Sex, Pies and Video Games: A revealing clip from UK reality show Age Gap Love

@Moggie

There’s a whole Eel Island?! I must find out where it is, so I never accidentally go there

Eel Pie Island! I only know about it because the inventor of the wind-up radio used to live there and he mentioned it in an interview (I think he described the place as “fifty drunks clinging to a mud flat.”)

Moon Custafer:

Eel Pie Island! I only know about it because the inventor of the wind-up radio used to live there and he mentioned it in an interview (I think he described the place as “fifty drunks clinging to a mud flat.”)

Less drunks than there used to be, though. The old hotel used to be a popular live music venue in the 1960s, and got quite rowdy because of the alcohol.

hiWhen I was ~20 I dated someone who was IIRC 38 when it started. We separated a few years later due to differing feelings on monogamy. We remained friends until I learned enough dogwhistles to realise how racist she was. Also her transphobia was comong out. Last I knew she was hanging out at 4chan. Age wasn’t really an issue though.

Alan,

Just don’t send Piers Morgan back here to the US. We already told you we didn’t want him. He’s your problem now!

I would consider trading him for Sean Hannity, but that’s about it.

Bina et al. in re video games

The family that plays together stays together. My eldest son met his current wife online playing World of Warcraft (they met in the old flight tower in Orgimar—he had just joined her guild and she was one of the guild leaders). They played together for several years, liked each other a lot, got a chance to meet, and that was pretty much all they needed to decide. They’ve been married for more than 10 years now, have been through some rough stuff, but they are still playing together. A friend of theirs painted a picture of that old flight tower for them (it’s been gone a long time in the game), and they have it on the wall in their house. I play with them when I can, but since they live in the UK our timing can get complicated.

And there’s a bit of an age gap, too. She’s about 5 years older.

I’m a oddball gen-Xer, I think– I preferred pinball machines to most all the ’80s video games (though I really enjoyed Centipede/Millipede, Tempest and Gyruss).

As for modern games? I don’t even have the reflexes to finish the final battle of Stacking.

@Dali

Sounds similar to my last long-term relationship – I was in my late 20s and she was in her late 40s, and the age gap was never an issue, but I broke it off after Ferguson when I donated to Michael Brown’s family, she donated to the fuckface cop’s legal fund and I suddenly realised who she really was. No no nope eww fuck no.

My younger partner is 6 and a bit years older than me, my elder 10 and a bit. I’m the one who usually ends up making the cradle jokes 😛 Age hasn’t really been an issue, just a number after all. The differences in perspective can be jarring, but that’s less age per se as much as upbringing. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity for them to introduce me to stuff I’m too young to remember and me stuff they’re too old to have gotten into 🙂

@Dvärghundspossen:

I hesitate to go into something this heavy when I’m kind of new here and lurk way more than I post, but…yes, I’ve been in a relationship with someone who (at the time we were dating) there was something of an age gap. I was 19, she was either 26 or 27 if I remember right, we went official on her birthday so I think 27. It was…not great, but it’s hard to say how much of that was strictly due to the age gap. I think it played into it somewhat, and I’m fully aware it’s colored my perceptions of being in a relationship with someone much older or younger than me despite it being unusually bad.

I should probably append this whole story with a quick suicide trigger warning before we get any further, since that’s going to play in.

Let me back up a bit. I was really lonely at the time and pretty seriously depressed. College wasn’t kind to me, and what I’d now recognize as gender dysphoria and general…orientation weirdness meant I hadn’t been in a relationship and had no hope of ever being in one. I had one non-therapist person outside of my family who I talked to on a regular basis and struggled to break into any other communities, I was a late bloomer and very awkward. She was the first and only person on one particular one I went to who reached out for me and when she said she was interested I jumped into it despite some misgivings.

There were a lot of warning signs I should have seen. I won’t go into the details unless someone really wants me to but about a year into the relationship we had an argument that ended with her saying she was killing a part of herself whom she personified as a separate entity in detail and making it clear it was my fault, then logging off. She came back online the next day claiming it was just due to stress relating to difficult customers.

Sorry if that doesn’t make a lot of sense, the logs are on an old, defunct messenger app so I can’t re-check them and it’s difficult to explain from memory. It was extremely distressing and confusing for me at the time, especially because I have intrusive thoughts of committing suicide and certain things like, well, the above can trigger that. She didn’t know at the time, I didn’t really have the vocabulary to express it, so I don’t know if she was specifically doing it to manipulate me then, but…well, you’ll see.

I think the most haunting one for me was that I found out not too long after we broke up that a messy break-up of a sorts she had with a mutual friend who had only recently turned 18 and was a CSA survivor was due in major part to her admitting romantic interest in them. This was several years into the relationship so the age gap was much bigger then, I think around ten years by that point. They’d kept a correspondence on another site and when they started getting into more heated arguments, she had me read their letters for her.

I remember I had the most profound ‘sinking feeling’ type emotion that there was something way worse going on here when that happened, much more than I was being let on to. Their responses didn’t paint her in the best light either even without mentioning that she’d come onto them, but I couldn’t really tell her that because she responded extremely negatively to even the gentlest criticisms about how she probably should reconsider her actions were taken very badly. Trust me, I tried and by that time I’d given up. She’d been planning on having this person move in with us before that point. I held a lot of guilt that I allowed that to happen to someone who was still very young, I felt like I should have protected them from that and stood up for them. I’ve since gotten back in contact with them and explained what happened on my end, and we’ve reconciled.

If you’re wondering why I stuck with all this, well, she had a lot of mental health issues and past traumas, and so did I. I could relate a lot to of them and because I’d made missteps in the relationship, I should be trying my best to make up for my mistakes and heal things. Plus, love does weird things to you, I guess. Nevertheless I felt as though I was in a live-in caretaker relationship constantly. It was in essence being on suicide watch 24-7, which was not great for my mental health either. I had hoped things would get better but they didn’t, and in fact got worse.

