Is Dating Somebody Emotionally Half My Age Illegal?

The worst thing about being a millennial is dating millennials. We're selfish and indulgent. Engage any 20something in a conversation about dating and they will quickly prattle off a dozen things they think they deserve. Yes, I have my own foolish preconceptions about what I deserve. But at least I have the jaded wisdom to know I'm probably never going to get those things / I'm going to die alone in Arizona.

I had a moment of clarity a few weeks ago. I was sick with a cold and my boyfriend came over to take care of me. Somehow, the gay agenda shifted into me buying him raisins and crackers at CVS and making him soup while he was on the phone with his mother.

This is not to say that he has never done anything for me and I resent doing things for him. But I have always felt a tension, as if our "acts of love" weren't truly selfless and we always expected something in return. More than that, he expected the both of us to fulfill certain roles that he had carefully laid out. I was supposed to be the responsible, corporate boyfriend who paid for everything. He was supposed to be the free-spirited, sociable boyfriend that planned our weekend calendar. I never really felt comfortable playing those roles, and honestly, why does everybody think they are Jessa Johansson?

I've gone along with it because I want to make promises that make him happy and I want to keep those promises. But at some point, I'm running around the city doing things I don't want to do just so somebody doesn't get mad at me via passive aggressive texts. Maybe that's what love is. I don't know. 

The ultimate problem with millennials is that our sense of empowerment has devolved into a sense of entitlement. I give him everything I have and he thinks he deserves more. I ask him for something and he "doesn't feel like it." And he just lacks the self-awareness to recognize the hypocrisy.  I'm sure I'm missing my own hypocrisy somewhere in this post but the lasting impression is that neither of us have finished growing up and being together keeps us from doing just that. In fewer words: I'm too young to be taking care of somebody. And he is too old to need to be taken care of.

New is the New New

Life is good, comparatively speaking. Looking back on time when I was on OKCupid, I am almost positive that six-month stretch will go down as the darkest era of my entire life, barring a musculoskeletal degenerative disorder that I may or may not be in store for at some point in the future.

I have a boyfriend. My apartment is one block from the metro station. I haven't felt inclined to make up a nickname for my boss that includes the word "cunt" or "poop." But it's during these times of content when I forget that things have been worse and wonder if things could be better. I can't tell if it's the lack of change or the lack of turmoil that makes me anxious. I never really considered myself someone who particularly enjoyed either change or turmoil. But the things we enjoy aren't necessarily the things that make us feel alive.

I've encountered a limit that my relationship cannot seem to grow beyond. Instead of becoming deeper it's become, for lack of a better word, wider. We share every meal, thought, and moment in this circuitous vortex where yesterday's feelings are today's feelings are tomorrow's feelings. Is there anything left to do and discover that won't be a rehash of something from before? Meanwhile the bleeding of our lives into each other's makes it so that there's no longer any distinction between my life as an individual and my life as his boyfriend.

Much of the stagnancy is my own fault. I can be stubbornly distant and seem to be adamant about maintaining the integrity of our individual lives. Is the big picture here that I'm unable to take things to the proverbial "next level." Or am I just unable to see myself at the next level with him? Emotionally speaking, I dont even know what the next level is. We already share a straw at the movies, when did that stop being enough?

I don't know what this says about me, other than I am selfish and destructive and maybe need to do more growing up than I thought. I'm even more at a loss for what to do. Is it ever fair to end a perfectly stable relationship to "find oneself" among the sights and sounds of Grindr? In two weeks time I will have found out that the only fish left in the sea are one-eyed and hermaphroditic.

I met a guy in a bar recently and we've been chatting casually. The initial excitement of meeting somebody always casts a thick veil but even through that I can recognize he represents everything horrible and uncertain and painful about my OKCupid subscribing existence. But he makes life feel new.

I Almost Forgot The Password To This Thing

It took about seven days for optimism to give way to realism. Embarrassingly soon after I declared that it was going to work, I decided the "relationship" (although I hesitate to designate what we had as *that*) was not going to work. 

Fundamentally, we didn't get along. With just a little bit of retrospect, I can see that now. So many parts of our personalities were at odds that we were constantly fighting. I think he mistook our emotional flare-ups as passion. It mostly reminded me of my parents and how much they hated each other between 1989 and 2007. True, we both cared about each other, but two cares one love does not make.

