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 was a teenager in the 90s - I often think of all the bad things that happened and the thing is, we did know they were wrong. We knew and the adults as well. It's just no one did anything about it. It still makes me angry.

But the parents thought it was ok. Why wouldn’t the lads have thought the same?

Now, yes. The men my age wouldn’t want their daughter in the age gap relationship they had.

But back then, the parents thought an older chap would steady their DD down, Why would the 24 year old lad think any different?

I cannot describe enough how different things felt then. It was misogyny. No doubt. But so entrenched most people couldn’t see it.

There was the odd girl who with hindsight was wiser than her years- maybe had a great home life so was really grounded, or maybe had astute parents who were already aware. They’d point out issues the rest of us just didn’t see.

But again, I’m a decade older, I’m talking about 80s and 90s, not 90s and 00s.

@MyDeepZebra That's awful, I think it shows someone is messed up mentally somehow if they need to pursue younger people.

I was at secondary school in the late 80s and it was not shocking or unusual for girls to have much older boyfriends. It was seen as quite cool and a sign of you being really grown up and mature.
I think nowadays , teenage girls are a lot more savvy. Obviously it still goes on, but loads of young people are grossed out by it all and they absolutely call it out.

I guess I'm talking more... the actual attraction itself. Why would someone being attracted to someone who visibly closer to a child than an adult, why would they be attracted to a brain that is that of a child's- no matter how 'mature' - why would that be more appealing over someone whose a fully formed adult. That's the bit that I can't really unravel in my head. Totally agree with all of your points on why people acted on it - it's just the actual attraction itself i find really, really hard to wrap my head around, as a grown woman in her thirties.

I think because we are now so well versed on the immaturity of children- brains not fully formed until 25 etc, that we see 15 year olds as children.

They were seen as young women- about to start work in shops, factories, offices. Marrying at 20 and having children by 25.
We went to nightclubs and pubs and no one wondered how old we were. I remember being chatted up by a bloke on a stall who asked me out. I asked him how old he was, because he was clearly ‘too old’, and he said ‘27, but I’m nearly 28’, as though he felt a bit young. He was flummoxed when I said that as I was 14 I wouldn’t be going anywhere with him. He recovered and asked for my number anyway, but I was clearly a lot younger than he thought.

What I’m trying to say, @Daisyvodka , is that most 16 year olds went to work. Only about ten/twenty percent stayed in school. The 24 year olds looking at the 16 year old didn’t see a child.

Bear in mind girls at 16 are physically mature, whereas boys look adolescent until more like 21.

Nobody took paedophilic stuff seriously back then. It may seem outrageous now because it was.
It was the culture. Misogyny, child abuse and domestic violence.
Bullying in schools was also normal and thought of as character building to an extent.

I think its more because we have infantilised young people over several decades, at 15 I was working more or less full time hours despite still being at school. I left home at 17 and moved into a bedsit, was working but at college at the same time. I wasnt a 'child' in any sense. I earned good money so went out with a wide variety of friends. It wasnt that unusual. Most of my friends were driving with jobs at 17.

Brains are fully developed in young adults and this is something I have to counter on lots of threads but I cant be bothered. Young brains are more flexible, adaptable and take more risk, more elastic, less rigid. That is all.

Very common in decades gone past! My friend was 15 and lived with her Grandparents, along with her 23 year old boyfriend! They shared a room, and lived together as a couple. I have no idea if the school knew or not. I know my parents disapproved, and to be honest at that age I didn't understand why! I just saw her relationship as rather grown-up. Obviously now I am older, and a Mum myself, I completely understand why my parents disapproved. I can safely say at 23 years old, I wasn't interested in 15 year old school boys!! It's odd. However, it was just accepted years ago.

Because they weren’t “visibly closer to a child than an adult”.

bear in mind it’s fairly recent that children have been expected to stay at school until 16, and then 18. You only stayed on for a’levels if you were planning on uni.

there were 250 in my school year. Some left when they turned 16 so before O’levels. My a’level cohort from that school was about 40 that stayed on. The rest left, got jobs, youth training schemes etc.

these 16 year olds had jobs, weren’t in school uniform, behaved and dressed like adults. They were treated like adults.

for girls, if they left school at 15/16 there very often wasn’t a “career”, it was a job until they got married.

men matured slower, because going out with someone your own age wasn’t the done thing, most didn’t have a girlfriend or any relationship experience until they left school.

when you’re a young male looking for your first girlfriend at 20 or 21, not been to uni, and you meet a girl in the same situation as you, working, going out etc, you’re both at the same stage in life.

you’re both equal. It’s not a 21 year old man who’s already had 3 long term relationships and several sexual partners preying on a 16 year old still at school and dependent on mum and dad, with no money of her own is different. He has power over her. Nowadays this is more the case as people have sex younger and with more people.

it’s more life stage and life experience.

one of my friends at school was having an ‘affair’ with our much older married form tutor. She was 15. God knows how old he was. 40s I would think. Everyone knew and no one did anything about it. When I was 15 I ‘went out’ with a 27 year old, it makes me sick when I think back how this was all ‘normal’. And this was only the 90s!

When I was 16, one of my friends was having an affair with a 40 year old man who worked in the supermarket when she had a Saturday job. I remember being grossed out but because I thought 40 was super old and he was really unattractive, not by the power imbalance and inappropriateness of it, which didn’t really occur to me. Now I wonder how many other teens he’d groomed.

