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Calling Attention to Gross Age Gaps, Again

“You say I’m insecure? You’re 28 with a teenager!”

Dr. Casey Lawrence
Bitchy
Published in
9 min readFeb 23, 2024

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The author, when she was in a relationship with a 36-year-old man

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…

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Bitchy
Bitchy

Published in Bitchy

Thought-provoking essays on gender, identity, and culture through the feminist lens.

Dr. Casey Lawrence
Dr. Casey Lawrence

Written by Dr. Casey Lawrence

Canadian author of three LGBT YA novels. PhD from Trinity College Dublin. Check out my lists for stories by genre/type.

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