Nonfiction

I met my first college boyfriend at a party. We hit it off right away and had lots of common interests, like Pokémon, Star Trek, and Spongebob. He was friends with my 23-year-old sister.

I didn't find out he was 34 until after we'd started seeing each other in a way that felt serious.

By then, I was sure that I was so grown up, so very mature for my age, that dating a man fifteen years my senior felt like a normal, or even expected, development.

Not everyone liked the idea of us together; my parents gritted their teeth, and my friends didn't "get" it either.

The first time I met my boyfriend's parents, they were perfectly polite to me, but after we'd left their house, my boyfriend got a text from his father that read,

"Don't you DARE get that girl pregnant."

He laughed, but it troubled me. I thought it was because I wasn't Jewish. In hindsight, his parents were concerned on my behalf.

Their unease with our relationship said far more about him than it did about me. They wanted me to be able to make a clean break when I'd realize that a man who'd date teenagers in his thirties isn't someone to start a life with.

They were right. We broke up when I was 21 and he was 36.

I turn 29 this year. My 19-year-old students look like children to me. The thought of someone in their thirties wanting to date one of them makes me feel like an overprotective mama bear.

This time last year, I wrote an article criticizing Jennifer Lawrence's film No Hard Feelings. In it, 32-year-old Maddie (Lawrence) is hired by the parents of 19-year-old Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) to take his virginity before he goes to college.

The movie trailer had me cringing, not laughing. I proposed that if the situation were reversed and someone pitched a film where a 32-year-old man was hired to seduce a teenage girl, people would be up in arms.

Apparently, I was wrong.

The comment section became a battlefield: While many commented that they, too, felt the "comedy" sent the wrong message, or that it trivialized sexual harassment and assault against boys/men, others were quick to defend the age gap, since the teen was "legal" and therefore fair game.

Feldman's character may be over the age of consent, but he is coerced into unwanted sex by someone much more experienced. And, despite not being old enough to legally drink, Percy is plied with alcohol (without his knowledge) as part of that coercion.

Whenever I post a feminist take on anything, I get a slew of hate mail. The article was called "white feminism at its grossest," "fearmongering," "infantalizing," and "missing the point of comedy" in the comments.

My favourite DM from that week called me a Nazi for daring to suggest that a 19-year-old might not want to be pressured into sex, even by a woman who looks like Jennifer Lawrence. One comment reads:

Best comment on Reddit: "This is a ridiculous premise, but do you know if they've cast the 19-year-old yet?"

Even in an article calling out the normalization of problematic age gaps and dubious consent, people are eager to joke that the teenaged boy should "enjoy it" — the exact logic used by predators to justify, for example, Mary Kay Letourneau's sexual relationship with her sixth-grade student.

Hollywood frequently trivializes age gaps and unhealthy power dynamics.

The media romanticizes the idea of dating an older man (or woman, in the case of No Hard Feelings) as an "introduction" to sex. It's been that way for a long time —it's so normalized that we hardly notice it anymore.

In Singin' in the Rain (1952), Debbie Reynolds was 19 and Gene Kelly was 40. Fifty years later, Scarlett Johansson was 18, opposite 52-year-old Bill Murray in Lost in Translation (2003).

The 80s and 90s were the worst for normalizing age gaps.

• In Blame It on Rio (1984), Michael Caine (50) dates his best friend's daughter, played by 18-year-old Michelle Johnson.
• Emmy Rossum was only 17 when she played the love interest of Gerard Butler (33) and Patrick Wilson (30) in Phantom of the Opera (1986).
• Worse still, in Poison Ivy (1992), 58-year-old Tom Skerritt filmed multiple graphic sex scenes with Drew Barrymore, who was only 17 (and playing his foster daughter). She appears topless on the poster.

It's on television, in movies, and in music. Constant exposure to romanticized "Lolita" narratives grooms young girls into a false sense of "maturity," making them vulnerable to toxic relationships [source].

For boys, it creates an incel culture that demonizes male virginity (portrayed as childish, creepy, and/or pathetic) and makes women, especially young women, fetish objects.

And it isn't just fiction. It is a long-running joke that former teen heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio (now 49) only dates women under 25, when the human brain reaches maturity. More recently, fans were worried when Billie Eilish began dating Jesse Rutherford, 31, when she was 20 — they met when she was just 16.

What brought this all back for me recently is a TikTok. Tessa Violet, known for upbeat electropop hits, released a song in 2023 called "You Are Not My Friend" about a failed relationship with a man ten years her senior. Recently, the song has gained attention for videos misusing the audio on TikTok as a criticism of teenage motherhood.

