as small as a world and as large as alone

9:39pm April 14, 2015

5thblight:

theres so many posts telling minors not to date adults but heres a post for the responsible people: if youre an adult dont date a minor

even if you “feel like a child” in your 20s you are still a legal adult with all the responsibility that comes with it. you are being creepy

you are the one with all the power in the relationship, stop forcing all the responsibility onto the literal child. stop making posts absolving yourself of this by telling kids to stay away from adults instead of telling other adults to not date minors

I mostly agree with this.

But.

There is an age when there’s a lot of overlap, and the law sometimes recognizes that.

My father and mother were engaged when my mother was 15 and my dad was 20.  My mom’s parents made them wait until my mom graduated high school to marry.  Her father later apologized for this.  Her father never apologizes for anything or generally shows any regard for other people, so this was a major shock to my dad.  He also thanked my dad for making my mother happy, another thing that was far out of character for him.  (But then my grandpa was dying at the time and dying people do sometimes re-evaluate themselves.  I just never thought my grandpa would be capable of even that much.)

Anyway, they stayed married 50 years, they were soulmates, and they would have been married longer if my father hadn’t got cancer and died.  My mother feels that he never left her even in death, because their hearts had grown so close together.

So while I 99.9999999999% agree with “adults shouldn’t date minors”, I also know that in my parents’ case and in some other cases it does work out.  But only when the age difference is not that big, and the adult is barely an adult to begin with, and the minor won’t be a minor much longer.

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