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When I was 19, I started sleeping with a 29-year-old man who thought he was incredibly charming in a sort of post-ironic, tortured-intellectual kind of way. I mostly just thought he was old.
The age gap wasn’t a huge deal at first. If anything, I got a kick out of teasing him for it. I’d call him grandpa every time he used punctuation in a text. When he pulled a muscle getting out of bed, I’d hand him Voltaren like a nurse in a wartime field hospital. He pretended to be offended. I pretended to be impressed when he talked about his first existential crisis. It was a delicate balance.
The last time I went over to his place, he was curled up watching a grainy black-and-white war documentary on YouTube. Not a sleek Netflix production – I’m talking serious Cold War vibes, with that crackly narration in a mid-Atlantic accent and old trumpet music playing in the background. Nazi flags waving. Marching. Very educational.
Naturally, I started to make fun of him.
“Really leaning into the geriatric fantasy tonight, huh?” I said.
He laughed, and then, completely unprompted, said:
“Well, now you’ve earned the privilege of watching it while we fuck.”
(It was clearly a joke. I think.)
So we did. Vanilla sex, missionary. Nothing worth writing home about, except that every time I looked over his shoulder, I was met with the sight of goose-stepping soldiers and swastikas flapping in the wind. There’s nothing quite like a WWII propaganda reel to snap you back to reality mid-thrust.
That was, as you can probably guess, the last time we engaged in such activities. Something about being filled by a man while a Nazi parade marched across the screen behind him really crystallised the age gap for me.
He was always trying to play the long game – dropping little lines like, “Are you sure there aren’t any feelings involved?” As if the occasional weird sex and two free drinks would be enough to make me fall in love. No, sir.
Our friends-with-benefits situation quietly downgraded to what I now refer to as “acquaintance with disadvantages.”
Lesson of the Week: If a man invites you over and puts on a war documentary before sex, leave. Unless it’s Shrek 2 in 240p, he is not the one.