So both my ex husband and my boyfriend before him were technically younger than me but only by a tiny amount... initially everyone I got with was born the same year as me but after me.
Notice I didn't actually say "my first boyfriend." Some things are extremely hard to talk about at all, much less online with an incredibly diverse audience where the most innocent remarks can go sideways because someone else heard something weird and offensive that was in no way intended.
It's made harder if your own personal baggage fits neatly with societal bias, harder still if you've thought a lot about it and concluded society is fundamentally wrong.
It's like saying "Hitler wasn't that bad, at least initially, and Germans had their reasons for voting for him.", a point I have actually tried to make online and boy are most people happy to assume you're an evil piece of shit with a thoroughly evil agenda while dragging your mother for bonus points of assholery.
I have two dirty secrets that sometimes make it hard to write in an honest and clear fashion while not stepping in a giant pile of doo doo.
One is that I was secretly married for a year, which means timelines about when I got married and when I moved out of my parental home don't seem to add up in the minds of other people. I got married at age nineteen. I moved out at age twenty.
The other is that the summer I turned fourteen, I briefly was involved with a nice college guy I met while visiting my sister at school and after my family chewed him up and spit him out, he fled to another continent for a time.
After that I dated tough guys or had secret relationships or both and I married a guy whose only dream was a military career which neatly served as a surgical extraction from a situation that should have continued ruining my life for decades to come but didn't.
Over the years, I've made a few stabs at trying to write about it because being molested didn't really screw me up psychologically. What screwed me up was that my family, including the person who molested me, decided to end this relationship and threaten to jail him if he ever contacted me again.
So my rapist had a say in who I dated and I did not. Thanks so very fucking MUCH.
Unlike my asshole rapist drug addicted brother, he was not pressuring me for sex and was willing to wait until I was ready.
But what the hell did I know? It was only my life and my body, which the world had zero desire to grant me any say over.
And I still don't know how to write about it in a world that will be happy to say it's apologist pro child molester thoughts rather than the view of the girl who was molested and raped by one man and denied the opportunity to pursue a consenting relationship by her rapist and others on his side.
I know it will absolutely be misconstrued by some people. I've discussed age difference in relationships in online forums before.