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Right, but wanting to date a more established man doesn’t necessarily mean the relationship will be healthy or functional. Obviously, they’re two consenting adults so they’re free to make their own choices. The question is how likely it is to be functional and healthy in the long run. Take an established 35 year old man specifically seeking out 18 year old girls. Or even flip the genders. Do you really think that’s likely to produce a healthy relationship? Think Leo DiCaprio’s pattern of dating younger women, then dumping them for the next 18 year old once they reach 25. Many of those women may fit the description you’re giving, but that doesn’t negate the dysfunction caused by such a significant gap in maturity and power. I’m not saying these relationships can’t work. My point is simply that consent alone doesn’t make a relationship healthy, and such a large age and power imbalance makes a healthy dynamic less likely.

I don’t doubt that, but this is not the life of the average 18 year old almost anywhere in the world. By and large, 18-21 year-olds are going to be spending time with other 18-21 year-olds. Of course there are exceptions, but we’re talking about averages here. Seeing a few 18-year-olds on a yacht and generalising from that to how people in that age group typically socialise is flawed reasoning. Your average 18-21 year-old friend group probably doesn’t want a 35-year-old regularly hanging around with them. And the average 35-year-old probably doesn’t want to spend their free time hanging around with a bunch of 18-year-olds either. I’m not saying these social circles never overlap. I’m saying that the examples you’re describing are exceptions rather than a representation of how most people actually socialise. And you don’t address the main point I’m making either, which is that regardless of how and who you socialise with the difference in maturity and life experience between a 35 year old and an 18 year old is vast, far too vast to build a solid relationship in most cases. The social circle is just one example of that, but there is no shortage of others. On average: 18 year old has little or no prior experience being in relationships 18 year old has little or no financial independence 18 year old has a much less developed sense of personal identity 18 year old has little experience with conflict resolution 18 year old has little experience with independence 18 year old has little experience with long term planning And this list took me about 30 seconds to come up with, I could keep going.

These are closely and intricately linked.

Men are emotionally abusive too. It’s not unique to women. And the rates of physical abuse towards women are still pretty high too.

Because a man in his 30s and a girl who is 18 have essentially zero shared life experience upon which to build a functional relationship. Imagine the 18 year old going to high school or college parties and bringing her 35 year old boyfriend along? Or the 18 year old coming along to weddings with the 35 year old? The typical social lives of these two people is quite incompatible. You would struggle to merge your lives together in a way that is required for a healthy relationship to blossom. If they wanna fuck and it’s consensual without any fucked up power dynamic? Sure, go for it. But building a functional relationship with that kind of age gap, where both people are at such fundamentally different parts of their lives? Very hard to make it work. On top of that it’s pretty likely that the 35 year old trying to date 18 year olds is aiming to abuse the power and development disparity, so there are potentially ethical concerns too. When you fully enter the adult world around 23-25 it becomes more doable. A 25 year old and a 40-50 year old for example is more doable despite the age difference being larger. It certainly wouldn’t immediately raise red flags purely for the age difference like it would with an 18 year old. Though it obviously is still much more likely to be dysfunctional than a smaller age gap relationship.

The chance of dysfunctional power dynamics definitely increases with age gap. It’s basically impossible for an 80 year old and an 18 year old to ever have a functional relationship, for example. Honestly it’s probably even pretty close to impossible for an 18 year old and a 30+ year old to have a functional relationship. With something like a 25 year old and a 50 year old it’s very much on the line. Possible to be functional? Yes. But likely to be functional? Not at all So age gap can serve as an indicator of dysfunction, even if it isn’t always a guarantee.

We have these too, most still do a very thorough assessment and are relatively regulated. At least here. I’m sure there are exceptions though if you hunt around for specific clinics that are a bit sketchy. Right, but if you want to solve this problem it is necessary to know what the root cause is. I’m glad this worked for you, but this is not guaranteed to work for everybody. If you’ve ever met someone with severe ADHD or Autism, eating anti-inflammatory food is not going to solve those issues. It may help to a degree, but it won’t solve them. What? I have no idea what you mean here Because kindergarteners have zero responsibility, so the impact of ADHD on their lives is fairly limited on them. Even in most of school, you don’t have that much responsibility so a lot of ADHD goes under diagnosed, especially in women. This is particularly relevant for the inattentive scale of ADHD which produces daydreamers, versus the hyperactive scale which produces the stereotypical chaotic badly behaved kids.

Also, to be clear, I agree diet exercise and sleep are all important. But you have to understand that maintaining these things can be incredibly difficult if you have broken reward circuitry from something like ADHD. In many cases, meds significantly help those with ADHD maintain consistent healthy habits.

