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— By Nathan Yau | Flowing Data

If you want to feel like you’re getting old, visit an optometrist and have them tell you that in 6 to 12 months you won’t be able to read things up close and you’ll need bifocals.

For most of my life, I had good vision without glasses or contacts, but in my mid-30s I noticed the basketball score on television looking kind of blurry. I had astigmatism. Just a little.

My prescription didn’t change for years. Until recently. My optometrist hit me with the news that most people start to have trouble reading up close between 39 to 43 years old. I had to look into it.

The following chart shows the percentage of adults who wear glasses or contacts, by age, based on data from the National Health Interview Survey.

When We Wear Glasses OR Contacts

We start to see the need around 40 years old.

Half of adults wear glasses or contacts from a young age, but you can see the inflection point right around 40. You can see a similar shift in the follow chart that shows difficulty seeing.

When Seeing Gets Difficult , Even With Glasses OR Contacts

The curves start to flatten out around 50.

There’s some solace in seeing the curve level off after the initial dip. It’s not quite like that with hearing though.

When We Use Hearing Aids

Hearing seems fine for a good while until it’s not.

While fewer people use hearing aids than wear glasses/contacts, the curves for difficulty hearing suggest that people just deal with hearing less over time.

When Hearing Gets Difficult , Even With A Hearing Aid

Hearing appears to steadily decline with no leveling off in the later years.

— By Nathan Yau

Through pop culture, it sometimes seems like it’s common for there to be a wide age difference between spouses. How common are the age gaps, really? These are the age differences through the lens of the 2022 five-year American Community Survey.

More Common For The Husband To Be Older

Among Male-Female Married Households.

This seems about right. A third of male-female married households have spouses within a year of each other. When there is an age difference, the husband is usually the older one. Wider gaps of 10 years or more are less common but not unheard of.

I thought for sure that greater age gaps would grow with age. After a certain age it would seem that age would matter less? But as shown in the following, the age of wife and husband stick pretty close to the equal line.

Differences By Age of Each Spouse

Circles Represent the Prevalence of Married Couples at the Corresponding Ages.

When comparing first marriages against second and third marriages, the age gaps seemed somewhat wider, so that might be something else to consider. Age gaps between same-sex marriages also seemed to be a bit wider. Or maybe we need to look at partners who are not married also. How has this changed over time? I think I need to poke more.