I broke it off with him in early July, reasoning that although there was not an issue per se, it would be better to end it before we got more invested. I only half-believed the words coming out of my mouth. What was really happening was he was wading deeper into the tar-pit that is a relationship with me and I was slowly backing out. I wanted to shut it down before we were on completely different pages. It felt selfish but it also felt necessary. 

Breaking up with a guy that didn't see it coming and wasn't ready to let go left me with a sense of survivor's guilt, like somehow it was an end for him and a beginning for me. I felt bad that I was feeling relief while he was feeling sadness. I also felt ridiculous for having feelings about a feeling. I was having tertiary feelings, God help me.

I still don't know if I made the right decision. I am in a new "relationship" now (though once again, I hesitate to make that designation). It feels like a better fit in all the topical senses, we like the same music, food, don't scream at each other in public, etc. But Chipmunk's loyalty and selflessness turned out to be two traits that I haven't encountered since.

Lord knows I have no idea what a healthy relationship feels like so I probably wouldn't be able to recognize the fact that I'm in one based on previous experience. I'm just wondering if those ah-ha moments where you realize you're not only in love but in love with the right guy have all been used up by Carrie Bradshaw, leaving the rest of us with debilitating unsureness.

Abusing This Metaphor to Death

I'm sitting on the 7th floor of my office building. You should be impressed because DC has a strict building height limit and oftentimes 7 floors is as high any building around here gets. I'm thinking about the guy I'm dating currently. We've been going out for about 3 months now and I am almost certain he feels more strongly for me than I for him.

For somebody who was so deeply unhappy about being a "have-not", it seems hypocritical that I would be unhappy as a "have" as well. He cares about me and he always puts me first. I have this terrifying suspicion he scrapped a plan to move to the west coast just to stay in DC with me. In normal situtations, I would be ecstatic, and probably on photoshop right now trying to merge our two faces and see what our children will look like. Instead, I feel impotent and out of control, which I really hate.

I think he fell for me because he has no expectations when it comes to dating and I was in the right place at the right time. Meanwhile, I have enough expectations to circumscribe Jupiter's fat ass. It's not that he's not great, but I have this, perhaps artificial, preference for guys that are masculine and aggressive but also calm and gentlemanly. My baby is none of those things. I mean, his nickname is "Chipmunk," if you can imagine.

This isn't the first time I've compromised to be with somebody. In the past, I've lowered my expectations to the 4th floor, only to be subjected to the ironic humiliation that I am a 2nd floor in their building. Usually I'd have to lower my standards to basement level 3 to find a guy that was genuinely interested in me as boyfriend material.  Chipmunk is definitely above grade. And each time I think about how lonely I would be without his company, it sends me a little deeper into his arms. So maybe the only thing that matters right now is that in his building, I'm on the 7th floor.

I Deserve More Karmic Compensation Than This

I dated a guy briefly in February. What was interesting about him was that he had an identical twin whose name was only one letter different from his own. Even more interesting was the fact that his identical twin was not gay. I didn't end up dating him for long because his twin brother's heterosexual existence was an affront to everything I learned in AP Biology. I want to believe that homosexuality is purely genetic and the way I am isn't because of some egregious mistake occuring druring my formative years (no doubt, my parents' fault). Or maybe it was something I ate.

Actually, the real reason why we stopped dating was because he wanted me to commit and I didn't want to. It was strangely ironic and perhaps poetic justice to have the tables turned on me in that way. Here I am, complaining about how I'm all alone and nobody loves me. The second somebody tries to, I'm all, "I'd rather not." I guess it was my turn to be a bitch / I can see from the perspective of the guys that never call me back now. When it's not right for one person, it's not right for either of them.

The way we broke it off was pretty comical in itself. We were both at one of his friend's party. He saw me talking to another guy and pulled me aside to tell me he couldn't stand my flagrant disrespect and didn't want to see me anymore and stormed off. I wondered if I was supposed to cry or keep drinking or stay at the party or what. Mostly I stood around wondering where my sweater was. A few minutes later he texts me, "Please do me a favor and don't sleep with ___." ___ is the guy I was talking to and I would definitely share his name but I don't even remember it. The thought hadn't even crossed my mind and ___ was kind of gross but at that point I wanted to do it just to be spiteful. *Does my best Emily Thorne impression*


Instead I found my sweater and left and never saw any of those people again.