Where was this? In most of the Western world, ADHD assessments are pretty thorough, and one of the defining characteristics is that symptoms must have been present before around age 12. If that’s not the case, they’re unlikely to attribute your issues to ADHD and will instead look at other explanations, like lifestyle factors. In your friend’s case, it’s entirely possible he got a legitimate diagnosis and, for whatever reason, medication just doesn’t work for him. That’s not particularly uncommon. There’s also a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem with ADHD and dopamine. Dysfunctional reward circuitry → seek dopamine → eat tasty food → potentially worsen reward regulation → seek more dopamine → eat more shit food, and so on. So you have to ask whether his dysfunctional reward circuitry is causing him to eat like shit, or whether eating like shit is contributing to the dysfunction. What’s the root cause? In my case, I’ve eaten pretty well throughout adulthood and always exercised consistently. Yet I still couldn’t reliably get the things I needed to do done, or maintain focus on anything I didn’t find particularly engaging. This was a massive problem at work, where I’d constantly jump between tasks and make silly mistakes. Since starting medication five months ago, I’ve been promoted, and several coworkers specifically highlighted in my recent feedback that my work and mindset over the past six months have been outstanding. I rarely make silly mistakes anymore, and I’ve been working on a single long-term project for three months without losing motivation. So I kind of struggle to see the downside. I was already a healthy person with a solid routine, yet no matter what I did, I just didn’t have the focus or mental bandwidth to achieve what I wanted to. Medication has made that possible. I struggle to see any explanation other than ADHD in my own case, especially considering I had most, if not all, of the markers of inattentive ADHD throughout childhood, going back to around age seven.

This is like saying “Autism? That’s just bad social skills. Have you tried talking to people?” The problem with the “just use willpower” argument for ADHD is that the part of your brain that is responsible for willpower is dysfunctional. Imagine it took you 5x the willpower just to do basic tasks like go for a walk and eat healthy, and how exhausting that would be over time. And while diet and exercise definitely help, the single biggest factor impacting the effects of ADHD is sleep quality. Also, plenty of people with ADHD are quite well behaved as kids, especially if they’re more on the inattentive side of the spectrum vs hyperactive, so that immediately discounts your final theory. All of this is to say, respectfully, you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

Jesus christ dude. I almost have sympathy for how emotionally fucked up you are. But I’m also thinking more and more that you’re just trolling. It feels like every post is specifically crafted to produce outrage, but not be so wild that it becomes obvious you’re trolling. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, the first sentence of this reply holds.

I think that’s fair. I’m not entirely convinced you’ve left that behind though, at least from the impression I get on this forum

What are the bad parts that you have left, in your opinion?

Same. The analogy I’d use is that for most of my life, I’d choose to dig six oddly shaped 1ft-deep holes instead of one perfectly rectangular 6ft-deep hole. The gravedigger analogy, lol. Maybe occasionally I’d manage to dig an almost rectangular 3ft hole, but I’d never quite follow through enough to produce that neat, solid 6ft hole that so many other people seem capable of digging. And that becomes a huge problem when life requires you to do one specific thing, do it well, and see it through to completion. Like, you know, an actual gravedigger would be expected to do. It feels good to tell yourself, “Well, being a generalist with a wide range of knowledge is valuable too.” And to a degree, it absolutely is, depending on the field you’re in. But it comes with sooo many downsides. Most notably, you end up coming across as a smart person who knows a lot about a lot of things, but has relatively little to show for it. Everyone assumes you should be successful because you seem knowledgeable and capable, but in practice, that knowledge is often spread so thinly across so many things that you struggle to turn it into anything that provides sustainable long term value to others. On meds, I can actually get things done to completion, for the most part. I can consistently dig a 5 or 6ft hole and make it pretty neat and tidy. And the nice thing is, I haven’t lost the ability to dig a few random 1ft holes along the way, just for the fun of exploring. I can still indulge that curiosity, but it no longer has to come at the expense of actually finishing the thing I set out to do. On another note, I suspect the polymaths of old still had massive follow through. I’ve met people with this polymath kind of mindset today, and they’re as far from ADHD as possible. They start one project, see it through to completion, then start the next and see it through to completion. And they never stop. Over time they build up such a wide array of deep knowledge, but it’s not done in this “jumping around” manner we get from ADHD. It’s built through consistency, follow through, focus, and execution applied to a wide variety of fields. And somehow they maintain the energy and consistency over time. It’s insane to me. The two people I have met like this seem borderline superhuman to me. Everything they touch turns to gold.

What meds did they prescribe you at the time? A couple of my friends who tried the classic ADHD meds like Ritalin and adderal found them too intense, but had excellent experiences with Vyvanse (lisdexamphetamine). It’s a slow release pro-drug that essentially converts into stimulants slowly in your bloodstream over 14hrs, so it doesn’t have that intense hit feeling. For first week or so it can have that, but once you settle down into it it’s a very subtle feeling you barely even notice, yet the benefits remain. I also cannot speak highly enough of it. I would go as far as to say it has changed my life in the past 5 months.