Any attempt to thwart this will only result in cementing her desire for him, stay out of it. Have a little faith that she’ll figure this out herself. Also she’s seventeen, if he really is deploying she could just get bored or distracted.
I mean, are you certain you can tell the difference between a cry for help, for someone to demonstrate they care that she doesn’t do something tragically stupid, and a young woman exploring her sexuality in a safe long distance kind of way?
You’re not her parent, and you cannot save people from learning their own life lessons, hard or painful though they may be.
Funnily enough I had a similar sort of situation happen with myself. Crushing on a guy on the internet, he’s in his 20s and I’m the teen, guy claims to be SWAT. One day supposedly falls down a staircase during a raid and busts his kneecaps. Only allowed on the internet as often as the hospital and visitors give him time to. We drifted apart after that. He never did anything sexual though, only romantic (hugs, etc). He was never a creep.
In fact, all my crushes and love interests have been online, or mostly online. I met all of them at one point in real life. I married one of them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with an age gap, meeting people on the internet, or dating long-distance.
Your sister doesn’t seem to be very broken-hearted about her previous boyfriends so why would you assume this one to be any different?
So, be a sister. Treat her like a normal person because her behavior sounds normal to me. She may have some other issues, but only caring friends and a therapist can help with that. Ratting her out will only cause a greater divide. If anything, push her towards a therapist than anything else. Talk about it not as though something is “wrong” with her or that going to a therapist means a person is “crazy”, because that’s the greatest reason people don’t go to therapy.
Personally, all my issues worked out when I found “the one” and moved out on my own. It was mostly other people’s pressure (like my parents) that put me off-kilter. Your sister may work herself out of her troubles just fine on her own with some more space.
In my case, I didn’t have an interest in any boys from my area. None of them “clicked” with me, none of them attracted me, none of them appealed to me. Some were ok as friends, but definitely nothing more. Instead, the internet was full of people that shared my interests, so I looked there.
The two people I dated that I met in real life first were actually big creeps. One of them that I went on a date with only once, on a whim, was still trying to contact me many years later.
I would posit that dating locally is not inherently better or more successful than online.
I concur. I have a 17 year old daughter, and one of the biggest “generational” challenges was accepting how big their world is now. In the same way that I spent hours on the phone, she spends hours on Skype.
We have something coming up this month - her friend/boyfriend is coming up from Florida to visit her for the first time. It’s a totally new and weird thing for us, but we’re trying to handle it rationally, and be understanding and just kinda go with it, to see if it’s crazy or weird or awesome or what.
And, she’s had three real life boyfriends, and one was a total octopus jerk. The others were fine, and nice but not her cup of tea. That’s okay.
I disagree. Romance is a broad concept, and most of it can be addressed online. After all, falling in love is mostly about talking when you’re that age.
Have you ever tried an online romance? It’s not for me, but I know that my daughter has spent hours and hours talking to boys online, and playing games and just basically chilling.
For background, I am the father of a 17-year-old girl. She has a live flesh-and-blood boyfriend whom I know. The relationship your sister is in does not sound healthy for a 17-year-old.
As for the age gap, the gap from 17 to 25 is usually a very big gap. When I was 33 I dated someone 10 years younger but I would never have dated a high schooler when I was 25. Sure, there have been successful relationships that started when a girl was 17 and the guy was 25 but not a majority and I doubt many of them started over the Internet.
How old are you? How is your relationship with your sister? If you tell your parents, how will that affect it? You should at least push her to tell your parents herself. It might be best to talk to your parents about it, but maybe not so much if their reaction will be to take a sledgehammer to the computer. Are they reasonable? What is their view of your sister’s dating history and how much do they know?
Is she exposed to any real danger here, other than the emotional trauma when things crash and burn?
Pardon my age but is masturbating in front a computer what they call “dating” now?
Humans are tactile creatures. And it’s important, especially at a young age, to know how to deal with those urges and the feelings that go along with it. If she engages in these OLRs at this age, and then at 23, she decides she wants to be in a real relationship, she’s going to be lacking in some of the fundamental skills most of us learned as a teenager. (Which would be off putting to any perspective mate.)
Besides, exactly how far can an OLR go anyway? They gonna get married OL too?
Gosh, my initial reaction is that this is probably the safest 25 year old she could be dating - they never see one another. I don’t see anything inherently unhealthy about phone sex, either. I mean, the relationship is probably doomed, but she’s going to find a way to be with him no matter what. You might as well play the role of nonjudgmental listener so she has someone in her corner when this all hits the fan.