For clarity’s sake, I absolutely do not think that mental health issues are enough to give up on a person, part of her issue was she was extremely self-sabotaging with social networks and dropped psychiatric professionals (to her credit, some of the specialists were terrible.) I also don’t think that any one person should be sole caretaker for someone. People aren’t meant to have relationships with just one person.

She did get me into a polyamorous relationship as one of those things I thought might help heal the relationship…but it was with someone I’d also been crushing at the time, and she knew it because I’d told her in the past. Granted, I never made my feelings known to my crush or tried to turn things into a “true” triad (e.g. where everyone is dating everyone else) so this one I will say was entirely my fault.

That aside, I did feel constantly pitted against her other partner, since said partner was able to give more money, was more willing to engage in sexual activities, and so on and so forth. TMI time: I’m asexual and somewhat repulsed by the idea of in-person sex; we’d done text-based stuff before but after one night where she had a breakdown doing ERP with both me and her other partner because she got overwhelmed dealing with both of us I was afraid to try again. I can say from experience that poly relationships will absolutely compound any prior issues we had. I was young and naive.

Fast forward about three years ago, she threatened suicide against me for one of those mild criticisms when I finally had the courage to stand up and give the most minor criticism I could think of. I figured it might be baby steps towards actually bringing up my bigger issues with the relationship. Well, that didn’t quite work out like I hoped, obviously.

She admitted a few days later she was doing this deliberately because she was aware of my suicide trigger and felt like it was ‘the only way to get [my] attention,’ her words exactly. I had hoped she’d just forgotten. I should have known this wasn’t the case because she specifically walked through the steps she was going to take, which is the specific thing that is most likely to cause intrusive thoughts for me. I felt incredibly betrayed. I am sure of her phrasing because that moment is burned into my memory, sometimes I struggle to remember things from that time period but that one I am certain of. It happened that fell very close to when I was going to a convention with some friends, and they strongly encouraged me to leave while I was staying at the hotel with them. One offered to put me up at her house until I could sort things out with housing. I didn’t want to take them up but after some heavy thinking and telling them about issues we’d had that I hadn’t told anyone else, I realized I needed to.

These were the same friends she was intensely jealous of because I spent a lot of time talking to them. If you ever find her, she’d blame the breakup on me not being interested in girls, I’m sure, since that was always a sticking point in our arguments (I’m biromantic, but I am more interested in men.) That wasn’t it. If it was, I wouldn’t have stuck with her for six years. I wish I hadn’t for that long, I wish I hadn’t moved in with her, I wish I’d said no that day she said she wanted a relationship, I wish I had acted better because in spite of it all I still feel guilt over hurting her, and I wish I knew how to feel about everything because there’s not really handbooks for recovering from the sort of relationship I was in as far as I know. Living with her was like being in a war zone for someone like me, waiting to step on a mine or get shelled by artillery. If the explosives were intrusive thoughts and suicidal impulses in this metaphor, I guess. Sometimes I can play video games and I hear a bit of voice acting or SFX that sounds like her self-injuring herself and it sets me off back into that same crisis mode. Someone who didn’t have the same triggers I did would probably have handled it better, I think.

But in spite of it all I didn’t see how bad things were until I finally made breakthroughs into a community where I had deeper connections with people than I had in the past. It made me realize what interpersonal conflicts are supposed to look like and how they shouldn’t end with someone threatening to hurt themself, or constantly turning any issue they have into how they’re suffering and letting their pain consume you, making you ignore any hurt you’ve felt and bury it deep.

Uh. I got kind of carried away, I’ve only ever talked about this stuff with close friends before and my boyfriend so after a while it just turned into stream-of-consciousness rambling of things I haven’t had a chance to really express yet.

Anyway, my point is that I don’t think age gaps are strictly bad, in spite of all that. I think that, on the darker end of the spectrum, some can use them to target lonely people like I was. Maybe they’re not even really aware of it, they just took the idea that someone who’s in a relationship should have their life center around you, and vice-versa. I say this because when someone is young and isolated, they’re more likely to idealize their partner, and that sort of attention can be addictive. I don’t mean to imply that this is the case for anyone else who’s in an age gap relationship. This is far from the the standard, I think, but for some more insidious people it’s true for them.

But personally speaking, my experiences have poisoned the well for me. I can’t ever see myself having another relationship with an age gap.

On happier notes: I play video games less and less these days. Though I’m still a diehard Pokemon fan and play (somewhat) competitively, and I pick up strategy games now and then and get obsessed with a handful. It’s a big change because I was half-raised by video games, for better or worse. I find that tabletop role-playing games replace a lot of fun that video games gave me and do a better job of it, for the most part. My boyfriend and most of my friends also have similar tastes in games, so we can bond over that.

Look, I know there weren’t any actual pies featured in the clip, but, come on, these are Brits. Obviously they will be eating pies at some point.

Is…is that an actual British stereotype? Liking pies? I…what?

Maybe David mixed up Brit stereotypes and Aussie stereotypes? Because it’s definitely an Aussie stereotype. We had literal protests after a few stores started charging for the sauce (ketchup) to put on them.

EDIT: Somewhat ninja’d on Aussie pie fanaticism… Ironically because I was eating a pie. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@Alan

but, come on, these are Brits. Obviously they will be eating pies at some point.

Hey! I haven’t eaten a pie since….well ok, today doesn’t provide my best counter argument; or yesterday come to that; or indeed…hmm.

But if you’d said this on Wednesday I could be rightly outraged.

You made me snort my organic green tea kombucha. (Yes, I’m from San Francisco.)