I imagine you guys are all aware of the more standard “rule”, but, just to help lavenderviolet out of their humorous misstatement, I’ll give the formulation they should have: “both partners should be at least as old as half the other’s age plus seven”.
Same here, except it was the guy who was older, and they had me instead of you, and neither of them are dead yet.
Other than that, exactly the same situation.
I know a couple who married when she was 16 and he was 21. That was about 35 years ago, today they have grandkids, a beautiful farmhouse, and a reasonably successful small business.
But he wasn’t a student. He was living on his own, with a steady blue collar trade.
Woo hoo!
Anyone know any available 12-year-old boys?
Another vote for half+7 rule. Otherwise, it’s skeevy. The kids shouldn’t feel bad about what they’re doing but the parents of the girl and possibly the guy should be against it. Although, with a 16 yr old girl in the house, her parents should be against everything but a nunnery.
Seriously. There was a similar post maybe three weeks ago.
I’ll trot out my usual perspective – age differences aren’t much if your personalities mesh, but you don’t really have a fully-formed personality 'til you’re in your early 20s, either finished college or beginning your life in a job. I really think those years are the most important after the first few years of a child’s life when it comes to Finding Yourself ™, and this can be hampered by someone who is 5+ years older for several reasons, including uneven priorities (from life goals to what you’re going to do that night i.e. drink legally at a bar), and often the younger, less experienced person’s viewpoints and desires come second. And yes, often the younger person is female.
There are always ‘My friends/parents/aunt and uncle met when they were 10 years apart’ stories in these threads, but (and I think I mentioned this in the last thread) no one’s family is telling stories round the dinner table about the college guy they dated at 15 who pressured them into sex without a condom. There are certainly exceptions, but you’ve got to wonder why this guy didn’t just rule it out of his mind in the first place.
Well for one thing they didn`t teach you that merely because something was true in one particular case it need not be true in every case. 
Reasonable people can acknowledge that there are examples of successful relationships between teens and adults and still hold that in general they’re inappropriate and should not be encouraged.
Teenagers deserve the opportunity to experiment and learn about relationships with others at the same stage of development as them.
For what it’s worth, I realize most people at any particular age are less mature than I was and that on the other side of the curve are outliers who are particularly immature for their age. The problem is that being especially immature doesn’t make it ok to date much younger people. Even if you’ve never dated or kissed or had sex you’re not really in the same stage of life as the teenager. I can sympathize, even if I can’t really empathize, but being immature at 21 doesn’t make it ok to date 16 year olds. It’s not about the 21 year old, it’s about the 16 year old.
My best friend is a woman I met when I was 26 and she was 16. We didn’t “officially” date, but for a long period of time neither of us was seeing anyone else and we spent a lot of time together.
Today I’m 51 and she’s 41. We are both happily married to others. She lives in the next town. I was in touch with her by IM maybe 20 minutes ago and we regularly play online Scrabble.
My wife graduated in the same high school class as my best friend, but I met her about eleven years later.
I think if people are compatible, age isn’t really important. To a certain point. Close friends aged 26 and 16 are NOT the same as 22 and 12.
If I were the parents, it would be an age gap that would make me wary - very wary - but I’d look at the people in person before saying NO, that’s wrong and bad. I can certainly imagine preferring my 16-year-old daughter dating a 21-year-old that I know is a nice guy over a younger guy that I know nothing about. When it comes to life expectations (I mean getting a house together, having kids eventually, or just getting really serious) they won’t be that different.
This is possibly partly because I come from a country where 16 is the age of consent, not 18.
The 16/21 age gap, at that point in life is too much. And the legal implications are very dangerous.
However, when I graduated from high school my current wife was still learning how to ‘pee like a big girl’. (That’s a family joke). She was 3 at that time. (And no, we didn’t know each other.) So I ran out the clock by getting married to others.
Now that we are older the age gap seems about right.
Right on, brother.
Then maybe the moral of the story is you can’t judge by age differences alone?
Well, one thing in the original scenario is that it seems that neither has hung out with the other’s friends. Maybe if he saw her giggling madly with her 16-year-old friends, and his college friends met her and teased him mercilessly, it would die a natural death. I can just imagine his friends all complaining about their workloads, their senior theses, the jobs they were applying for, relationship problems with women they were living with, and she pipes in with a complaint that her English teacher is unfair. She might be a very mature 16-year-old, but unless she’s living a very unusual life, she’s not going to have much to talk about college seniors about.
If this kid is anywhere near as awkward socially as the OP claims, I’m not so sure I’d put money on that.
Yeah, it’s a little creepy. But then again if the kid is 21 and never even kissed a girl, I’d imagine he’s probably used to people thinking he’s weird. I’d be against it, but not to a “call the police” degree.
It is not that weird. A friend of mine fell in love with our science practice teacher when we were juniors in high school.
When she was a junior in college, she married him. They are still married 40 years later.
I should note that he did not DATE her when he was her practice teacher–that would have been weird–but that was the point at which he stopped dating anyone else. There was never anyone else for her after that either. I think they both spent about a year agonizing over this hopeless, doomed non-romance until they decided to actually start going together.
Not really weird, but this is a prudish country when it comes to sexual relationships and they may just learn that the hard way (this would mostly affect the male, naturally). It would definitely behoove him to check the laws in his jurisdiction.
No. The moral of the story is that it’s ok to consider a particular age difference inappropriate in general even if it was a positive relationship in a particular case.
Age differences so often wind up being a case-by-case evaluation situation. There are always clearly inappropriate situations (if the guy were, say, 30 I’d be a hella lot more likely to decree this inappropriate out of hand, for example), but a lot of the time it seriously depends on the two people involved.
My parents (who have been happily married for 35 years) have a seven year difference between them. My sister is almost 10 years younger than her husband of fifteen years.
If I were this girl’s parents, the age difference might give me pause - but since it appears they know the boy involved well enough to let him hang out at their house for extended periods, they should be able to make an informed decision about whether or not this particular 21 year old is a good fit for their 16 year old daughter. It’s not an unreasonably large difference - I can easily see a 21 year old guy being immature enough to be a good emotional fit for a 16 year old girl. It doesn’t sound like he’s swimming in worldly experience here.
As to why he’s not interested in girls his own age - there could be a lot of things going on there. Maybe strange girls intimidate the crap out of him, and since the friend’s daughter is part of his extended social circle, he felt comfortable enough around her to actually talk to her. Maybe the girls he knows at college are also aware of his lack of worldly experience and mocked him fiercely for it. Maybe he’s the kind of person who, while he was in college, spent all his time and focus and energy in the academic arena and only now that he’s about to graduate has had the leisure to disengage his nose from the proverbial grindstone. Maybe the 16 year old and he got to chatting because they were members of the same extended social circle and found out that they have everything in common (so maybe it was just a luck thing that he found someone who shares his abiding love of, say, DC comic book villian paraphenalia or online computer gaming or balsa wood airplanes in this girl, and not a question of his not being interested in girls his own age at all). Could be lots of things.
Maybe the OP’s friend should just ask the guy. Not in the threatening, I’ma-beat-you-down-for-touching-my-baby way, but in the “Hey, I’m her dad and the age difference worries me some, so maybe you could help me see why you’re not dating girls your own age here” kind of way.
When I was in high school (class of 97) the girls who dated guys in their 20’s were the slutty girls with low self-esteem. Just sayin’.
I would prefer my daughter date someone closer to her own age at that age, but it doesn’t strike me as particularly weird.
Hahahaha, I just skimmed over the post the first time since I knew the “rule,” and I totally missed the “or minus” part.