I'm sorry, i just really struggle to see how a 16 year old, even dressed as an adult with a job, wouldn't physically look like a 16 year old, a teenager just old of childhood. Maybe this is just my experience, but for example if you are on a night out, and there's a group of younger girls there, 18/19 etc - they don't look like adults in their twenties- they look late teens, no matter how they are dressed. Even if at a glance they look older, after a few minutes it just becomes obvious. Happy to hold my hands up and say that maybe I've just not come across the outliers to this.

• just out of childhood

@Daisyvodka I can't understand it either but some men will always be perverts. The smaller, thinner, younger the better. They are gross, only just staying on the legal side.

When I was 15 I was seeing a guy who was 25. I didn't tell my parents until I was 16. Of course I got hurt , we actually moved in together for 18 months. I wouldn't listen to my parents and loved ones about what he was like.

At 18 I met through some family my ex. He was 13 years older than me. We had dc together. And to be honest we're happy. But the age gap got in the way. We split when dc was 3.5

Then through friends I met a guy. Again 13 years older. We dated. But he was a control freak. Luckily I spotted this early and dumped him

Happily married now to dh who is younger than me.

I found a photo of me and some of my university friends in the late 90s the other day. We’re aged between 16 (Scottish, so went young) and 22. You really wouldn’t be able to rank us in order of youngest to oldest.

I totally get this in photos, but I just feel like in person it's so obvious?? Maybe it's just the way people look around my area!

I have noticed that people generally stick far more to their own age groups for socialising now, so perhaps there is a difference because of that.

There was a 90s pop song "I'm in love with a man nearly twice my age"... It was seen as cool to have an older boyfriend by teen girls. In hindsight it was really effing creepy.

Confession time.

I will say my parents did not approve but to some extent I was a will full obstinate girl… (more on that later).

At 15 I had a 25 year old boyfriend and the reality is he was absolutely feckin horrible to me (hindsight). Recently I’ve found myself dwelling on this “relationship” and wondering how much it’s impacted on my life and how different things would have been if I’d never met him.

I was quite an unhappy teenager (poor background, bullied, desperate to fit in), my gang of friends weren’t really friends and I felt like I was always the after thought for most things. Boys my age definitely not interested in me and then I meet a 25 year old, good looking man who was interested in me.

As soon as I turned 16 there was pressure for the relationship to become sexual especially as “he’d waited until it was legal”. Again to be fair to my parents there were no “sleepovers” and for years it was a relationship many conducted in his car. People knew about us and after initial upset with my parents and some wider family it was mostly accepted.

He was very controlling and any time I would go out with friends it inevitably ended up in huge arguments before going or the following day. Eventually I realised it was easier to just stay home and just hang out with him when he was available. As I got to 18 and applying for university it was made very clear he wouldn’t be entering a “long distance relationship”, you’ve guessed it I didn’t go.
He’d do really strange things like arranging cinema trips but would only see 18 certificate films (which makes me think now why have a 16 year old girlfriend) - ID checks didn’t seem to happen in the 90’s.

As I turned 18 he bought a property (had lived at home with his parents) but again it was odd. Despite being in a well paid job for a decade, and having a paying sideline he had no money for a deposit so his parents ended up giving him a few thousand pounds and me a few hundred that I’d saved from my Saturday job. At the time it felt like the thing to do, we’d live in the house eventually.

We muddled along for a few years, all my school friends left for university and he pretty much became my only “person”. During the many explosive arguments at the time I always thought I have as good as I got but he was brutal with a sharp tongue and always knew how to cut me to the quick. I was naive, unworldly and also had a mother who was desperate to keep her children from flying the nest.

I didn’t learn to drive because he did. I got a job in the office he worked at (to be fair it was one of the larger employers in the area) and it looked as if this was my life.

I had no life other than what revolved around him, and he became more volatile and controlling. Stupidly I also didn’t feel I could tell anyone and I suppose I thought this was normal - my parents had a very shouty door slammers relationship so I suppose it was normal to me.

Eventually I turned 22 and we’d gone to a wedding and for some reason I’d pissed him off with my “who do you think you are” attitude (to this day I don’t know what I did), and he said the immortal line “you are nothing Sparkly, you are just a girl from The Sticks, and you always will be. You will never be anything or anyone other than from The Sticks” and that’s what finally made me wake up and realise this wasn’t living. Within 48 hours I’d broken things off and the had about 6 months of him mildly “stalking” (pre social media, but he’d turn up in my parents house or places he’d know I’d be at just be a pain). He eventually realised I wasn’t going back and found himself a 19 year old girlfriend.

I look back and feel so sad for the girl I was and now realise what a profound impact this has on my life. I’ve never fully trusted anyone, am a desperately needy people pleaser and will do anything (normally to my detriment to avoid confrontation). I always feel the most stupid person in the room (despite having “pretend” degree studied through evening classes whilst working full time), and I have the worst imposter syndrome you can imagine. I’ve carved out a 25 year career, yet spend most of my time waiting to be “found out” that I’m not worthy of a seat at the table.

I’m approaching another decade and don’t know if things will ever change. I wonder if he was a shitty person, or just we were shitty together. He’s married, has two children and his daughter is approaching the age I was when we met. I wonder if he thinks about that sometimes but probably not. I’m not sure if I was groomed or not.

Phew! Nearly 30 years confessing there! Sorry.

maybe it’s your age now? When you’re older everyone looks young. I went to a police station last week and bloody hell what they say about you know you’re old when they have 12 year old police officers is true. They looked about 13 max, but of course were at least 18.

when you were 17/18 could you tell who was 16 and who was 22? I couldn’t. Everyone looked roughly the same until you were getting to the 25+ range.

Yes same here, mid to late 80s. See pictures of any bands with young singers of that age, we were young adults at 16 or so.

We have really gone backwards in how we infantilise the population.