• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    29·
    3 months ago

    So it wasn’t actually that much higher back in the day. I have a feeling there were more outliers, though.

    • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.eeEnglish
      24·
      3 months ago

      Keep in mind that the average being twice as high indicates a much higher number of severe age gap marriages than there are now.

      This is another “average age of 30” stat where the average somewhat lies about the situation.

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
        3·
        3 months ago

        Isn’t there a way to cut out outliers methodically to get a better picture of the majority? It’s been a long time since I took statistics. I also think these numbers would change if you broke them down to regional or religion or other demographics. A single number for everyone doesn’t tell the whole story.

          • Rhaedas@fedia.io
            4·
            3 months ago

            That also brought up a good point - lots of couples aren’t married (by choice or other reasons) and aren’t in these studies because of that. And then what about same sex couples? The question of age gap still applies to them too in the overall scope of whether people seek out similar ages or not.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          In introductory stuff they just say discard outliers by eyeball, but obviously that’s not very rigorous. You can do mathier versions, but it can be considered cooking the data if it changes your conclusion, and can get you in real trouble if you don’t announce it.

          I wasn’t even talking about outliers in the data-breaking sense there, though. I really just meant that there must have been a lot of variation because that’s not as big a difference as I was expecting, based on old stories. There’s a few standard ways to measure that, actually an infinite series, but the two you often focus on for “outliers” in this sense are variance (literally just called that) and kurtosis. The higher order ones become increasingly nitpicky.

  • SirSamuel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    152·
    3 months ago

    My wife and I are 3 years apart. One of the things she liked when we were dating was that we had the same cultural references from childhood. She had dated men 10 years her senior and didn’t like it for that reason.

    At 26 I was hanging out with friends and this one girl was a cutie (who was clearly in her mid-twenties) that I was casually flirting with. Then she said “I gotta go, my dad’s picking me up” and I’m like “Wait you don’t drive?” and she’s like “Dad doesn’t want me to drive till I’m 18” and. I. Was. Mortified. I felt like a complete pedophile. God damned Latinas.

    The point is, dating outside (x/2)+7 is unacceptable, but even over 40 a 10 year age gap is weird