Heart Will Go On” is the romantic ballad playing as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet embrace at the front of the ill-fated liner that crashed into a iceberg. Dion showed great technical skill coping with the tricky modulations of a song written by James Horner and Will Jennings, while the poignant tin-whistle playing is courtesy of Andrea Corr.
6/10 5) “Take My Breath Away” (Top Gun, 1986)
Top Gun was virtually completed when Tom Whitlock came up with the lyrics to “Take My Breath Away” as he was driving home from work and mulling on a melody Giorgio Moroder had composed. The agreed they had something good and made a demo to play for director Tony Scott. He called back Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis to shoot some new love scenes to go with the new song. “If you see those scenes, you’ll notice that they are lit differently and there are those gauzy curtains blowing around,” Whitlock told rediscoverthe80s.com “All of that was to disguise that some months had gone by and the actors didn’t look exactly the same.”
The songwriters picked Terri Nunn to sing the song, having worked with her new wave band Berlin previously. She nailed the song and “Take My Breath Away” became a global hit. The synthesisers on the track were played by Arthur Barrow, a veteran musician who had worked with The Doors and Frank Zappa.
7/10 4) “I Just Called to Say I Love You” (The Woman in Red, 1984)
In 1984, another year of popular movie title songs (“Ghostbusters” and “Footloose” were in the running), the Oscar went to Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You”. Wonder said that he had the late John Lennon in mind for a song he claimed he had first thought of in 1976. “I had the melody and lyric for the chorus, and I imagined in my mind when hearing the chords that The Beatles were singing with me. And that idea and feeling is what inspired me to use the vocoder.” The song was written for the movie The Woman in Red, a mediocre comedy starring Gene Wilder. In 2018, singer-songwriter John Prine recorded a slow, stripped-down version of the song for Spotify Singles, in which he brings out the essential charm of a ballad some find too saccharine. Wonder’s winner was a particular favourite of the writer Maya Angelou
Rex
8/10 3) “Moon River” (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961)
In Blake Edwards’s film of the Truman Capote novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s, there is a scene in which the love interest Audrey Hepburn sits on the fire escape at a New York apartment and accompanies herself on guitar singing “Moon River”. The scene is charming and the waif-like Hepburn, staying in tune and doing her best with a singing voice that was thin and limited in range, delivers a moving version of a song written for her by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer.
Mancini later said that after the first preview screening of the film, the president of Paramount Pictures puffed a cigar and announced that the song had to be removed. “Over my dead body,” the usually mild-mannered Hepburn said. Although Paramount substituted her voice for an orchestral version on the soundtrack, her version caught the public imagination and more than a million copies of the sheet music were sold in the month after the film’s release.
Paramount/Kobal/Rex
9/10 2) “Mona Lisa” (Captain Carey, U.S.A, 1950)
The film noir Captain Carey, U.S.A, a tale of revenge set in the aftermath of the Second World War that starred Alan Ladd, is regarded now as a dated dud. Its theme tune “Mona Lisa”, sung by Ukrainian jazz trumpeter and bandleader Charlie Spivak, is the surviving glory of the film, however. It became a global hit when it was covered in 1950 by Nat King Cole. Ray Evans wrote the poignant lyrics – “Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa? /Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?” – and realised the song, comparing a lover to the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci, would work as a showcase for Cole’s warm baritone voice. Cole’s splendid version was at No.1 for eight weeks. In the year it won, incidentally, “Mona Lisa” beat the Disney novelty song “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” from Cinderella.
Paramount
10/10 1) “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (The Wizard of Oz, 1939)
Although “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is not a straightforward love song, it is a ballad about hope and loving humanity itself, a song that co-writer Yip Harburg called an attempt to “create a rainbow world”, where the dreams you dare to dream really do come true. It was the song Ariana Grande picked to perform at the ‘One Love Manchester’ concert in 2017 for the victims of the terrorist attack. Remarkably, this 20th-century classic, whose melody was composed by Harold Arlen, was almost cut from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, because MGM were worried that the opening Kansas sequence was too long. Sixteen-year-old Judy Garland’s sublime version, orchestrated by Murray Cutter, wowed cinema-goers and the decision to leave it in was vindicated. Lady Gaga sings a brief section of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in the Oscar-nominated movie A Star is Born.
Rex Features
1/10 10) “Up Where We Belong (An Officer and A Gentleman, 1982)
1982 was a year of blockbuster movie songs and “Up Where We Belong” pipped “Eye of the Tiger” to Oscars glory. Buffy Sainte-Marie, Will Jennings and Jack Nitzsche wrote it for the Richard Gere movie An Officer and A Gentleman. It was sung as a duet after Jennifer Warnes suggested a collaboration with Joe Cocker. Warnes had been a fan of the late Cocker since her teenage years and said she cried out with joy when he accepted the invitation to work with her. Their version was a worldwide hit and also won a Golden Globe and a Grammy.
