Love Across The Ages

Brad is 47, Angelina is 36.

Katie Holmes married Tom Cruise, the man who was a poster on her bedroom wall as a teenager, when she was 28 and he was 44.

Arthur Miller was 41 when he married Marilyn Monroe, the bride was 30.

J. Howard Marshall II was 62 years older than his infamous bombshell wife, Anna Nicole Smith.

And most recently, 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchison is making headlines for tying the knot with Courtney Stodden, a 16-year-old aspiring singer from Tacoma, Washington.

Relationships between younger women and older men are a long-standing romantic tradition, and now WhatsYourPrice.com, the world's first site that allows members to buy and sell first dates, claims to have determined the optimum age gap between men and women. Their conclusion is the result of a five-month long study, which examined more than 100,000 first dates between older men and younger women.

And the ideal age gap in a relationship is...

6 years, according to the WhatsYourPrice.com research team.

So why is the average woman attracted to a man 6 years her senior? "Women tend to mature faster than men," says Brandon Wade, Founder & CEO of WhatsYourPrice.com, SeekingArrangement.com, and SeekingMillionaire.com. "For this reason, most women don't like to date men around their age or who are younger than they are."

Maturity only gets you so far, however: the study also found that, although women are attracted to older men, they generally prefer to date men who are less than ten years older than they are.

If you are an older gentlemen looking for young love, don't lose hope. The WhatsYourPrice.com team also discovered that the preference for men who are older, but not too much older, can be overridden with one simple thing: a burgeoning bank account. Men who want to date women more than 10 years younger than themselves must pay approximately 13% more than the average to close every year of the gap, the study found.

"People are generally shallow and materialistic when it comes to first impression on an online dating website. Luckily for older men, when they fall outside of a woman's list of shallow attraction criteria such as looks or age gap, money is the only factor that can level the playing field," says Wade.

Before you lose faith in romance entirely, consider this wisdom from Wade: An older man with money can use the contents of his wallet to close the age gap prejudice and secure a first date. Then, when meeting his date for the first time, he has "the chance to show off his personality and appeal to a woman's deeper set of attraction criteria."