At age 34, I started dating an 18 year old.
The relationship lasted 27 months, ending 15 months ago.
When we had reached our one year anniversary, I started an “Ask The __” Thread here. It quickly became a “Tell The __” Thread.
As the Thread progressed, the “whatever works for you” people started coming out of the woodwork- but they didn’t join the Thread until after seeing me take some healthy abuse first.
I won’t link the Thread so as not to have it Zombied but you can find it in ATMB listed in the “Ask the . . . Anthology” sticky. I did notice that the Thread has already been bumped a couple of times with people asking for an update. I didn’t subscribe to the Thread so I didn’t know it had gotten bumped until the Anthology Thread was posted- by that time the Thread had died again so I did not revive it to post an update. So, this post here can serve as my update:
I had never dated anyone significantly younger than me before, in fact most of my long-ish relationships had been with women a few years older than me.
We met at a show that I performed at but she hadn’t known me long enough to be looking at me through the eyes of a “fan”. She was just about to start college locally- which was local to where she had grown up. Her closest friends all were going away to college, so she was looking to establish a brand new social life anyway.
I first contacted her because I needed a drum and bass duo for a show I was emceeing. None of the drummers I knew well were available. She and I had already connected on MySpace (WAY back in MySpace days) and her page had links to her YouTube page with many drumming videos- and she’s an excellent drummer. She wasn’t available for the show I needed her for but asked to be kept in the loop. I let her know about a different event for which I was working the door. When she showed up at that event, I was actually quite taken by surprise that it seemed she wanted me to ask her out.
She stayed until the end of the event that night and we went to an all night diner afterward. Next time we got together it was for a completely non-ambiguous date. We ended up dating for, as stated above, 27 months.
We talked about the age difference early in the relationship.
I told her I didn’t want to just dismissively assert that “age makes no difference”. Every relationship between two people is different from every other relationship between two people- and there would be aspects of our relationship that were different specifically because of the age difference. Of course, we agreed that there would also be aspects of our relationship where the age difference wouldn’t matter at all. I loved her and told her so, but let her know that although I wanted to see the relationship last for a long happy time I didn’t think it was realistic for it to be a forever thing. I was her first significant boyfriend, and it just never fit with my personal feelings about how things “ought to be” that an 18 year old should stay with her first boyfriend for the rest of her life. I had no intention of planning the end of the relationship, no intention of sabotaging the relationship, but I told her I believed it made sense that she would have other romances in her future. She agreed that when thinking about it rationally and critically that it probably wasn’t a forever kind of a thing but she also wanted to move forward with it and let it play out.
The next 27 months were wonderful. We had plenty in common despite the age difference, we both love music and movies. She had never limited her interests to the newest offerings. Her favorite movie is Blazing Saddles, her favorite musician is Alice Cooper. She was already a well versed rock/pop historian and she filled as many gaps in my knowledge as I did for her. She played drums with me at three different gigs- two duo shows with me on guitar and vocals, and one band show that we did as a “Chirstmas Special” with friends.
For the first year and a half most of the new friends she made were my friends. The college she was going to was very much a commuter school and she found it difficult to make friends there. Eventually she started feeling more comfortable going to music shows on her own (I work nights, five nights a week) and as she started doing this she began making new friends on her own- meeting people at shows then connecting on Facebook then meeting the same people out at future shows.
I had said that I had no intention of planning the end of the relationship or sabotaging it, but it’s hard to know if it doesn’t happen as a self-fulfilling prophecy to acknowledge at the start of a relationship that it wouldn’t be a forever thing. I do know that I was always keenly aware of a hope that she would be the one to end it- I hated the idea of me dumping her.
For the entire relationship we never really talked about anything in terms of the far off future. There were a few trips and events that we planned up to six months or so in advance, but that was the extent of future planning. Nearing our two year anniversary, a conversation arose that addressed marriage. This was not a “planning marriage” conversation, just a “what do you think about marriage” conversation. That part of the conversation went well: I told her that I do want to find myself in a long-lasting strong life partnership but it wasn’t important to me whether or not it was a legal marriage. We had this conversation in a very open manner that acknowledged our longheld recognition that we might not be each other’s forever, but we also remained honestly open about our recognition that we had a wonderful strong relationship and that time could prove that we would beat the odds as our relationship was continuing to grow.
Then, unprovoked, I took the conversation one step farther:
Two years together and this was our first conversation about marriage- nothing at all wrong with that since she was so young and in no hurry to get married. But talking about marriage made me realize that we had never in two years talked about kids- again, we were not going to be making any plans regarding kids so there was no pressing need to talk about it. Despite there being no pressing need, I felt compelled to volunteer information on the matter. I knew full well that I would not ever want to have kids. Since I knew it, it kind of felt like a “Lie of Omission” to not bring it out into the open. I honestly had no idea how she would react- she had never talked about kids and had never taken much interest in other people’s kids. Well, she was shocked to hear that I didn’t want kids. She had never imagined that I might not want kids. She knew that she would definitely want kids and it was a major blow to her to find that we would not be on the same page on that matter. She didn’t want kids tomorrow, she didn’t want kids next year or two years from now or three years from now but she definitely knew that she wanted kids.
That evening she had a hard time dealing with the revelation, but we talked and reminded ourselves that we were always following our relationship into each new day as it came and that it wasn’t an issue of immediate concern. After that evening things seemed fine but she did start to grow distant and more aloof. After another three months, she broke up with me. She said that she still felt like she could be in a happy relationship without having to know that it would be a forever thing, but that she couldn’t be in a relationship knowing that it wouldn’t be a forever thing.
We had a few months of a “transitional period” finding a happy post-breakup friendship, but ever since we got through that transitional period our friendship has been great. She has remained friends with my friends- my friends still invite her to various gatherings and there have been plenty that she attended that I wasn’t able to attend. She’s continued to make friends on her own and I have hung out with her and a new friend from the past year that she spends most of her social adventures with. I haven’t dated anyone new yet. She dated one guy for a short while (older than her but younger than me). Her new friend that she spends a lot of time with is a guy (her age) but I don’t see it becoming romantic (she says there’s no romantic potential and she has always related better with guys so it’s no surprise that her closest friend is a guy).
Our friendship is strong and dependable now and I see us being very important to one another for the rest of our lives. She’ll be 22 this month. We dated from when she was 18 and a half (I was 34) until she was just a few months shy of her 21st birthday (I was nearing 37). I did kinda make me do a faceslap that we broke up just before she turned 21, there had always been cool things happening that we couldn’t do because she wasn’t 21 and couldn’t get into the venue. I was really looking forward to that not being an issue.