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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?
Try to think of the situation in reverse. If my niece or one of my younger cousins when they come of age at 18, told me they were currently dating a 30 year old man, it would certainly give me pause and reflection to wonder where his particular interest comes from, that's distinct and different from someone in the same age group as they are. Would you feel differently if the tables were reversed in your case? It's a matter of differences in the stage of life. An "adult" at 30 isn't even on the same level as an "adult" at 50. It's less questionable because there's likely mature development from both parties from 18 to their present age that's taken place. A person at 18 though is too green to have that life experience that feels right. Would you take advice from yourself at 14? How about 18? I know more about everything, including myself; today in 2026 than I ever did back then, but looking back, although I was lacking in knowledge about certain things, I was every bit on the right track.
I was rejected once by a woman who was 1 year older than me and said it she felt it she would be like dating her younger brother. Seemed petty to me and it would've landed better without the insult. My ex-girlfriend of almost 8 years was a year and a half older than me. We'd known each other prior to dating, so there was already an established history there. Maybe that was something that softened any kind of weirdness. Looking at most of my age cohort today, I've done amazingly well by comparison when I see so many woman who still act like 16 year old girls. If I ever got a word with mom and dad and I'd tell them they clearly failed as a parent.
The same place all male interest in females comes from. Historically, 30 year old men (or even older) routinely sought out 16-18 year old women to form families with. The question is entirely in the quality of the man. I happen to have this exact situation in my family, with a cousin dating and then marrying at 19 to a man 12 years her senior. He is a very good dude who happened to really, really want a large family. To my knowledge, he adores her, never speaks down to her or has treated her as less than an equal partner, and 8 (or maybe 9? I've lost count) kids later they are one of the happiest families I know.
It goes without saying men are biologically attracted to women. Not all desire is a form of healthy expression or interest. There are a lot of very attractive women in my family and a good handful of them I view like younger sisters. That men would find them attractive is no surprise and I don't hold it against them for thinking that. I'm against a man who would manipulate them into sex without requiring love, mutual commitment, support or investment. Yeah, sexual congress is universal. I get it. The goal has never been to prevent that. The goal is to keep that within context.
I wouldn't inherently reject a man who comes along and tells me he's interested in one of my relatives. I've had it happen before. Like you, it depends entirely on how I vet him to be. When I was a teenager, a group of my friends were out in the city once late at night doing things they shouldn't have been doing. As the night continued to get late, I drop word in with my best friend that my younger cousin (which they all knew) is out at a party past her curfew so I asked him to swing by to pick her up and join them while they walked her home. At one point one of the guys in the group made a pass at my cousin and my best friend who was there walked up and popped him in the face pretty hard, and told him to "shut the fuck up." After she was dropped off, they rolled through my place as it was nearing the morning and they told me what happened. Me and said friend in that group are still friends to this day and he apologized the night that it happened, but our relationship has been strained for decades after that. He's definitely been out on the periphery of things ever since then. But that was all par for the course with how we grew up. We policed each other's behavior and kept one another in line. It was a strongly enforced norm. Homeboy chose to make an degrading attempt instead of keeping his mouth shut.
It's about the kind of man you are and how responsible you are. If you can prove you're a mature suitor and a respectable man, that's more than enough social proof for me to have my blessing, but "proof" is the key word in that sentence. If he was much older than her but came from my friend group and we'd had a multiple decade long pedigree with each other, I'd know the man well enough to know whether he's a good fit for someone in my family or not. One of my best friend's cousins is married to one of my cousins and they have two kids with each other and it's a very happy marriage. We've long passed the point of being best friends, we've been in-laws now for quite awhile.
Absolutely, and this is one of the advantages of a strong family, as it has been historically. If a man knocks up a woman and doesnt do the honorable thing, the womans family has certain duties involving pitchforks and/or shotguns. But an age gap is not a good indicator of lack of commitment, I would argue both historically and currently its the inverse. Even the sour-grapes danger-haired feminists who shriek about such things couch their argument in terms of power imbalances rather than a lack of commitment.
Well, the argument being couched that way merely conceals the complaint about a lack of commitment; gynosupremacists feel entitled to male commitment.
"Power imbalance" is the way they legitimize that entitlement, as the power imbalance has favored the woman in any relationship for the past 50 years or so. Compare "eat the rich" (and the people who say it); in both cases, it's just a fight over whose version of entitlement is enforced at gunpoint.
I've always adopted the approach that whether we're talking about employment, gender relations, family, interpersonal interactions, whatever it is, if you want to live and be independent of the group that's your right to do so, but you in turn receive no benefit by your lack of membership in it.
If I and other men are implicitly held to be responsible for how the men around us behave, such that it's our job to keep them in line so women feel comfortable and happy going about their business, then they're in turn obliged to follow men's rules at the end of the day. I can fully understand why a woman wouldn't like to constantly live her life in deference to men, but there's no good alternative around this. The only other way to live is by accepting the risk that your independence makes you fair game for anybody and everybody. If we have to compete and you wind up getting in a fucked up situation, you signed onto this, so don't ask me to have pity for you. Despite what others told you, you knew what you were getting yourself into. Every man understands this in his dealings with other men.
If you're complimentary to me, then I obviously owe you certain rights and privileges in virtue of our obligations to serve out the roles we carry for one another. If you're my equal then you're a competitor to me in all aspects of life and your misfortune and pain is a natural consequence of "losing" in the game of survival we're playing. The fact that you lost isn’t proof of your innocence, all it proves is that you’re weaker than me. Sorry, but that's how it is. Life is full of trade offs.
A lot of what men deal with in life they figure out through difficult experience, trial and error. Life is a catch-22 for us because if I don't go to work, I starve. For women (yes, not all of them), plenty of these choices are optional, such that you don't 'have' to work if you don't want to. Or at least has hard as a man does. Women have options where men often have no choice. So a lot of the bad choices women end up making for themselves are expressions of their desire to engage in that activity; and so they’re there by choice. So when you end up getting "burned," you aren't a "victim," you're simply an idiot.
Sorry, what exactly is the "this" here? Every man understands that they're signing up to compete and potentially get fucked up?
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