You know that pop culture-driven, potentially made-up standard rule for determining how young you can date?
Turns out, Texans actually follow it.
Out of the nearly 2 million Texas marriage licenses filed from 2004 to 2014, only 588 marriages didn’t abide by the half-your-age-plus-seven rule.
The rule suggests the younger person in a relationship should be older than half the older person’s age plus seven years in order for the relationship to be socially acceptable. For example, the youngest a 26-year-old person should date is 20.
The beginnings of the rule are murky. Wikipedia’s brief section on the rule cites French author Max O’Rell’s 1901 work “Her Royal Highness Woman” as the first written mention of the rule, but that’s Wikipedia. I first heard about it from Andy Dwyer - Chris Pratt’s character on “Parks and Recreation” - when he was determining whether April Ludgate was in his age range. We checked - Pratt and Anna Faris met the rule.
While the number of marriage licenses grew over 10 years, the number of rule-breaking marriages stayed stable. 2014 saw a sharp drop in rule-breakers, going from .03 percent of all marriages in 2013 to the even smaller amount of .002 percent in 2014.
Marriages where the husband was older were definitely more likely to break the rule throughout the decade. Out of the 588 marriages, 534 of them were situations where the husband was older. Wives were older in only 54 of the cases.
