fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3863 ]

[ SECRET POST #3863 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3863 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Alex James from Blur]

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03.

[Night Court]

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[Top: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Chris Pratt
Bottom: Dave Bautista, Josh Brolin]

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05.

[Stephen Fry and Elliott Spencer]

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06.

[Anna Faris and Chris Pratt in Mom, S04E11 "Good Karma and the Big Weird"]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 24 secrets from Secret Submission Post #553.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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Does the gender of the people involved change your opinion? Any other factors that might affect it? This is assuming that everyone in the relationship is of legal consenting age and there's no concerns of grooming or power inbalances beyond the age gap.

I actually think the whole "half the age plus 7" works pretty well.

When one person is obviously using their age to exert power over the other person.

I judge a little, but I also recognize what consenting adults do is not my business.

Honestly, I don't see how you can escape some kind of power imbalance if the age difference is huge, and I also wonder why someone who is like 35 is super interested in, say, a 19-year-old with little-to-none life experience. That just can't not be skeevy to me.

I acknowledge that the older the people get, and the more experiences the younger person has, the less the age matters. A 40-year-old and 60-year-old is maybe slightly unfortunate, but certainly doesn't bother me a lot.

Any older person going after very young adults feels gross, though. Not even a little sorry I think that.

All of this basically.

Yes, this.

You know, what the gender might make a difference. It's hard to say. I definitely do think that Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor are basically the most adorable couple in Hollywood. But I think what distinguishes that is less the gender, and more the fact that Paulson (a) clearly has a thing for older people, especially older women and (b) is openly and avidly thirsty constantly. It's very sweet.

I less side eye women going for younger people than men.

Re: When do you judge age gaps in adult relationships?

(Anonymous) - 2017-08-01 23:58 (UTC) - Expand

same anon

(Anonymous) - 2017-08-01 23:59 (UTC) - Expand

Re: When do you judge age gaps in adult relationships?

(Anonymous) - 2017-08-02 00:12 (UTC) - Expand

When everyone is of legal age and there are no concerns like you mention I don't judge any age gap, in the sense of thinking they shouldn't be together. I might think that something could potentially be a bad idea, and maybe if it were a close friend or relative in an age gap relationship I'd talk to them about it, but mostly I just stay out of it because they're adults and it's not my business.

Pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter, too.

Same.

I will admit to being a little eye-rolly when there's serious fame/wealth imbalances too. But not in the way I think they're doing something wrong, just more that I suspect things other than true love are making them happy there.

I agree with this stance. If it were a friend or a relative -- and even then, only if I'm reasonably certain the relationship has issues.

Exactly.

When either or both halves of the relationship are together for reasons other than love, like wanting barely-legal arm candy/sex, or not giving a shit about the person and just wanting their money/what it can buy, or contempt from either side. I don't really care what age people in a relationship are as long as they're both legal* and happy with each other, and not just with access to a hot body or money or power. I guess if a couple was amicable but not in love, and one half was like "I don't mind fucking you if you don't mind my spending a shitton of your money," I'd be a little skeeved out, but so long as they were honest it wouldn't actually make me sad.

*Actually if there's not much of an age gap, like less than a year or maybe two, and especially if they got together when both were still underage, I don't care if one half of a couple is 17 and one is 18, or whatever, as long as there's no power play shit going on.

I only judge when the age gap becomes that person's "type."

It's one thing if a 25-year-old and a 75-year-old just happen to fall in love. But there's something skeevy about a 50-year-old making it a point to pick up high school seniors.

^^^^

That always comes across to me as someone who's abusive and goes after people they see as easy targets.

I think it's not terribly uncommon for abusers to pick out their preferred targets based on who they feel they control, it's just a little more visible if it's something like that.

Re: When do you judge age gaps in adult relationships?

el_regrs - 2017-08-01 23:55 (UTC) - Expand

I guess I start to feel weird about it when the gap is more than 15 years, since we're talking different generations in practical terms and the two people grew up in different worlds.

I was going to say gender was irrelevant, but I think actually it's only the gender of the younger party that is irrelevant. If the older person is a woman, I'm less likely to side-eye than if it's a man. My knee-jerk reaction is that an older woman is lucky someone of any age wanted to be with her, so there must be something special there, but the older man is just seeking out younger partners on purpose and is kind of a loser. Not fair, but that's secretly where my mind will go.

I don't actually say any of this out loud, not even to third parties (unless someone else brings it up).

I don't think you really can NOT have a power imbalance if the age gap is really big. If one partner is old enough to be the other person's biological parent, I find it creepy in almost all cases because you simply can't have a romantic partnership of true equals when one person has a literal lifetime more of experience in almost all aspects of life than the other one does. Now, imo it's a little different when both persons are well into adulthood because the experience gap is lessened when you have, say, a relationship between a 40 year old and a 60 year old versus a 20 year old and a 40 year old. The former could very well be two people who've both had a successful career and have well-established themselves as mature individuals with a good social and familial network and experience in romance/sex. The latter, you've got a kid barely out of high school who probably has 2 or 3 years in the workforce at most, paltry or no savings/income, may never have had a serious relationship before, and is still learning who they are as a person. They probably don't know a ton about the adult world yet, so the 40 year old could very easily (even unintentionally) manipulate them or groom them to be what they want the kid to be, not what the kid wants to be or should be if they had room to grow. I find it skeevy no matter the genders, but there is a slight increase in skeeve if it's a much older man with a much younger woman, because it's probably the most likely in that case out of the 4 "basic" gender combinations that the specific reason he's with her is so that he can use her as a combination of sex toy and trophy who will put up with it because she lacks the experience to know when she should walk away.

I think it's squicky when a couple with a big age difference knew each other when the younger one was a child/young teen (or even a somewhat older teen) and the older one was already an adult. I mean, it's not a problem if one was 15 and the other 9, or one was 22 and the other 16, but if one was 22 and the other 9, that's weird. Even if they don't get together until years later, it bugs me.

Re: When do you judge age gaps in adult relationships?

el_regrs - 2017-08-02 01:38 (UTC) - Expand

tbh it always weirds me out to have any bigger-than-normal age gap, the bigger the weirder. But I'm of course going to keep that to myself if we're talking about a relationship IRL, I'm not an asshole.

If the younger person is 25 or older, I don't judge no matter how old the other person is. I figure they know their own mind by that age. Any younger, if there's a huge age gap I can wonder if it's kinda on the creepy scale. I probably wouldn't say anything unless it was family or a close friend, but yeah, I'd wonder.

Ok, this is where I fuel the speculation that I'm Lesbian Futerist. I do immediatly cringe as old man young woman ships. I can't help but instinctively feel like that is an evil man taking advantage of a girl. I don't feel that way about Older lady young man / young woman, or older man younger man. It's exclusively Older man younger woman that feels like someone is being a victim, which is bullshit of course.

I know this is profoundly incorrect, and I do try to not give in to that reaction, but yeah, I totally have this gut reaction.

I think it's because for all my years being red pilled, all the various shit women have done to me, all the many examples I've seen of women being donright criminal, I never really got to stop thinking on some level about men as violent aggressors. That little voice "We're evil and everyone can see it" never goes away, I guess.

The actual size of the age gap is no issue to me, tho. If a 75 year old and a 16 year old want to fuck, it never hits me as any worse than a 20 year old and a 40 tear old.

Edited 2017-08-02 06:58 (UTC)

I don't particularly care, but I can't really help thinking that a considerably (~30 years) younger person in a relationship with a wealthy older person screams "gold digger" to me, regardless of gender.

When one is clearly a trophy spouse.

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