You can use the internet one of two ways for dating.
One, you’re using it as a database for potential people you’ll meet eventually in person. Eharmony, plentyoffish, okcupid, etc. are repositories of datable people. That would inherently not be any more or less successful than going to a bar, coffee shop, church, book store, singles group, etc. The only problem is that the dating pool available online for 17 year olds is severely lacking and so… inferior than purely in-person dating.
Two, you’re looking for people based on shared interests with no intention of meeting up in person (even though there’s a slim chance you’re in the same city). You take this one shared aspect and build a relationship around it. You socialize, interact, and carry one entirely online. I would argue that on top of being artificial, this is not as healthy as an in-person relationship where you and your partner can share experiences not just with each other but with your social circle, his/her social circle, and family as well.
That is unless of course you want to take a great online relationship that’s lacking in the social, and as Shakes puts it: tactile aspects and compare it with the worst case scenario of an in-person relationship. Well then… sure. If you want to use a false analogy like that, I’d be inclined to agree with you.
And he pressured her into a couple of things she wasn’t ready for, so it’s not like he was somehow more safe because he was flesh and blood. But, that happens to most girls. It happened to me, and it happened to everyone I know, so I don’t see it as a big deal. When we talked about it, I listened to her, and gave her pointers, and just generally used it as a learning experience about boys and sex and her own sexuality and how some people are assholes.
I get what you’re saying about the tactile part of a relationship, but please remember that at that age, most of what sex is about is getting off. And that can be done alone, or online or in real life. Even before these kind of relationships existed, things got weird and exciting and regretful sometimes. At this age, sex is almost exclusive of legitimate feelings - learning how to weave the two together in a meaningful way happens much later in most cases.
Do I wish she had some kind of high school sweetheart in town, where they could hold hands and make out in the car. Sure. But for most people, things weren’t that way before the Internet. It’s always been a weird area, full of sticky situations and heartbreak and obstacles.
I have a nephew that is also 17, and he’s dating a real life girl, who’s nice and and he’s nice, and everything is nice. But. They never see each other, and they never talk, except at school and the occasional school function. Her parents are hard-core Catholics, and dating is almost verboten. He’s been dating her for almost a year, they truly care abut each other, and it’s a heartbreaking mess for him. Is that somehow superior since they see each other? I submit that my daughter’s relationship with Florida Guy is deeper and more fulfilling, since they’ve been hanging out for even longer and spent more time together, even though it’s via Internet.
That’s a little rude and a little bit insulting too. Online relationships aren’t any more “fake” than real life ones are. Are long-distance relationships also fake to you? How about the teenager with the 3rd boyfriend in a year? Friends with benefits? You’re not exactly in a position to figure out who has a “real” relationship or not - only people in the relationship know that.
I’m not sure that people will be lacking any fundamental skills if they start a relationship online and then later bring it offline later. And people will take it offline as they get more serious. We just had a thread about how people feel about older-than-teenager virgins and most had no problems at all with it until the person is past 30 years old.
I mean hell, I’m living proof that an online relationship can end up in a happy, loving marriage. I went online as a kid to talk to people about hobbies and interests. After a couple years, I had a slew of great friendships. We all had shared experiences because we all got together in the same online rooms to talk as well as chatted individually. After a couple more years, one of them said “I think I love you. Can we meet up and see if this is serious?” We met up. It was serious. We dated medium-distance through college, seeing each other every month. We moved in together. We got married. We’re happy as clams. I think all the talk about face-to-face the whole way being better or more healthy is overrated. I certainly had and still have deep friendships with my online friends, all better than the friends that flow in and out of my physical vicinity. Online, it doesn’t matter where you are, you can always reach out to them despite the physical distance.
I don’t want to make it sound like the better way to do things because I don’t think it is, but doing things online allowed me to pick the creeps out and discover who was really sweet on the inside without being in danger. Since they’re hundreds of miles away, they can’t exactly sit next to me at the party and start creeping their hands up my legs.
If the OP’s mother posted the other recent thread about the exact same age gap, they already know
Now then, I think dating someone who lives in the Internet is a terrible idea. What if you get along really well and have great chemistry and just the right ratio of common interests and all that, and then you meet in person and find out the other person has a slightly different hair color than you prefer? :rolleyes: