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13 days agothere’s nothing legally wrong with it, but it’s not something i would be happy to hear about from a friend or whatever, cause now i need to ask:
- how long/how well do they know them (longer and knowing them more is generally worse)
- were drugs or alcohol involved (bad, but maybe gives the 26 year old more wiggle room)
- are they going to continue seeing them (probably bad)
- are they aware that they hooked up with someone who’s brain isn’t fully formed
like, it can be done in an ethical way, but in practice, probably won’t be. legally, an 18 year old is an adult, but that does not mean they’re equal in all capacities to adults over 25
generally speaking, unless it was a very isolated hookup without follow up contact, i would pretty strongly recommend against it
that said, yeah, this post reeks of flexing about hooking up with an 18 year old LMAO which… personally, i would not brag about
i appreciate you posting this, i like learning more about things and i’m glad i know better now than to just assume the brain is finished developing at 25
so i did a little more reading and the following points still seem clear:
so, instead of just looking at their age, we have to look at their age gap, and ask the question, is there a disproportionate imbalance of power here?
let’s take a moment to define this: the definition i use is roughly, does one person possess more of a handful of traits than the other? these traits are: life experience, career/financial experience, social experience, and general brain development (ability to assess risk reward, understand long term consequences, ability to communicate one’s needs effectively, etc; which is informed both by growth and experience)
obviously, we can’t make a generalized comparison that will be true for every 18 year old and every 26 year old in the world. however, we can understand that, in most circumstances, the 26 year old will have more of each of these attributes in spades than the 18 year old
reversing that argument also makes this very clear: for it to be acceptable, the 26 year old needs to have a comparable maturity and reasoning level to an 18 year old, someone nearly a decade younger than them. which is why i said it’s not something i would brag about, personally. either you’re saying you’re immature as an 18 year old, or you’re saying you’re comfortable, to some degree, of engaging in intimately dangerous behavior with someone who is significantly less experienced and developed than you are (or, i suppose, very rarely, you’ve hooked up with an 18 year old who is not only pretty mature, but who’s been living on their own and supporting themselves for a while. but you didn’t include that in the parameters of the question, so i don’t think that’s what you meant)
to be clear, i understand that the current economic situation has made attaining those life experiences quite difficult, even for people in their mid twenties. however, most people who cannot attain those life experiences, are also generally not hooking up with people, because there are a number of practical barriers to entry there (financial, location, transportation, etc); i don’t think it’s something to be ashamed of! but notably, in this situation, one would be bragging about something very much not worth bragging about, either (and i would hope they were still sensitive to the idea that there are still some differences between them, robbed of the opportunities to spread their wings as an adult, and an 18 year old, who has simply not been alive long enough to do so)
invalidating the question of whether a brain is completely mature at 25 doesn’t mean that an age gap becomes acceptable because “we can’t tell”, it just means we need to apply a more nuanced standard of scrutiny to the situation
which, maybe you agree with, but i wanted to make my position in light of this new evidence very clear