I’m a bit relieved to see the number of ‘not creepy’ responses here. I was 23 when I met my husband who was 19. We’ll be celebrating 20 years together at the end of this year.
I met my wife when I was 21 and she was 19. But I don’t think that’s what the OP meant.
I’m going to say it is a bit creepy and I’ll tell you why. And it’s not because of the actual ages. The way our society is set up, there are these sociological barriers at different points in people’s lives:
-Graduating high school and going off to college (around 18)
-Graduating college and joining the real world (around 22)
-That age where it’s no longer “cool” for you to still be visiting college campuses on any day other than big alumni football weekends (around 25 or so)
The “creepy factor” comes into play when one starts to date across those boundaries. The reason is basically the answer to the question, where does a 20-something guy meet a teenage girl? He’s either hanging out at venues where he is probably too old to still be hanging out at (like an under 18 nightclub or high school parking lot). It’s in some position of power and authority (like a teacher or managing the summer intern program at work) where such a relationship would be inappropriate. Or the girl is sneaking into someplace where she probably isn’t allowed to be at (like a nightclub).
Yeah, the example that comes to mind is a girl who lived in my dorm my freshman year, and was presumably somewhere in the 17-19 year old range in 1991, when all this started. She started dating one of her professors, who was literally old enough to be her dad (got his BA in 1975, and PhD in 1982. They ended up getting married about a year later. We all thought that was the creepiest shit we’d ever heard of, and we’re still to this day surprised there wasn’t any kind of sanction against the guy by the university.
This sounds a bit like my step son’s (I will call him Kent) drama of last summer.
Kent lives in a very small isolated town up north. Less than 1000 people. Kent is into tabletop games, RPGS, comics etc, and has a variety of friends who do the same, ages range from 15 to 25. It’s kind of normal, they have a solid group of friends who are “weirdos” in that town. Kent was working at a fast food place, (only job he could get in town, has had some issues and changed majors and never did get an associates degree) and met / reintroduced to his co worker’s niece. They started dating, Kent 23, (ah let’s call girlfriend Lois) Lois is 21 going on 22. (turns 22 that summer.)
Lois and Kent have a good go of it for about 2 and a half months. They break up and the next day Lois is going out with Jimmy Olsen! Who is 15. In September, Lois goes back to college in a larger city 8 hours away (This is northern Ontario, it’s far, but she hasn’t even left the region, it’s still considered NOT THAT FAR away.)
Fast forward to now. Lois dropped out of college because she misses Jimmy. Jimmy can’t get or keep a job and now has “high school drop out” to add to his resume of two day stints at jobs at gas stations and fast food and cutting lawns and snow shovelling. Jimmy was told by his mother to stop seeing the Lois or move out. So now Lois and Jimmy are couch surfing around small town Ontario, living off what is left of Lois’s student loans. Neither have jobs. They plan on moving to a larger nearby town when they can either afford a place to stay or have a job offer.
My stepson was really crushed at first but now he is grateful to be away from that train-wreck. For a while Lois and Jimmy still hung out with the same group of friends but more and more people are fed up with them. Jimmy won’t be 16 until the end of May. Lois will be 23 in July. According to Kent, Lois always has an eye out for younger guys.
It’s more than creepy. It seems pathological.
And according to FinsToTheLeft, it’s illegal, if he’s under 16 and she’s over 20.
I don’t think so.
My first girlfriend asked me out when I was 19 and she was 23. It was surprising but not creepy. I don’t think it would have been much different if we were 18 and 24. We were together 3 years and if that hadn’t happened I’d probably be a close to 40 year-old virgin.
When I was in high school there was a girl in my class who, as a 16 year-old junior, dated a 25 year-old guy who worked at the bank. When we were seniors she dated a guy in 9th grade. I found both of those slightly creepy though the former much more so.
I met my wife when I was 25 and she was 31.
I graduated from college when I was 35, but I don’t recall interacting with any of the 15,000 or so attractive 18-22 year-old women while I was there.
MilliCal has checked out your responses twice.
She says that she’s surprised at the number of people who say it’s OK.
24-18 seems just on the edge of “not creepy” to me. I wasn’t interested in 18-year-old girls when I was 24, but I knew plenty of guys around my age who were.
Well, if this is a actual situation, she knows actual people involved and is a better judge of the degree of creepiness than we. Maybe the guy is creepy; maybe the girls is more sheltered than we’re assuming.
Although MilliCal had a definite case in mind, she was asking this question in the anstract. To her and to her friends, dating between an 18 year old and a 24 year old is creepy.
Actually, make that was creepy. She tells me that, after reading the replies, she thinks that it does depend on the people involved and how mature they are. But she still leans toward “creepy”.
Agreed. But “life in a Northern town” kind of skews oddly. Anyone with any ambition leaves for college, few return. My stepson actually has a good job now with a mining company, but is still planning on moving away this summer. When he was younger his next door neighbour/ classmate had a baby at age 13. The girl had a 23 year old boyfriend. No charges were ever laid, and the mother was happy to have daughter and baby and boyfriend live with her and be one big happy family.
Yuck.
Barring a preternaturally precocious 18-year-old, 18 only in the sense that his/her birth certificate says so and by all accounts passable for a fully-fledged adult, I lean squarely on the side of icky. It essentially implies that one party to the relationship is heinously immature, and failing that, that someone is being taken advantage of. The average 18-year-old is still a child in many respects.
I wouldn’t be surprised if domestic violence was grossly over-represented in such relationships, either - almost all of the acquaintances I have who have regrettably been victims of domestic violence were abused under such circumstances.
Very few of you might recall that, back in the 50’s, it was not uncommon for parents to be proud of their high school girl, (junior or senior grade) dating a ‘college man’, who was usually in his 20’s. Plus, I recall in many an old movie of the time where school girls got this big romantic crush on their male teacher – and no one ran him out of town on a rail or slammed him in jail branded forever a pedophile whether he did anything or not.
Huh. Still, she would know best, being roughly that age (I assume).
From my advanced age, 24 and 18 are both so impossibly young, they are peers. I might defer to the opinion of a person closer in age, if the young weren’t, in general, so very judgmental.
How old is MilliCal? It goes without saying she’s precocious & mature for her age. We know her Dad. 
The point being that how this looks to us 30-, 50-, and 70-somethings is very different to how it looks to a 15-year old. They have to guess what it’s like to be those ages since they haven’t yet had the chance to try it. We know, at least sort of*.
My take, like so many others above, is that they’re pressing the creepiness envelope some. How much depends on their life stages more than their exact ages. Two undergrads dating is real different from a shy high schooler dating a 6-year journeyman plumber or a degreed middle manager.
I’d also point out that ages 18 vs. 24 is actually a range of age differences. It varies from 6 years plus one day to 8 years minus two days apart. At that stage of life where they are within that range is a huge difference too.
- The older I get, the better I was!
Yep. The 24 year old has lived at least 25% longer than the 18 year old. That’s the equivalent of a 48 year old dating a 36 year old. It’s not on the extreme end of the age difference bell curve, but an outlier none-the-less.
MilliCal is 18 herself (as her peers at school).
Wow. Color me surprised.
I’d formed an opinion of her age based on your posts over the years, and had pegged her at about 12 now. I guess most of your posts have been stories from her childhood that were old when you posted them but seemed like current events as told.
Congrats on raising a sound young woman.
High school or college?
The answer will vary depending on the culture in which you grew up in. There is mother nature and there is society. Growing up wild in smaller groups like our ancient ancestors did might have you give a different answer than you growing up in a more modern conservative society. This is very obvious if you watch documentaries of native tribes that live in rain forests vs people in modern cities.