When I was 16 I dated a few guys, not for very long. The youngest was 17 and the eldest was 24. At the time I don't think I would have gone much past 24 to be honest - maybe a year or two but I think I would have probably thought that we wouldn't have had a great deal in common if it was pushed much past that.
When I was 17 I met my husband. He was 24 when we met. We had a lot in common - okay I was in sixth form college, and he wasn't, but he knew a lot of students, and we had (and still have) similar interests and so on, so it was fine.
I'm 30 now and he's 37. We are very similar, and really, who would bat an eyelid at two people in their 30s being together? But some people thought it was odd when I was 17 and he was 24. To this day I'm not sure why. I wasn't particularly immature at 17 - I mean hell, I became a mother at 21, so I'm no stranger to being responsible from what today's society deems a "young" age.
I'm not even sure why people think late teens is young anyway. Like I said, it's today's society. Push the years back several decades, and people found it quite normal to get married at 18 and start a family soon after. It wasn't considered strange at all. Nowadays though you get people living with their parents all through their 20s, and even 30s in some cases, as though they were still teenagers.
You see it even with kids these days - tell someone you leave your 9 year old child at home for an hour unsupervised whilst you go shopping, and they look at you as though you're leaving a 2 month old baby. NEGLECT! OMG!
It's absolutely ridiculous.
Again, wind the clock back a generation-and-a-half, and a child of 9 was letting themselves in after school with their own key whilst their parents worked, and cooking their own damned dinner!
My own parents left school at 15 and went to work. Why? Because that's what was normal.
I hear it too often - "I'd never leave my "child" alone overnight until they're 18". "I'd never let my 7 year old play outside the house unsupervised." etc. etc. It's the helicopter parenting that seems so prevalent these days, and in turn that's filtering down into the younger generations, who now feel themselves that they're still children when they're in their 20s.
It's completely bonkers.
I treat my children the way my generation was treated. At 8 my mother would go to work part-time and leave me at home for up to 3 hours unsupervised. At 11 I was allowed to take the bus with friends and go to town (20 minutes bus ride away).
Ya know what? So were TONS of other people in my year at school.
At 13 I was babysitting other peoples kids, in their own home, and yes I was totally in charge all by myself. At 16 I was dating a 24 year old. At 17 I was engaged. At 21 I was married and had a baby.
And guess what? That's not weird.
What's weird is the way people mollycoddle and helicopter parent all the damned time these days. What's weird is how people think a 16 year old and a 23/24 year old have nothing in common, because a 16 year old is "soooooo young", they're "still a child". Good God. Maybe that's true because people TREAT them that way!
/epic rant