Rex
2/10 9) “The Way You Look Tonight” (Swing Time, 1936)
In Swing Time, Fred Astaire sings the gorgeous ballad “The Way You Look Tonight” to Ginger Rogers while she is washing her hair. The sentimental lyrics were written by the brilliant songwriter Dorothy Fields, whose credits include “A Fine Romance” and “The Sunny Side of the Street”. The song, with music composed by Jerome Kern, was up against some terrific competition in 1936 – beating “Pennies from Heaven” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” to an award in its third year. Billie Holiday, with jazz maestro Teddy Wilson on piano, had a hit with “The Way You Look Tonight” that year and the song has since been recorded by hundreds of best-selling singers, including Frank Sinatra. “The Way You Look Tonight” is popular, romantic songwriting at its very best.
RKO Radio Pictures
3/10 8) “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” (Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, 1955)
Sammy Fain’s formal love ballads epitomised the style of movie music in the 1950s. Fain won the Academy award for best song twice – for “Secret Love”, from the 1953 Doris Day movie Calamity Jane and, two years later, with the title song for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. Fain, a trained pianist, started out as song promoter in the 1920s and he was pragmatic about delivering the song studio bosses wanted for this William Holden movie. Fain and lyricist Paul Francis Webster constantly tinkered with the words in “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” to keep 20th Century-Fox happy. The song, performed by The Four Aces on the soundtrack, has remained a favourite of crooners, from Sinatra to Barry Manilow. The song has also been referenced in numerous modern films, including Grease and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.
YouTube/20th Century Fox
4/10 7) “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” (The Lion King 1994)
In songwriting terms, it was essentially Elton John v Randy Newman in 1994. Newman was nominated for “Make Up Your Mind” for The Paper and John for three songs from The Lion King (his other nominations were for the songs “The Circle of Life” and “Hakuna Matata”). “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”, co-written with Tim Rice, was a popular winner and the single sold 11 million copies.
5/10 6) “My Heart Will Go On” (Titanic, 1997)
Canadian Céline Dion’s power ballad “My Heart Will Go On”, the theme song to James Cameron’s hit film Titanic, has been bought more than 20 million times. “My Heart Will Go On” is the romantic ballad playing as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet embrace at the front of the ill-fated liner that crashed into a iceberg. Dion showed great technical skill coping with the tricky modulations of a song written by James Horner and Will Jennings, while the poignant tin-whistle playing is courtesy of Andrea Corr.
6/10 5) “Take My Breath Away” (Top Gun, 1986)
Top Gun was virtually completed when Tom Whitlock came up with the lyrics to “Take My Breath Away” as he was driving home from work and mulling on a melody Giorgio Moroder had composed. The agreed they had something good and made a demo to play for director Tony Scott. He called back Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis to shoot some new love scenes to go with the new song. “If you see those scenes, you’ll notice that they are lit differently and there are those gauzy curtains blowing around,” Whitlock told rediscoverthe80s.com “All of that was to disguise that some months had gone by and the actors didn’t look exactly the same.”
The songwriters picked Terri Nunn to sing the song, having worked with her new wave band Berlin previously. She nailed the song and “Take My Breath Away” became a global hit. The synthesisers on the track were played by Arthur Barrow, a veteran musician who had worked with The Doors and Frank Zappa.
7/10 4) “I Just Called to Say I Love You” (The Woman in Red, 1984)
In 1984, another year of popular movie title songs (“Ghostbusters” and “Footloose” were in the running), the Oscar went to Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You”. Wonder said that he had the late John Lennon in mind for a song he claimed he had first thought of in 1976. “I had the melody and lyric for the chorus, and I imagined in my mind when hearing the chords that The Beatles were singing with me. And that idea and feeling is what inspired me to use the vocoder.” The song was written for the movie The Woman in Red, a mediocre comedy starring Gene Wilder. In 2018, singer-songwriter John Prine recorded a slow, stripped-down version of the song for Spotify Singles, in which he brings out the essential charm of a ballad some find too saccharine. Wonder’s winner was a particular favourite of the writer Maya Angelou
Rex
8/10 3) “Moon River” (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961)
In Blake Edwards’s film of the Truman Capote novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s, there is a scene in which the love interest Audrey Hepburn sits on the fire escape at a New York apartment and accompanies herself on guitar singing “Moon River”. The scene is charming and the waif-like Hepburn, staying in tune and doing her best with a singing voice that was thin and limited in range, delivers a moving version of a song written for her by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer.
Mancini later said that after the first preview screening of the film, the president of Paramount Pictures puffed a cigar and announced that the song had to be removed. “Over my dead body,” the usually mild-mannered Hepburn said. Although Paramount substituted her voice for an orchestral version on the soundtrack, her version caught the public imagination and more than a million copies of the sheet music were sold in the month after the film’s release.
