Attitudes to underage/borderline relationship in the 90’s/noughties…wtf?!

[spinningbirds]

In about 2001 when I was 16, I was training pretty seriously in a sport, helped a lot by a successful older girl in the sport (17/18). This older girl appeared to be in a relationship with her female ex-coach’s ex-boyfriend, (she’d met him when being trained by her ex-coach, a several years earlier.)

The boyfriend was by this time 35. She was just 18. I was 16.

Her very nice parents somehow (?!) came around to the relationship, which I now know had started when she was 14. The girl an d the boyfriend invited me and another girl (also 16, also heavily involved in the sport) to go on holiday with 2 of them; I’d never been abroad without my parents before. The 4 of us went to Lanzarote.

I think that by me and the other 16 year old being there too (we all shared a self catering flat) it made it their holiday somehow “ok’?!

I don’t have anything specifically bad about the guy to say, other than that he always treated me coldly, perhaps he knew I didn’t like him. On the first night of the holiday the other three agreed to have some drinks when we arrived. I declined, and asked for just coke… he put vodka in it anyway. I soon felt weird, and freaked out, not knowing I’d had alcohol; I hadn’t been drunk before. The three of them laughed their socks off at me, sat on the bathroom floor of the flat in confusion, feeling sick. Only a long time later that evening did they confess the trick. Haha.

Anyway the holiday was fine, the couple had separate bedrooms but engineered plenty of alone time…

24 years later, this whole thing makes me feel creeped out. What was my mum thinking sending me on holiday with a bloke nearly 20 years older than us? Were times so very different in 2001?

For the record, the couple are still together. My mum said today she think they actually started dating when the girl was 13. But they’ve built a life together now, so that’s ok, isn’t it..

Anyway the whole thing makes me feel creepy AF, does anyone else have crazy shit like this from 20 years ago/could you give me some therapy to feel less weird about it?!!!

I am so glad that I escaped this, but my (now ex) best friend wasn’t so lucky. She had a boyfriend eight years older from the age of about 12. It was even worse than that because he first started grooming her when she was about 9. Her parents knew the whole time and would just giggle about it, saying, “She has a little crush on him.” It progressed to sleepovers at his house where apparently he would not leave her alone the whole night 🤢 He would buy underwear for her and send “sext” messages all the time. It’s so grim to think about now.

They stayed together for years, I think until she was about 30. I hope when all the MeToo stuff came out, she realised that she was a victim and he was a wrongun all along.

No one really batted an eyelid back then. It was frighteningly normalised.

Mandy Smith's relationship with Bill Wyman was mid 80s, not 90s. Even so, it is wrong to state age gap relationships between young teenagers and grown men were generally viewed as okay. They definitely weren't then, in the 90s or now. There will always be exceptions, for example where parents are effectively groomed by the older man, or simply fear they'll push their daughter away and think it's better to let the relationship continue without condoning it.

It was also the case around that time that dressing up to go out generally involved make up and looking older than you were.

I'm low contact with my parents over a situation like this. I was in a 'relationship' with a 37 year old married man when I was 16 and they did absolutely nothing about it. I've tackled my dad about it years later and he just looked blankly and said "well what did you expect me to do?"
I was basically groomed in plain sight and because he was charming and respectable it was almost as though they were proud that someone like that showed interest in their daughter.
He basically got me to do sexual stuff that his wife probably objected to, because I was too young to know any different.
I've been in a succession of either toxic or abusive relationships ever since and it's massively blighted my life.
As soon as my daughter hit 16 and I realised just how young I was, I started to rage. And I don't think I've ever stopped.

People love a young age of consent in this country but then have double standards saying it should only be with people the same age. But why? The age of consent laws dont care.

Ah and I’ve just remembered a relative of mine who met her future husband at tennis club when she was 15 and he was mid 30s. Her parents did nothing to intervene and went off on holiday for six weeks leaving them alone to get on with it 🤢 because “forcing them apart would only drive them closer together”. My grandparents were obviously very upset and against the marriage. The girl never spoke to them again because she was hurt that they didn’t like their granddaughter being with a middle age man. Twenty years down the line she absolutely hated him and they got a very nasty divorce. Grandma is always right.

Maturity, vulnerability and power. Two 16 year olds are around the same maturity level and experience. A 40 year old and a 16 year old are aeons apart in maturity and experience and he will have a lot more power in the relationship. A 16 year old is a child.

yeah and id happily see the age of consent upped to 18 but in another thread all manner of people saying it should be 16 or less. Never mind your aeons, if its legal its legal hence blokes in their 30s in their work vans picking up schoolgirls after school in the 90s was normal and nobody cared.

@username299 absolutely this

@ThatLimeFatball there should be a staggered age of consent, as suggested by Russell Brand's poor victim.

Who remembers the 1987 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too?
I'm sorry that so many of you went through these inappropriate relationships whilst you were in your teens. It seems so many parents, particularly mothers, were keen to marry their daughters off. That was their goal in life to get their very young daughters into relationships.
Luckily my parents didn't allow anyone any of this abuse. I was born in the mid 60s.
I do remember in 6th form a friend at school having a relationship with the Head of Art.

Which other thread?! I think it should be 18 too

One where a womans daughter was having sex at age 15 with her 15 year old boyfriend.

