Would you date/boink/marry someone who aged 5 times faster than you?

[WhyNot]

@Machine_Elf

So the OP’s premise is something everybody has to consider IRL: are you willing to date/boink/marry someone whom you may outlive by many years, possibly even many decades?

This part is not a hypothetical for me. My SO is 22 years my elder - I’m 37, he’s 59. I’m, arguably, just entering middle age, he’s rapidly (in the almost four years we’ve been together), visibly, moved from middle age to Old Guy. He’s had a heart attack (at 40), he’s got high blood pressure, he’s got COPD and his last A1c indicates that we won’t be able to deny the diabetes diagnosis much longer. Given all probabilities, I’m going to be a widow before I’m 50.

I have actual panic attacks if I think about it too much. But it doesn’t stop me from loving him or making a life with him.

Children are another matter I think. Not, unlike other posters, because my kids will probably die before me. (Also been there, faced that possibility, although thank Athena it didn’t happen.) I’m okay with children dying, although of course it sucks.

Rather, it’s because I as a parent have a certain pace that I grow with my child. I don’t think I could adjust and adapt and continue to adjust and adapt to a triple, or even double, rate of growth. It sounds exhausting just thinking about it. Even though I’ve parented one child to age 19, I still need to grow and adjust with my second, age 7. I’m not the same parent of this 7 year old that I was of my boy when he was 7. I’m not even the same parent of this 7 year old that I was when she was 6. And I need that time to mature, just as much as she does.

So I think were I to meet Mr. Right and he happened to be Blue, I’d have a relationship with him. But I’d not want children, or I’d want to adopt full humans or use IVF to have human children. I think it’s easier and more realistic for him to slow down than me to speed up, as a parent.

[BigT]

Once again, your title doesn’t quite match up with the hypothetical. For the title, I don’t think I could, as to have any meaningful time with them, they’d have to be physically children when we started for a relationship and would never become mature enough mentally to just boink. But your hypothetical seems to indicate that they’d be at a higher level of maturity than they’d even appear, and are aliens and come from a culture where they would have adapted to this. So I have no problem there.

As a bonus, you don’t mention if they age to the same level physically before they die, so that might be a further benefit for the bonking-only scenario. Skin color is no big deal, as long as blue or purple doesn’t mean the blue that people turn, but something far enough different that I wouldn’t instinctually think they looked sick–that would cross into uncanny valley for me. And they can’t be all bumby like untransformed Mystique. Yuck for boinking purposes–it looked like a bad paint job.

[BigT]

@Der_Trihs

Short term sex yes; the aging difference doesn’t matter then. But not a long term relationship.

Ha; this thread had me thinking of the short story Petals of Rose, which involves humans on a planet inhabited by a species that only lives for 24 hours. Kes from Voyager is a closer match.

Closer, perhaps, but she was going to die at age 9 (above average for her species unaided), and was to be married at 4 and dating as young as 1. And she would have had a single kid around 4 or 5.

Of course, that was an alternate timeline where she didn’t get superpowers.