How's that for an eloquent response?
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There's something else that I want to talk about, also. I did not get a lot of sleep last night; I will try not to meander.
When I talk about the age gap between me and you or other people your age, I am not drawing from personal experience of having dated older people when I was younger. I have never dated an older person. I don't know whether or not I would have if I hadn't spent most of my life in a small state where there's not much variety. I have never had difficulty attracting people, but that can be a problem, particularly when you're young and you don't realize that most of the people who are trying to hug you aren't trying to hug your personality.
What I'm thinking about when I'm saying "I'm too old for you" is partially about what I look like, and it's not an insecurity that reassurance can fix. It's actually not an insecurity. I liked how I looked when I was young, and I would probably choose to look that way for the rest of my life if I could, but I am getting used to aging. I don't know what aging is like for other people. For me, the most emotionally painful years were when I started to look less youthful. I don't know what metaphor to use other than a house being torn down. What you have thought of as being inseparable from who you are for 15 to 20 years turns out to be a temporary dwelling over which you have no control. Human beings might not be the smartest animals on the planet about aging; why we all think we'll be able to avoid it is a mystery.
Now that I definitely look older (when customer service people call me "Miss" instead of "Ma'am" it feels like a holiday that falls on leap year), and have for enough years that how I look now is what I think of as me, I am less anguished. I have to live my life. I don't want to spend all of my time worrying about something that is only going to get worse every day until I die. If I did that, I wouldn't be able to think of jokes such as telling you that my eyesight has started to change over the past year. I have needed glasses for nearsightedness since I was in elementary school. The good news is that I will never need bifocals. The bad news is that when I'm wearing glasses or contacts, I have to hold things away from me to read them. The joke that I thought of while I've been thinking about what to say to you is that if I dated you, you'd be looking into my eyes and I'd have to ask you to back up.
Again, I don't know about other people my age, but I'm a tactile dater. I touch the person whom I'm dating a lot; it's not a friendship or a business arrangement. I need to feel compatible with that person, and not just for sex. I think that I would feel gross pawing someone your age. I would feel like I always had to be mindful of not making you look at or be touched by my elderly pieces.
It works better in the movies.
https://youtu.be/SFzxuEm9MyM
Maybe I should say that it did work better in the movies, when not everyone who worked in the movies was a moron.
Then there's the emotional side, which I think is especially pertinent to my situation. It is not nice of older people when they have tragedies to which they make younger people hostages. You cannot make up to me everything that life ever put me through, and I don't want to sap your youth by asking or allowing you to try.
I also don't want to be that person, particularly not in the context of dating: a tragic heroine who's been through so much, enjoys reading, walking, build average to could-be-athletic, lots of deep thoughts but can be silly upon request, send an email to me at this dating site if you'd like to know more! Yeah. No.
Unfortunately, I have had a significant amount of tragedy and nothing erases that from someone's life. Tragedy is something that you live with; that's the hardest thing about it. Regardless of how you're coping with it, it doesn't go away. I expend a lot of energy making myself move forward with my life; there are still times when I think about what a relief it would be to be diagnosed with a terminal illness. That's not a joke. I have those thoughts.
A much younger person, in an intimate relationship, can't help being psychologically influenced by the older person. I don't want to take over someone else's life, and that is what would happen. I don't have infinite strength; nobody does.
You have responsibility for your decisions, but not for everything that has ever happened to me. I think that neither of us would be able to remember that if we were dating. The distress which has been observable to you from my writing and talking and from the illicit information-gathering which the conglomerate is nefariously normalizing is not the full extent of what I feel. If I have ever upset you with things which you have read or heard from my blogs, think about those things as if they are souvenirs from the site of a disaster. The entertainment industry likes to romanticize that type of thing, but nothing could be less romantic, more sad, more bitter, or more potentially destructive.