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Notes -
Age Gap Relationships
So its no secret that people, particularly zoomers, like to bitch and moan about age gaps in relationships. Should someone who's 30 date someone who's 18? Does it make you a pedophile if you do?
A lot of this discussion hinges on whether or not these people are actually "adults" that can make logical decisions. I've been pondering this myself so I'm going to run by two hypotheticals (Both for and against 18 year olds or "teenagers" being adults) and see what you guys think:
Case 1
Is it fair to say that you killed a child? Probably not. You killed teenagers? Technically. Did you kill some grown ass man thinking he could jack you? Many would say yes! On top of this, many people would judge these boys as adults, and have them take a prison/jail sentence as adults. It seems that in the eyes of many, if you do adult things, and are expected to take accountability as an adult, we should rightfully call you an adult. Make sense? Maybe lets consider case 2.
Case 2
Now, both Steve & Maddy choose to do an adult action (have sex) with an adult consequence (reproduction), and took responsibility as "adults" (getting married and getting a job). Would we say these 2 are adults? It seems the answer here, for many is no. You shouldn't want teenagers to be having kids: that's what adults are expected to do. That fact that Steve & Maddy have done adult things, and are now taking on adult responsibilities, doesn't make them true adults in the eyes of many.
So far, Im what I'm thinking with both of these cases is that the cognition needed to make adult decisions perhaps simply lie at different ages, based on said decision. Maybe its easier at 14 to know that car jacking & killing is wrong, than it would be to have the knowledge and maturity neccessary to handle a sexual relationship. And that the whole "lets have one universal age of adulthood" is looking at it wrong: Different actions simply have different complexities to them, and thus a universal set age of adulthood ignores those complexities. But assuming this is true, where does sexual relationships lie on the age scale? Is a 16 year old really too immature to date some one who is 19? 20?
If we should have universal age of adulthood, that tracts onto everything (alcohol, crime, sex) where would it be? Currently, all of these have different ages (21 is for alcohol if you are in the US). What do you guys think?
I think it's important to first identify who the principal opposition to age gap relationships is and at least in my experience, it's almost always women. "Dirty Old Man" and the like. In particular, it's older women. (Not absolutely old but older than the younger age gap partner). Which makes sense. Men famously have a rather constant age of women they find attractive. IIRC in practice age gap relationships are actually rather rare but if an average guy got to choose an idealized partner she'd probably be about 20-25 in age. Which is usually just biology. Just like an idealised female would pick a 6'3 billionaire.
Women are on average better at things like using emotive language and at enforcing and creating social norms ("the longhouse"). Indeed, I can think of no real social norms that have recently been created by men. Women excel in doing things like creating social legitimisation for personal bugbears (see the proliferation of female-centered therapy language). Since we live in a post-violent, heavily language and discourse centered world and since the discourse creators are now all female, you should expect "the discourse" to reflect the issues and wishes of the women forging the discourse.
So that's something to keep in mind with age gap discourse, a lot of it's probably the collective grievance of older women in terms of not wanting to compete with younger women for higher-value mates.
IIRC actual research finds that large age-gap relationships aren't that common but also that they tend to produce slightly better and more durable relationships. I think that 18 is a reasonable Shelling point for these things. People are allowed far more destructive things from that age than dating someone older than them.
I propose a different explanation. If we take a broad look at the age-gap relations where the woman is above the age of majority and the man is older than her, we can see that they are not universally bad (unlike, say, forty-year-old men raping ten-year-old girls). However, there's a specific subtype of this relationship that, while definitely not illegal and not universally immoral, still isn't something that improves the overall quality of truth and love and beauty in the universe.
I'm talking, of course, about a relationship with an expiry date. An older man uses his greater access to material resources or his greater relationship experience to have sex with a young attractive woman and then breaks up with her. Just a few decades ago this wasn't a problem: the young woman's parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents would all immediately see through this man's nefarious plan and forbid the problematic relationship. If the suitor had noble intentions, he would have to prove himself to them.
However, it's $current_year, and this kind of direct personal interference in a woman's private life is now taboo. She's an adult, and no one can tell her who to date and who not to date. On the other hand, she's no longer protected from this form of exploitative relationship. How do you square the circle? You transform personal interference into impersonal. Instead of specific women being told, "no, you cannot date this man", all men are now told, "any of you that dares to date a 18yo is definitely a disgusting predator".
There's an unspoken carve-out for men with noble intentions, just like there's one for attractive men in "don't hit on women in bars/gyms/etc", but it doesn't work well, given the amount of heat this topic generates.
I agree that there may be an element of this in play, but consider a situation where a young woman who is dating a man who is roughly her age but also is a "player" or "f*ck-boy" type (or gives those vibes off). Applying your historical view of things, in the past the young woman's family would have arguably identified such a man as a "cad" or a "rake," and forbade the relationship.
Nowadays, there is some degree of impersonal social disapproval of "player" types, but it's nowhere near the ferocious hostility displayed towards older men who are in age-gap relationships. So I have to think that there's more in play.
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I don't know that this is true. I used to do a fair amount of genealogy for work and large age gaps were pretty common in the old days. Even in my own family, my great aunt married a guy in 1931 (when she was 20) who was about 20 years older than her, and only a couple years younger than her parents. This aunt was like a grandmother to me but I never knew her husband, as he died in 1963, and I didn't really know much about him. Years later, my dad a comment about him along the line of the following when we were talking about the family history: "I don't know what she saw in him. He was like an old man, he never had a steady job, he was mean. I don't understand why my grandparents let her marry that guy." My uncle told a story about his first driving experience, when Uncle Lee asked him to take him to Oakland so he could buy a piss urinal for his basement. He used to tinker around down there and didn't want to walk upstairs and was tired of peeing in a bottle. So he asked my uncle, despite the fact that my uncle was only 13 at the time. My uncle said "Don't you need a permit or something?" and he just waved his hand and said no. So my uncle drove him to Oakland. He had a winter coat on and turned the heat up all the way in the car even though it was June. When they got there the place didn't have one and Uncle Lee got pissed off at the manager. Then when they were leaving my uncle backed into the alley and ran over a bicycle that was lying in the street. Uncle Lee got out and threw it while yelling "Goddamn kids with their toys!" Apparently my grandfather hit the ceiling when he found out about it.
Some of those age gaps I've noticed in my own genealogy research was a much older man marrying a 2nd wife after the first wife died (new wife then helps care for existing kids plus having some of her own with him). Not always, as your example shows, but trying to tease apart the particulars complicates it.
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