Does age matter?

06/27/2018

Is age truly just a number when it comes to dating or love? well it wasn't until recently that I began to ponder the answer to this question. It was on a Wednesday that I was asked this question by my 18 year old brother, who is a senior and is currently dating a sophomore in his school who is 15. Not having gone through such a situation myself I was stumped by the question and decided to do some research to find a good answer. The first thing that I did was go through the list of buddies I had on my phone and asked any of them if they had ever dated any girls who were younger than them.

Each and every answer I received varied and after I had received there answers I was astonished to find out that biggest age gap any of there girlfriends had was an 8 year difference. Now this age difference sounds weird, but my buddy is 30 and his girlfriend is 22 which doesn't sound bad, when you look at it. But why is it bad for an 18 year old to date a 15 year old in high school? That's when I realized that there is a double standard, in high school this looks bad but once your out of high school and you grow older but the age gap stays the same, society will accept the age different when your 21 and your girlfriend/boyfriend is 18. Now why is this, well in my research and a lot of books that I purchased and read, I noticed that the main reason an 18 year old and a 15 year old aren't accepted in society as a normal couple. Is because it looks as if the 18 year old is taking advantage of the 15 year old, while if we were to increase there ages to 21 and 18 then it would be accepted by society because both people are viewed as adults while in are earlier situation only the 18 year old is viewed as an adult. Now not wanting to give my brother this lame answer I decided to hit the books and do some more research about the subject at hand. Still I reached the same conclusion over and over again, and having run out of things to read I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. Upon this walk I noticed two people, one who looked a lot like my brother and another figure who I was guessing was his 15 year old girlfriend. Having no answer and nothing to do that Wednesday I decided to follow him, not because I wanted to spy on him, but because I wanted to see what type of relationship they had.

So after walking around the neighborhood for about an hour I noticed that during this time they held hands every now and then and through out their walk they talked and interacted with each other most of time, getting to know one another. Then after about thirty minuets I realized that he was walking his girlfriend home and when he dropped her off at home, he walked home with one of the biggest smiles on his face, now this was the happiest that I had ever seen my brother and realizing that this girl made my brother happy I decided to re-look the first conclusion I had reached during my research.