I was a teenager in the late 60s - lots of kids left school at 15 and went to work...My mother, back in the 1930s went out to work at 14.
People were regarded as adults at 16 - it's less than 2 years ago when marriage was forbidden at 16, and what is more adult than getting married?
We recognised creepy older guys I can assure you, but they had money to spend and girls are more emotionally mature as teenagers than boys and find boys of their own age childish. However more than a 5 year age gap would have been regarded as suspicious by most parents - if they knew about it!

You're right, predating on teenagers was normalised. People did care, I minded. I thought the Smith, Wyman relationship was disgusting. I thought topless teenagers in a national paper was disgusting as well, but it was normalised.

Sam Fox's mum (famous glamour model), got into it when her mum sent off her pictures at 15. Her dad was her manager.

Children going up chimneys was legal and normalised as well.

Personally, I think it should be staggered based on partners age.

At the end of the day 16 year olds are going to sleep with each other, no matter what the law says, and criminalising a bunch of teens isn't going to do anyone any good. But I'm all for it being illegal to have sex with a 16yo if you're 2 years older than them for instance.

When i was 17/18 in the late 1980s one of my close friends (same age as me) had a relationship with a guy who was 37. Neither me or my other friends thought it was ok, nor my parents or sister. We were very concerned, looked out for her.

Fortunately she split from him after a year or so and married a guy her own age in her twenties.

It's really not true that everyone thought it was fine in the 80s or that we were all medieval in our outlook.

And I think far too many 16+ teens in relationships is normalised in 2025. I think they are emotionally too young to fully understand the possible consequences of pregnancy and the rest.

The Sport did a countdown to a 15 year old girls 16th birthday when she appeared topless.

Google Richard Chipchase. Maths teacher gone bad. He slept in his camper van outside his girlfriend’s parents’ house when his wife booted him out when she found out that he’d been sleeping with his 15/16yr old student. He went back to teach elsewhere and it all happened again. Twice. This wanker should’ve been struck off the first time.

Sadly I think it was going on long after your parent’s generation had kids. And still is.

It just changes form. I was in my early 20’s in the noughties and in those days, it was all about Lad and Ladette culture, FHM etc.

At the time, women my age thought we were in on the joke, but looking back it was a particularly nasty time where laddish behaviour was glorified. ( for laddish read treating women like shit and objectifying them)

I personally think it’s as bad as ever - Andrew Tate, pick up artists etc. and look at the pressures on women to look a certain way. There’s a thread on here about fillers etc…women are more pressured than ever to please men. We just get duped that we are all going mad for Botox ‘for ourselves’.

Hardly any young women nowadays have pubic hair - who is that for? None of my friends give a shit about my fanny hair.

I don't think people generally thought it was ok but it was just accepted. 14 year old groupies running after a pop band were seen as knowing what they were doing, though that didn't mean all 14 year olds were the same. They were kind of seen as bad girls, rather than the men being at fault.

I remember being 17 in the late 70s and a girl of my age had a 25 year old boyfriend. I wondered then what he saw in her (how naive of me!).

A girl at school - must have been 15 /16 -had a relationship with our RE teacher; he must have been late 20s at least. We all knew and she flirted with him in lessons. We just thought he was a bad teacher (he was) and that she had poor taste in men - he wasn't exactly attractive.

Another female teacher, mother of a girl in my year, took her 16 year old male pupils to the pub, invited them to her house and was rumoured to have sex with them. We knew it wasn't right but nothing was done about it.

Seems incredible now.

I was shocked as a young teacher that my Head of Department was married to his teacher. They had a relationship when he was 14 or 15.
As far as I know they remained together until her death. She was more than double his age when they got together. He as an excellent teacher an HOD. I learnt a great deal from him and was put forward for SALT fairly young. He was an excellent mentor as was his wife.
Yet, it made me feel uncomfortable to know their history. She had been his English teacher and tutor and he had been a young adolescent student. I will always be grateful fort their mentoring . They appeared to have a very happy relationship.
They had been married about 28 years when I knew them in the late 80s.
I could not imagine my parents having approved of such a relationship if I had such a relationship. Nor, could I have imagined being attracted to someone so much older. Although, I had friends who had boyfriends who were older than them . One friend who was involved in theatre remained the OW to one of her directors for 20 years!
There is one thing being in lower 6th and going out with a chap in upper 6th. This would mean only a few months.

Many people of both sexes seem to be attracted to people who are not in their peer group.

I don't think it was just accepted but there wasn't social media to call it out, and ensuing campaigns etc. Tabloid newspapers ran the stories (and some magazines) to generate circulation. They had much more power to push whatever agenda that suited them.

A couple of my school friends at 14/15 had erm affairs with married men in their 30's, maybe even 40's, I'm not sure of the exact ages, one he was her teacher and they did go onto get married and remain married, and the other was through an extra curricular activity, it fizzled out very quickly after she lost her virginity to him, what concerns me is that both of these men still work with / have close contact with teenage girls in seemingly respectable ways.

I was in a relationship with a 21 year old man when I was 14, fully encouraged to be in it, slept at his house, he slept at mine. Dropped me off at school.

Only really realised last year after reading a book on the subject that I was groomed and abused. He took my virginity and encouraged me to do sexual things that no 14 year old should be doing.