Relationship Advice
Welcome to the Relationship Advice community on Lemmy and Kbin!
The ideal place to ask for help with your relationships: romantic, friendships, we don't know what we are yet, co-workers or just human interactions in general.
Please make sure you read our rules before posting.
Rules:
Rules can be clicked on to be expanded.
1: Treat all users with respect. [!]
The goal of this community is helping OP and readers, not making fun of them. We are an inclusive community, any sort of disrespect towards ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, etc, will not be tolerated.
2: Mark sexual content as NSFW. [!]
Posts containing mentions or descriptions of sexual topics must be tagged as NSFW. This includes descriptions of sexual acts, requests for advice in the bedroom, explicit descriptions of your body and similar content.
3: All posts must be a request for advice.
All posts must be phrased as a request for advice or as a question. Sharing of stories, personal anecdotes, or past mistakes are only allowed if they're followed by a clear and relevant request for advice with the situation.
4: Provide sufficient and relevant information.
Your title and body need to contain enough information relevant to your situation, such as ages, genders, and the relationship between people mentioned. For privacy-related concerns, we recommend using fake names and broad general locations.
5: Comments must be on topic and relevant to OP.
Comments must be directly related to helping OP, asking for more information, providing relevant resources or otherwise relevant to the thread. Off-topic comments and remarks, suspicious attempts at gathering personal data from OP or other readers, or bullying will not be tolerated.
6: This is a community for requesting advice, not moral judgement.
Moral judgements, "AITA?" and other similar questions are better served by different communities.
Reddit reposts are allowed.
As a temporary measure and the result of a poll, Reddit reposts are allowed following an expanded set of rules: https://lemmy.world/post/317115
How are rules enforced and bans applied?
For the most part, this community operates under the assumption that users are acting in good faith and should be given second-chances for their mistakes. Posts and comments with very light rule violations, or otherwise undesired but mostly harmless content, can be removed by a moderator on a case by case basis without any further punitive actions.
For violations of our rules, we follow a “3 strike” system as follows:
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1st violation: 72 hours ban + moderator warning via PMs.
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2nd violation: 1 week ~ 1 month ban + final warning via PMs.
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3rd violation: 1 month ~ permanent ban.
The goal of this system is making sure users are made aware of their behavior before being permanently banned, but also protecting the community from any rule violations.
Exceptions:
While the “3 strike” system will be applied to the majority of situations, rules marked with a [!] in the sidebar signifies a rule that, if violated in an intentional, malicious or significant way, can warrant an immediate permanent ban regardless of the number of previous violations. This includes severe disrespect to users or groups, dangerous content, and similar.
Related communities:
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Adulting: [email protected]
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No Stupid Questions: [email protected]
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Mental Health [email protected]
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Why would it be weird to be friends with anyone?
Seriously, it isn't something that an age gap matters at all. If anything, having friends of all ages is a good thing. Yeah, you'll usually have the most in common with people closest to your age, but that's not the only thing friendship is built on.
You can have pretty much nothing in common as long as a few core things are. Mutual respect is mandatory. The ability to accept differences and communicate about them is mandatory. Past that, friendship is about shared experience, not necessarily having had the same life. The things you do and talk about as friends is what really matters.
Now, you do run into things where most people just aren't able to communicate with someone that's diametrically opposed in some way, but all that means is that one of the people involved in unable/unwilling to accept and communicate about something. It isn't inherently impossible to overcome major differences just because they exist.
Hell, the only reason it's weird to be friends with anyone is when there's a question of propriety. In those cases, you'd have to navigate things very carefully, but it still isn't an automatic barrier to friendship, it just makes it harder to navigate. Like when there's a power imbalance and one of the two might feel pressured to give way to the other or suffer some consequences; like a boss and employee, or a student and teacher. That's hard to navigate, and it may mean that a decision has to be made about delaying the friendship.
That's the same with adults and minors. You can be friends with people that are pretty damn young, but it is a very tricky thing to manage. Often not worth the hassles for the older person, but it isn't inherently bad or weird solely because of the ages; it's the issue of propriety and power imbalance. It's damn near impossible to not influence someone that's younger, so making sure you do things right is complicated and requires enough energy that being friends instead of just a mentor and mentee is unlikely.
But online? That really reduces a lot of difficulty to begin with. You aren't having to deal with some of the little things that are barriers. It's just two people communicating, you don't have to worry about the things that are sometimes a difficulty in person
I think people have forgotten that generation gap friendships are good thing. They're never common, because overcoming that initial span where you need to have some reason to get together and become acquaintances first is a doozie. That's why friends from school (including college) are often very deep. You have enforced togetherness lol. You have a structure where you don't have to manufacture a reason to know each other and get together. By the time you're out of school, those formative bonds are in place to build on as you age together.
But it's a good thing when it happens. Diversity of friends in any way is a good thing. If we're only friends with people exactly like us, are we actually good friends at all? When our friends are different from us in some way or many ways, we can enrich each other all the more.
So, nah, y'all are both grown-ass men. Nothing weird at all.