In several video responses, Violet has made clear that the song is about her relationship with a man in his late twenties when she was 18/19, not about teen moms. The lyrics express her resentment over the toxicity of their relationship and how she, the younger party, was forced to grow up and take responsibility for choices made by her much-older partner:

Good news, I'll never make another excuse for you, and how you never seem to come through. Didn't bother coming to my show, cut me down so I couldn't grow. […]

I've cried on bathroom floors and tried to be mature. You say I'm insecure? You're twenty-eight with a teenager!

Far from criticizing teen mothers, Violet's song highlights the type of men who pursue relationships with younger women.

Current evidence suggests that a majority of babies born to teenage mothers (14–19) were fathered by adult men (over 20), rather than similarly-aged partners [source]. The youngest mothers in the study (aged 14–15 at conception) were the most likely to have a partner five or more years older.

Tessa Violet's "diss track" about her former partner brings to light the serious issue of teenagers in romantic relationships with older adults.

Although I was of legal age (19) when I started dating a 34-year-old, his father was (rightfully) concerned enough to reprimand him ("Don't you DARE get that girl pregnant"), because he didn't want me to potentially become trapped in that dynamic, like many young mothers are.

When I first heard "You Are Not My Friend," I was reminded of two similar tracks released the year before: Demi Lovato's "29" and Taylor Swift's "Should've Could've Would've", both of which tell a shockingly similar story.

Demi Lovato's song looks back at a relationship the singer had at 17 with a man who was 29, now that she is the age that he was then:

Finally twenty-nine — Seventeen would never cross my mind. Thought it was a teenage dream, a fantasy, but it was yours, it wasn't mine. Seventeen, twenty-nine.

When Lovato released a teaser of "29" as an audio on TikTok, it quickly became a viral trend on the app for people to share their stories about being groomed into abusive relationships with an inappropriate age gap.

As a result, there are thousands of videos using the sound — mostly by women, but some men too — to come forward about traumatic romantic experiences with an older partner.

Although she didn't mention her ex by name, Lovato went on the record with Howard Stern about 10-year age gaps being 'gross' when they involve young, vulnerable people:

"I was a teenager. And so to me, that's gross. If you are 50 and 60, you're fine. Even 30 and 40, that's not gross at all. But I think that when you're in your development years, you should absolutely not be with somebody that is older than you by that much. It's just unhealthy and toxic."

Taylor Swift's "Should've Could've Would've" is also about a relationship with a significant age gap, with such heartbreaking lines as "If I was a child, did it matter / if you got to wash your hands?" and "Give me back my girlhood, / it was mine first."

Swift was courted by several older men before she turned twenty. In 2010, she dated the late Glee star Corey Monteith (28), John Mayer (32), and Jake Gyllenhaal (29). Swift is notorious for writing "unflattering" songs about her exes, but "Should've Could've Would've" hits hard for those of us who had a teenage relationship with that kind of power imbalance:

If you'd never looked my way I would've stayed on my knees And I damn sure never would've danced with the devil At nineteen […] And now that I'm grown, I'm scared of ghosts Memories feel like weapons And now that I know, I wish you'd left me wondering

It has been convincingly argued that "Should've Could've Would've" is about Swift's short-lived relationship with Mayer, whom she dated when she was 19 and he was 32 (like Lovato, the age when she released the song).

Mayer was also allegedly the subject of "Dear John" (2010), which uses the similar refrain "I should've known" and references their age gap: "Don't you think nineteen is too young / To be played by your dark twisted games."

I'll get backlash for saying it, but grown adults who look at high schools as dating pools need to grow the fuck up, and probably get therapy.

Teen pregnancy and abortion are still hot-button issues; we need to look to the grown men statistically causing those pregnancies, predating on teenagers, before we dare blame the person whose prefrontal cortex is still growing.

Teenagers make stupid decisions. Their brains and bodies are flooded with hormones that do the talking for them. I was a smart kid — so were, I suspect, many of us. But you can't "smart" your way out of being groomed.

If it can happen to powerful, privileged, wealthy people like Taylor Swift, there's no chance for the average teen being bombarded with messages that it is okay — or even expected — to have a relationship with someone a decade older.

Our grandmothers and our mothers were often trapped into these dynamics permanently, but our generation got out and is speaking up:

"Just five years a bleeder, student and a teacher — Far from innocent, what the fuck's consent? Numbers told you not to, but that didn't stop you"

(Demi Lovato, "29")

"God rest my soul, I miss who I used to be. The tomb won't close, stained glass windows in my mind… I regret you all the time"

(Taylor Swift, "Should've Could've Would've")

I've cried on bathroom floors and tried to be mature. You say I'm insecure? You're 28 with a teenager!

(Tessa Violet, "You Are Not My Friend")

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