I cannot for the life of me understand why this is not working. I am so confused. I have a class Person which has a data member age, and I just want to add two people so that it adds the ages. I don't know why this is so hard, but I'm looking for examples and I feel like everyone does something different, and for some reason NONE of them work. Sometimes the examples I see have two parameters, sometimes they only have one, sometimes the parameters are references to the object, sometimes they're not, sometimes they return an int, sometimes they return a Person object. Like..what is the most normal way to do it? class Person { public: int age; //std::string haircolor = "brown"; //std::string ID = "23432598"; Person(): age(19) {} Person operator+(Person&) { } }; Person operator+(Person &obj1, Person &obj2){ Person sum = obj1; sum += obj2; return sum; } I really feel like overloading a + operator should seriously be the easiest thing in the world except I DON'T KNOW WHAT I AM DOING. I don't know if I'm supposed to create the overload function inside the class, outside, if it makes a difference, why if I do it inside it only allows one parameter, I just honestly don't get it.