Hopefully My Face Stays Young Too

I have this theory, which I arrived at through a combination of empirical data, personal experience, and watching Mean Girls. 

In middle school, the normal boys and girls went girl/boy crazy respectively. For the next several years, they acted impulsively and naively when it came to "love." Jumping from one partner to the next, they didn't care about each others' feelings because they didn't quite understand their own. But nobody really got hurt because nobody really "got it." Also, nobody in middle school was having sex. (Except that one guy, who I still think was lying. And that one girl, who had no daddy.) It's the same when baby lions play-fight with one another so cutely in preparation for the day when they actually have to slaughter a cape buffalo.

Eventually, this adolescent practice gives way to the real thing. Feelings, maturity, and sexuality coalesce into meaningful relationships. By age 25, everyone is married even though the girls have yet to learn how to clean up their bathrooms and the boys still say "dude."

It's hard not to laugh, and then cry uncontrollably, when I reflect on my own middle school experience. About the same time I started lusting after my guy friends, they started lusting after girls. I felt like Julia Roberts running after that not famous guy running after Cameron Diaz in My Best Friend's Wedding. Of course, I had a string of fake girlfriends to fit in and deflect suspicion, but that wasn't exactly cathartic. My urges were forcibly suppressed, held back by the anti-ejaculative equivalent of the Hoover Dam.

This is where I arrived at my revelation: the reason why gay people are so fucking annoying. We are all emotionally arrested as 13 year-olds. We're boy crazy now because we never got a chance to be cute little sluts in middle school. But since we're at an age where we can act out on our childish feelings via blowjobs, we end up feeling more conflicted and distraught when our impulsive connections don't work out. It's gotten to the point where I can't really ride the metro because every time I see a really hot guy I have this full blown panic attack that can only be calmed by eating an entire french baguette with butter.

I'm not really sad or angry about it. I'm kind of seeing somebody now and he drives and pays so I feel all mature and stuff.

All the Single Men Are Sociopaths

There is a phrase basic people like to put on their Facebook profiles and lower backs, "Live each day as if it were your last." I've adapted it to my situation so that it reads, "Fuck each guy like you'll never see them again."

I say this phrase in my head repeatedly while hooking up with boys (in between silent renditions of Whitney Houston's version of the Star Spangled Banner) to remind myself that we all just want sex, and while I'm being honest, the guy on top of me (not a bottom, just lazy) is not good enough to warrant being done twice. 

Mostly, this has worked out well for me. Like Beyonce empowered me to do via "Independent Women Part I," after it's over I prefer to leave gracefully without the clunky exchange of numbers, job descriptions, and life stories. I've satisfied my needs and for the sake of my conscience would rather pretend our encounter was just a so-so dream somewhere in between the time I dreamed I was in The Help (high) and the time I dreamed we were all lizards (low).

I met a guy several weeks ago that was intent on tampering with my system. He was cute and cordial, inviting me back to his place to "cuddle" and "be innocent." "God this guy is dumb, I can't wait to get him pregnant," is what my drunk-self in-my-head-screamed. 

I sat on his couch waiting for him to get naked while he told me about his job and his British heritage. I was like, "Really? I thought you were Russian. Take off your pants." 

 

But halfway between him telling me how hot I was and seeing his eight inch cock, I found myself wanting to see him beyond this one night. I was excited to tell him that I lived just a few blocks away and I was flattered when he suggested seeing me again soon. I wanted to know his last name. Justin What.

Even so, I attempted to leave the next morning with my hopes in check. As I opened the door he stopped me, "Wait, I never got your number." He recited his for me to put into my phone and I candidly said, "I'll save you as Justin Newton Street so I can remember who you are." He laughed, "My last name's ______."

I haven't heard from him since then. Sent him two texts over the course of three days to no response and figured I would give it a rest. Saw him trolling around on Grindr before I decided to give that a rest too. What I don't understand is that when I gave him the perfect opportunity to do what he wanted to do all along, why didn't he take it? Why did he have to pretend to be interested when he wasn't?

I think his behavior bled beyond politeness into pathological. It's one thing to fake-tell somebody they're attractive and reveal a last name, but it's another to make future plans with no intention of following through. It seems as though he wanted what I wanted - to have nothing to do with each other, but he wanted to be the one to say so. 

I'm not entirely sure when all of this became such a game. And if I'm supposedly making the rules, why am I still losing?