I am a single guy in my early 30s and I am more lonely than I’ve ever been. I am losing people in my life from the past and present. I have recently fallen for a 21-year-old girl who I met while on vacation last summer. She is bright, sweet and charming, and seems like the solution to my loneliness. But is 21 too young for me?—Jack
Maybe your friends are disappearing because they don’t want to be around a skeevester dude with a 21-year-old piece? That’s kind of mean, I guess, but I’m good with it. Cross-generational relationships aren’t what’s gross; what’s gross is an over-30 guy getting with a barely legal beach bunny (I’m extrapolating here) who is very unlikely to have enough agency and self-awareness to participate in this relationship on equal terms. Do you remember being 21? Me neither, because I buried it under a decade-long accumulation of painful, essential maturity.
The official rule is half your age plus seven, so even if you’re just 31, she’d have to be 22.5 to be legit. And even then….What do you have to talk about? Why would your friends want to hang out with her? Why is she into you, and not some guy with those just-post-teen hipbones who hasn’t begun the hellish descent into tightly edited friend groups and being tired? Are you cool to hang out while she goes to school, finds herself, changes her mind and turns into a person unrecognizable as the girl you met on vacay? Or, you know, is it just a sex thing, in which case…whatever.
Age-inappropriate relationships (assuming they’re legal and enthusiastically consented to) can be a test-tube of concentrated sexiness, mutual curiosity and whatever else comes from dating someone very different than you. But more often, that only starts when the younger half is already a functioning, self-contained adult. So, don’t date her. It’s normal to be lonely; it’s normal to miss your friends. Being with someone even more vulnerable than you won’t make you feel any better.
I’ve been wondering how a person knows if the sexual aspect of their relationship is good enough. There has definitely been a setting-in of routine when it comes to sex with my husband. We know what works for us, and sex has become the same every time. What should I be satisfied with? —Gemma
What “satisfied” means is impossible for anyone else to tell you. I guess it has to be somewhere between meeting the very basics—being sated—most of the time, right on through to an infinitely profound feeling of peace and contentment. Right? In my dull imagination, married-couple sex goes from incomplete oral (two minutes) to listless groping (30 seconds) to intercourse (five minutes? Is that generous?) to your-turn manual stimulation (two minutes) and ends with at least one of them wondering the same important thing that you’re wondering. So, yeah. I don’t know.
But here is something. Durex, the condom-maker, recently conducted a 36-country survey about “sexual well-being, in particular the emotional aspect of sexual satisfaction.” Peter Roach, a company spokesperson, says, “Satisfaction is about positive physical and emotional experiences. We asked questions including, ‘Do you have sex as frequently as you would like? Do foreplay and sex last as long as you would like?’ We asked respondents if their sex life was exciting, if they felt uninhibited, felt respected, felt loved.” (Does that help?) Of the Canadians surveyed, 79 per cent of men and 77 per cent of women said their partner is good at giving them sexual pleasure, making 78 per cent of us generally satisfied. (Japan’s average, the lowest, was 34 per cent; the highest was Indonesia, at 89 per cent. So, we’re doing okay.)
It’s not just the level of satisfaction that’s important, it’s what you’re willing to do to be more satisfied. That often acts as a dividing line between people: it separates the ones who are fine with “good enough” from the ones for whom “good enough” is a decent start. Your question is probably an indication of which side you might be lying on.
