Whats your range ?

Before your nomadic mind starts wandering in the wild thinking about all the sorts of ranges in life, let me pause you right there and pull you back in to the real world. I am not talking about your size range, or your price range, i am talking about a very different kind of range.

Let me paint a picture!

You go in a really cool party at your friends place and meet a new person. You both really hit it off very well, so much that you already have a date planned with that person in the next couple of days. You both meet at a really nice hotel, sitting near the window with candles lit on one side and lovely waves hitting the shore on the other. The moon is bright, shinning and smiling from the top sitting on the bunch of some grey clouds. The sky feels like an artist's painting. A cork pops open from a rare champagne bottle and the wine is slowly trickling down the glasses to begin the evening. He starts talking about all his cool experiences in the past that are blowing her away, while she is also trying to hold him in the frame through her vast range of hobbies, likes/dislikes etc. You both have a wonderful time, you cant stop thinking about the other, even after reaching you home and you know something special is up. Your common friend calls you up the next day, to ask about how the last party hosted by him/her was and if you enjoyed it well. In super excited tone you start telling him/her about the awesome person you met at the party and how you went on a date and are loving it. He/she, quite amused, and slips out in an interrogative tone,
" Do you even know how old is he ?"
...and you replied, " No, may be like a couple of years older than me"....
..."He is 10 years older than you"
..bam....and now have two options :

1. either you get astonished and you start thinking " What will happen now, how could he be so old, no but i like him so much"

 or

 2. you would be like.."hmmm, i could anyways sense it, i am sure it'll be fine, we really connected on the first date and i don't think age's any issue" 

Now here comes my question, "WHATS YOUR RANGE?"

 Everybody has a range, some have it very sharply defined and some have it loosely defined. Since, we are all humans, unlike machines, we are not programmed to make random choices. All our decisions are filtered & processed through the extensive network of over a billion wires running in our head, which means all the choices are accompanied by logic, self defined, self satisfying logic. What is the upper and lower range of the lover you seek, of the soul mate you are searching for ?

 We all may have very different answers, but there are some common elements that are influencing those decisions. Very cliche and typical, yet very important and true are your surroundings, the environment you were brought up in, your culture, your traditions, all these factors condition your thinking and then you try to attach logic to the answers derived from those the set of those pre-existing common factors.

 With 7 Billion people in the world, I am sure you will find ample people sitting on all the points on the scale of the range. Some on the extreme ends, fine with the partner being older by over 20-30 years on the positive end, and then some are fine with partner being 10-20 yrs younger. While the middles ones fine with + or - 2 yrs of difference. Though the attitudes of the ones on the extreme ends might differ from the ones sitting in the middle, for e.g. when a middle person sees a person sitting on the end of the scale, and just out of curiosity, he shouts out
 "What the hell are you doing sitting there, so far ?"
......and he replies..."Just chillin...........It's feels quite nice up here, you should try it sometime"
 .. and the middle one fails to understand the reason and just shuns it as a mere whim of that wierd guy.

 But the core question still exists, where do you find yourself sitting on the scale? What exactly is your range ?

 There are many schools of thoughts, and as i pointed before, people will find their own set of logical arguments to define the range they came up with because of other surrounding factors, to be appropriate for them. I will just try to portray some of those schools of thought and you can see if you fit in one or may be choose your own :)

 1.Base principle: "Girls have a tendency to like guys who are older than them" Girls usually find older guys really attractive and would love to fall in love with them. This is typically seen with smarter girls and as people say, girls mature faster than guys and they are looking for someone of the same or higher maturity level, which they find in older men. Girls are looking for much more in a relationship than guys (and you know what guys are looking for :P), they want someone with whom they can learn new things, someone who is mature enough to understand them well, someone who can take them to the places she has never been (physcially and mentally), which they will definitely find in an older guy with his much larger set of experiences and broader sense of the world can satisfy.

 2.Base principle: "Girls will never try to go for a much younger guy" Without repeating much of the arguments made in the last point, a typical women's range for guy is not very much deep on the lower end because of the aforementioned reasons. And mind you, we are only talking about real relationships and not flings or one night stands, because there, the tendency is quite opposite and both want to try things they have never tried and hence wierd combinations work out :P..... To summarize, the lack of maturity, lack of enough experiences and understanding of the world and the art to get girls, younger guys are less susceptible to getting married to older girls. Remember, exceptions are always there :)

 3.Base principle: "A guy will try to go for any age range to begin with, as he begins with one sole aim and develops with time in a relationship" Guys, typically, again typically, (not 100%), aim for a relationship for benefits, it might not be their only goal but is definitely the larger goal to begin with. With time, as they become more mature and start developing a liking for the other person, they start thinking about the things surrounding benefits. For some, they do find the surrounding things very interesting and they wanna move forward, while with some they are not able to relate themselves to those surroundings, and find the fantasy short lived which soon falls apart and hence the relationship ends.

There are many many more schools of thought and i am definitely not the master of the subject, instead am just a pupil trying to unravel the behavioral science behind it and am still in baby steps. But, i am sure you will find yours too, look for it inside and you will find it :)

 Cheers

PS: Its not an account of my personal experiences but just a collection of thoughts from a session with friends over a bottle of wine :)

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