The Most Problematic Age Gap: Two 18-Year-Olds
I never thought I'd live to see an age gap shamed for being too small, but here we are.
I wrote about age gap relationship shaming a few weeks ago—mostly the fact that it exists to protect an individual’s desired dating market by enforcing a consequence for failing to settle down young. Most commonly, we see this with women shaming older men who date younger, but that’s probably because those relationships are just more common than the reverse. As I covered, older women dating younger men are subject to the exact same treatment, with many critics calling these relationships “hagmaxxing” and accusing the women of failing to get married at more acceptable ages because they were too busy “competing with men on the job market.” (Show me on the doll where the employed woman hurt you.)
Age gap relationships between consenting adults (I’m talking 10-15+ years, not 5) have their own challenges and are not the desired scenario for your average young person, but they are typically harmless, some turn out great, and it’s stupid to moralize about them. However, I never thought I’d see the day when people attempted to shame relationships for the participants—in these recent cases, two teenagers—being too close in age.
I won’t post photos of the children involved because, well, it’s weird, but all week I have been repeatedly bombarded with the same prom photo of four good-looking teenagers with the caption:
The stark physical difference between young men and young women of the same age is severely understated. Relationships with significant age gaps are very obviously biologically advantageous.
Big asterisk on “significant age gaps” because the guy who posted it is in his mid-twenties, not his forties (I am laughing at the idea of trying to convince an eighteen-year-old girl to ditch “boys her age” and settle down with a “real man,” and that real man is a 24-year-old named Aiden.) However, several other men who actually were much older agreed with him. In their minds, the boys looked obviously underdeveloped compared to the girls, therefore, something was wrong with the girls wanting to date these boys instead of men old enough to be their dads. Notably, nobody could explain what sinister force made these “unnatural” relationships happen.
The “biological advantage” of breaking up these teen relationships so the girls can date older men is nonexistent, really, unless it’s a euphemism for “that kind of relationship would make my penis happy, personally.” And while shaming relationships with large age gaps is a strategy to protect one’s desired dating pool, the same is true of shaming relationships between two teenagers who are too close in age. If your desired dating pool is “teenage girls,” that is.
Perpetuating the myth that teenage girls don’t find boys around their own age attractive, or that young men are “worthless” and shouldn’t bother even attempting relationships until they get older, is a very obvious form of intrasexual competition. #MenInWomensFields.
