Yeah, I had a ex-friend lecture me all the time for being in a loving relationship with someone who was 26 when I was 30, it made literally no sense to me and I refused to accept any of there criticisms and told them to get off of twitter.

Like in there mind I should only be dating someone my exact same age otherwise they felt the power imbalance would be off. I explained to them that I do consider power dynamics very deeply in relationships and its always an active conversation im having with my partners and that for me ‘life stage’ and general alignment along goals is more important - sure age gaps in the extreme id raise an eyebrow at, and of course below age of consent but this moralizing I just dont care for.

Content warning - SA

When I was like 21 I had a 27 year old friend and he was the best, always had drugs and knew where the secret festivals were happening

They’re cancelling cool uncs

I spent my childhood feeling more comfortable around adults than peers. I spent my late teens and early-mid twenties spending a lot of time with my brother and his friends, who were all 6-8 years older. I’ve become good friends with some housemates that are the same age gap but reversed. There is a certain ease with people more my age but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy mixed age friendships.

I feel like people making so many friends online where you can cast such a heavy filter really messed with people. Like, just because they’re the wrong age for dating doesn’t mean we can be platonic. In real life its normal to hang out with different kinds of people.

Being online emphasizes theory over praxis and it means that opinions are untested. Telling someone to touch grass is challenging them to apply experimental rigor to their hypotheses. In this essay I will…

I was on a dating site once and was contacted by someone almost a decade younger than me (very much of age, of course) so we began talking. At some point the topic came up with my dad and he said something along the lines of “trust me, you don’t want that.” I didn’t think much about it at the time but soon after I started to realize what he meant. The conversations were extremely boring and repetitive and honestly a bit self-involved and whiney, and then I realized what he meant. I was probably like that at that life stage too, but I’d grown past it. Hearing all the same nonsense all over again was a headache, so I broke it off before it got off the ground.

Also it probably didn’t help that I felt a bit fetishized for being older, but I think societally that’s not nearly as much of an issue as its reverse.

You’re not getting heavily invested with a friend though. You’re not spending the majority of your time with them, making decisions involving substantial risk with them, making deep commitments with them, etc.

Even roommates doesn’t necessarily cross the line. I’ve had roommates that were 8 years younger, and ones that were 30+ years older.

If everybody got more used to the idea of degrees of interaction/personal involvement and a spectrum of how much of a peer someone is, that would do a lot of good.

I mean, “wanting to be their friends” could totally be seen as an attempt to be more than friends, but actually being friends with a younger adult happens especially when said younger person feels like their peers are kiddish

I’m open to be challenged on this, but it seems to me that age gap only applies to sex and romance because we live in societies where exploitation was built into these modes of relationship for private property reasons, while friendship was never about private property

I’ve been thinking about it, trying to work out what I want to focus on saying. There are two main ways it strikes me:

1. It sounds trivial to me in the context of pressing issues, like child marriage laws (it still floors me this is a thing that can happen in the US, child marriage); financial abuse relating to vulnerable positions that capitalism puts people in; isolation, individualism, and absence of community that furthers the vulnerability of people.

2. There is something to it, but mainly because of capitalism; how vulnerable people are and how transactional relationships can tend to be. But putting the spotlight on some adults happening to have an age gap is missing the forest for the trees. I’d also think there’s a major difference between someone who happens to want to connect with you and there’s an age gap, versus someone who is specifically going around looking for people who are younger than them, but this is hard to judge without investigating and figuring out intent.

It’s a human thing to connect with each other. People of all ages can be friends in the sense of enjoying each other’s company and bringing joy to each other’s lives. The dynamic is going to be somewhat different with adult and child because the adult has to act as caregiver and protector, not treat the child as someone they can simply confide with on anything. But the point is, even there, it’s possible for them to have something resembling friendship and it’s vulgarizing of what friendship means to suggest otherwise; I think individualist culture just makes this sound more creepy than it is because you aren’t likely to be organically hanging around a child much unless it’s your own or you work in childcare. In a more tight-knit community, I’d expect it to be more common that “it takes a village” is quite literal and that plenty of adults will have good relationships with the kids in the community, acting as helper caregivers and having human connection with them. That some people may take advantage of friendships, or friendly relations if you prefer, is a valid concern, but that’s where missing community accountability and awareness is the major problem, not friendship intrinsically. Again, I would be concerned if someone was specifically seeking out those who are younger, but that’s not the same as incidentally having human connection.

Like… I don’t know, there’s something unsettling to me about the implied thought process. Almost like it’s implying that human connection is somehow predatory inherently and the only way to stave off predation is to only relate with the closest of peers (even though people of the same age can still abuse each other…). Which really only makes sense if you believe the capitalist transactional mode is what human connection inherently is.

Am I missing something?

Good were the days when kids were not the majority on the internet. Imagine a world where any child’s shower thought won’t stay just between that child and its friends, but can now be shared with the whole world and maybe even boosted to become atrend by the recommender system. We’re in that world.

Due to life circumstances, currently most of my close friends are much younger and they can be tiresome sometimes, so I can understand some of the issues with age gaps. Some old school acquaintances are married or even getting divorced while the people I deal with daily are still living out their “finally a free adult” days lol.

But this seems to be the type of thing that is only a major issue in school, where it’s expected to mostly meet only people at the same age. Once you get a job, for example, it’s incredibly unlikely your peers are going to be your exact same age, and that’s fine. Life’s too diverse and hard to keep so many self-imposed rules.

Edit: this only applies to friendships though. Large age gaps in romantic relationships have their risks and complications, and must be analysed on a case-by-case basis.

To be fair I kinda get it.

Different generations have different interests and that’s what ultimately drives your social interaction. I have a harder time opening up to Boomers or Gen Xers and even some older Millennials whereas I can more easily find common ground with people in my age range.

Age isn’t the only factor, though. Culture, politics, language, class, etc. influence this too.