Paramount/Kobal/Rex
9/10 2) “Mona Lisa” (Captain Carey, U.S.A, 1950)
The film noir Captain Carey, U.S.A, a tale of revenge set in the aftermath of the Second World War that starred Alan Ladd, is regarded now as a dated dud. Its theme tune “Mona Lisa”, sung by Ukrainian jazz trumpeter and bandleader Charlie Spivak, is the surviving glory of the film, however. It became a global hit when it was covered in 1950 by Nat King Cole. Ray Evans wrote the poignant lyrics – “Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa? /Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?” – and realised the song, comparing a lover to the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci, would work as a showcase for Cole’s warm baritone voice. Cole’s splendid version was at No.1 for eight weeks. In the year it won, incidentally, “Mona Lisa” beat the Disney novelty song “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” from Cinderella.
Paramount
10/10 1) “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (The Wizard of Oz, 1939)
Although “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is not a straightforward love song, it is a ballad about hope and loving humanity itself, a song that co-writer Yip Harburg called an attempt to “create a rainbow world”, where the dreams you dare to dream really do come true. It was the song Ariana Grande picked to perform at the ‘One Love Manchester’ concert in 2017 for the victims of the terrorist attack. Remarkably, this 20th-century classic, whose melody was composed by Harold Arlen, was almost cut from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, because MGM were worried that the opening Kansas sequence was too long. Sixteen-year-old Judy Garland’s sublime version, orchestrated by Murray Cutter, wowed cinema-goers and the decision to leave it in was vindicated. Lady Gaga sings a brief section of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in the Oscar-nominated movie A Star is Born.
Rex Features
Relationship expert Susan Winter said, “I find it amusing that there’s an equation for the ‘optimal’ age gap in love. While formula’s seem as though they have some kind of scientific credence, the truth is that two resonant souls will find each other (regardless of their ages).”
Whether there are any rules we should follow when looking for a potential mate, Winter said, “Rules no longer apply – there are no rules in love except to follow your heart.” Cute.
“Socially speaking in the western world, women have been granted liberty to unite with men five to 15 years older without anyone batting an eye. Conversely, when a man chooses an older mate he’s apt to encounter judgement and discrimination,” Winter told us.
As for why she thinks the equation has endured for so long, Winter said, “There’s no logical reason for this to be a ‘rule.’ Nor does this mathematical equation determine the ‘optimal age gap.’”
“However, you might note that the gap is larger than one would imagine. Historically, a woman was to choose a man the same age, or five to 15 years older. Mid-century, the reason for the elevated age gap would’ve been economic. Women had little ability to earn income. Their husband was their access to social standing and economic stability. Obviously, an older man had more time to achieve a greater number of personal and financial goals.”
Interestingly, Winter said, ”If this phrase originated in the early 1900’s it was clearly created by men (and therefore to their benefit).”
Relationship expert Rachel Russo also felt the rule had no basis in fact – but could see why it had endured.
For Russo, “It is more important to look at the life stage someone is in to see if your values are similar than to base your decision on chronological age.”
However, she “could see the rule working out much better for men than women,” because “chances are a 30-year-old man dating a 22-year-old woman would be a much better match than a 30-year-old woman and a 22-year-old guy, as men typically lag behind women in maturity and relationship ready-ness.”
But Russo also thinks it is important to remember, “Many people have very different priorities, so this rule is not one-size-fits-all and does not guarantee a good match.”
As for the endurance of the rule, Russo thinks it may have something to do with men being attracted to younger women.
She said, “one reason why this may have endured is because men are generally more attracted to younger women and would like a rule that makes them feel it is acceptable to date younger.” So basically men are to blame.
But for relationship expert Rachel DeAlto, the old rule is pretty helpful in determining suitable age differences.
According to DeAlto, “It is still a decent rule of thumb to set a boundary of a minimum age. While age is truly just a number, successful significant relationships are based on mutual understanding and connection.”
She continued, “I’ve seen a few anomalies where a large age gap didn’t get in the way of a lasting connection, but often times, it can lead to frustrations and the end of a relationship.
“Rules are made to be broken in certain cases, but it’s not a bad start to set some parameters.”
However, how much can we really rely on a rule written from the perspective of an early 20th-century male?
The original quote, taken from Her Royal Highness, Woman: And His Majesty Cupid, is as follows: “I heard the other day a very good piece of advice, which I should like to repeat here, as I endorse it thoroughly: A man should marry a woman half his age, plus seven. Try it at whatever age you like, and you will find it works very well, taking for granted all the while that, after all, a man as well as a woman is the age that he looks and feels.”
Diminishing his credibility, in the next paragraph, O’Rell gives readers the advice: “Never marry a woman richer than you, or one taller than you, or one older than you.”
So despite the approval and support from DeAlto, the rule originally repeated by O’Rell seems significantly outdated – in real life, but especially in the anything-goes world of celebrity dating.
While some beliefs may stand the test of time, this old-fashioned dating rule doesn’t appear to be one of them.
After all, rules are made to be broken.
This article was originally published in January 2018
