'all age gaps problematic' people are so wild. "what can a 19 year old and a 28 year even have in common??? what do they talk about??" BITCH THEIR HOBBIES???????
Do You Not Have Hobbies Or Interests
being age appropriate??? to a NINETEEN YEAR OLD?????????
like yeah i do personally think it's weird to date a 19yr old as a 28yr old but let's not act like that 9 year age difference makes them different species that can't even interact even as friends. like can we be normal. i promise you can talk to younger people.
I think their point is, though, that the lives of a 19 year old and a 28 to 30 year old are way different, because one could be in college and is fresh out of highschool, lending to their naivety, while the 30 year old (I like round numbers better) has a lot more experience in life, so it's hard to relate insofar as events happening to them.
i don't like generalizing like that, because people's lives can all take very different paths. not everyone goes to college. a 19 year old could be in the army. they could be getting married, they could be getting divorced, they could be doing anything. a 28 year old could be in college and living with their parents, while a 19 year old could at the same time be struggling to pay rent and being the legal guardian to a child. they could be in the same college class, even. life experience isn't linear, and it does the human experience a disservice to pretend everyone walks the same paths.
and relating is not all there is to human connection! i can't relate to the experiences and life of an olympic sports player, but that doesn't mean we can't connect on any level.
Over half of college students in the U.S. are older than 25. I don't know about other countries, but, like. The notion that "college" means "A life stage that happens at ages 18-23, which is basically an extended form of childhood, during which a person has no meaningful adult responsibilities, does not do their own self-care tasks, has never had a job (or at least not a 'real,' 'serious,' 'adult' job), and certainly would not ever even think about anything like having serious relationships or children of their own" is such an incredibly... astonishingly... narrow view.
Besides hobbies, some things that a 28 year old and a 19 year old might have in common to talk about include:
Their babies. I've mentioned before that my mom's longtime best friend is someone she met when they were 44 and 18, respectively, and mothers of kids aged 3 and 1, respectively.
The college class that they're both taking together.
Their job that they both do. (So many people in the notes are talking about the older person being "more advanced in their career" and, uhhh, are you not only upper-middle-class, but also a time traveler from the '90s? What is this strange "People get regular promotions based on seniority and can reasonably be assumed to be in a higher professional position than they were 10 years ago" alchemy you reference?
I'm 40; my closest friends are 19 and 52. In both cases we have very strong commonalities despite being from different generations, and our points of differing life experience (whether related to our ages or not) simply bring enrichment to each other.
Edit: and if the "oh this is ok for friendship but not dating" crowd could grow up, that'd be fabulous.
I've had a fling with someone twice my age (I was 25) and it was pleasant, safe, and not remotely an issue.
My late girlfriend was half my age and we bonded over shared experiences that my closer-in-age exes couldn't even process, much less relate to.
Most age gap discourse is just ageism, infantilizing the younger party and painting the older party as a predator, and somehow at the same time immature; but this is not the innocent immaturity of a child in their early 20s (sic), and is instead the wicked, not-right-in-the-head immaturity of someone in their late 20s or older. It's nothing but just pasting ageist tropes onto people.
Aside from the moralizing pearl-clutching...
I think a lot of people in the notes are just keen to shout from the rooftops about how much more mature they are than people a mere few years younger than them.
Tones of:
It's so insane that people seemingly think of 19 year olds as literal children, who will explode when they hear sexual stuff and curse words
Please go outside more
PLEASE find a hobby and engage with other people about it
I knit. Most patterns, videos etc are made by middle aged to elderly women. Am I not allowed to engage with them?
I write. I have friends ranging from like 17 to well beyond 40.
I used to go to a music group. The participants were between 20 and 80+
How are you so obsessed with a number? You're chronically online and caught up on cult like discourse and it fucking SHOWS
Join the rest of us in reality at any point
A couple of years back I took some art classes and the people I grew closest to were a 17 year old and one 30 something year old (I was 23 at the time) because we had common tastes in video games, and we talked about college, because I was in college, the kid was thinking about what he wanted to do for college and the older guy was thinking of going to college now that he had the opportunity to, when he couldn’t when he was younger.
