Do you think it's weird and/or predatory for a 13 year-old and a 30 year-old to be best friends if they're not family members or related by blood? Assuming everything is innocent and platonic. Nothing romantic or sexual.
Yes, it's weird and predatory
It's weird. But not predatory
It's predatory. But not weird
No, it's not weird or predatory
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unpopular opinion but I don't think there's anything weird or predatory about an innocent friendship
The question is why the fuck is a thirty year old hanging out with a 13 year old if not in their family?? The only other relation that could have them interact is through teacher/student and bring friends like that would be weird as fuck
found family? the kid not feeling safe in their house? the adult wanting to help? family / teacher / school isn't always a guaranteed safe place. should the kid and adult each have friends that are their own age too? sure. but if their friendship is genuinely innocent then I think the problem isn't them but people who project their weird and predatory thoughts onto them
Don't forget shared hobbies?
A 13 year old and a 30 year old could reasonably meet at a tabletop gaming store, a fiber arts group, a book club....
They could literally just be neighbors. This whole isolationist thing of never even talking to the people you live closest to is new and weird.
When I was 13, an art teacher who worked for my mother (who ran after school programs) got into the X-Files. This was season 1. Neither of us knew anyone else who was into it, and she wasn't very online given that this was 1994, so she had nowhere else to discuss it. I'd call her every Friday night after the episode, and we'd obsessively go over it.
I'd probably have called her my best friend at the time, though I very much doubt she'd have said the same, partly because having One Single Best Friend and being super weird about which of your friends gets this coveted spot is not something middle-aged people care about.
Some of you have very weird ideas about 13-year-olds living in hermetically sealed bubbles. Frankly, many neurodivergent weirdo 13-year-olds who grew up to be Tumblr users were far, far better at talking to adults at that age than at talking to other 13-year-olds. Many of you would have had a way happier year if you'd also had an old-ass "best friend" to talk to back then.
