Age-Gap Relationships

*Please excuse any grammatical errors on this or any of my other blog posts, I have a bad habit of writing posts late at night when I’m basically half asleep.*

I have noticed that with many people who have been in relationships (or situations) where there was a large age gap between themselves and the person they were involved with – particularly people who, at a young age, dated individuals who were much older than them – the older that one gets (and the closer they get to the age of the person they dated), the more the red flags in relationships (or situations) like this become apparent to them.

This is something I can relate to. Unfortunately, I have been in multiple situations where I was involved with people who were much older than I am – most of these situations occurred in my early twenties. There were also several instances when I was still underage of older men expressing an interest in dating me. At times, I erroneously believed that I was interested in them as well.

For most of my life, people have constantly told me that I am “mature for my age” and that I will more than likely end up with someone older than me because “boys my age won’t understand me”. For most of my life, statements like that have shaped my perception of dating and marriage. At one point in my life, I even declared – publicly – that I only dated older men. Thankfully, the aforementioned statements no longer have an impact on my life.

I do believe that it is possible (!!!! IN NON-PREDATORY SITUATIONS !!!!!) for people who are far apart in age to genuinely fall in love with one another and then go on to have a beautiful relationship. However, if someone is going out of their way to date people way younger than them – or if someone is going out of their way to date people way older than them – there is a problem.

As I get older and look back at the ages I was when I was involved with older men, I cannot fathom even considering someone that young as a possible partner. In my eyes, I see someone who is just a few years younger than I am as a child – a literal baby. Now, at this stage in my life, even though I’m older myself, I can no longer even wrap my mind around being involved with any of the men that I was involved with back then. Now that I have matured, grown and healed, it’s insane to me to consider dating someone that much older.

I see now that no matter how nice or normal some of those men may have been (and few of them were), the fact that they were even willing to date me as young as I was was a huge red flag and indicative of other problems.

I feel that there is a great amount of trauma behind the statement that I once made that one is only willing to date individuals older than them. Also, I’m sorry but the idea that I would only be able to get along well with an older man as opposed to someone my age due to my maturity level is laughable because most of the men who were willing to pursue me when I was so young were EXTREMELY (bold and italicizing isn’t enough – I think I need to pay for a blimp to display this message across the sky to really get the point across) immature.