What is a May/December relationship?

Well this is an unusual question to receive as a tech blogger!

It's interesting, though, because there are all sorts of facets to the answer. In a nutshell, a May/December relationship (also commonly called a May/September relationship) is when one person in the relationship is significantly older than the other.

If you're 27 and going out with a guy who is 50? That's a May/December relationship.

Where's the name from? It's to do with phases of life. If you imagine that birth is January and death is, well, December, you can imagine that your college years are April (or so), your 50s are hopefully mid-Autumn, and those retiree years when you're trying to remember what meds you're supposed to take? Yeah, that's December.

So in some sense, a May/September relationship is less depressing: do you want to be going out with someone on their last legs, just a few months or years from their demise? :-)

Then again, our expectations of same-age relationships are culturally based too, and probably originate in biology, though the older king or sheik with their harem of beautiful (and fertile) young women? That's certainly part of our shared history, and you can argue that it's a smart woman who waits to find a man who is successful before partnering with them and having children.

Vice-versa, I'll note, is popularly captured in the "cougar" metaphor now, and from a biological perspective, women of 40 or older have complications around birth that younger women do not face, so a 27 year old man having a child with a 50 year old woman definitely isn't going to work out as well as the opposite situation.

Long answer to a simple question. But that's just my take on things. What do you think, reader?