the pain gap - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess

immediately after i turned eighteen, i started going on a lot of dates with men in their early-to-mid-twenties. this is one of those things that doesn't seem like a big deal when you're eighteen but the second you become not-eighteen you’re like what the fuck!!! the distance between eighteen and everything else is perilous and insurmountable, but nobody tells you that until you’re twenty. at the time, though, i was not yet not-eighteen, and so i remember feeling a buried sense of pride at the fact that i was dating real guys, with real jobs, who had lived big, expansive lives beyond my reckoning — surely it implied that there was something real and big inside of me too. i was certain that i was mature enough to handle it, or at least certain that i wanted to be and determined to learn through experience (there is a sickeningly pervasive idea in our culture, by the way, that a young woman can only become interesting and complex by experiencing untold quantities of pain — and so we seek

immediately after i turned eighteen, i started going on a lot of dates with men in their early-to-mid-twenties. this is one of those things that doesn't seem like a big deal when you're eighteen but the second you become not-eighteen you’re like what the fuck!!! the distance between eighteen and everything else is perilous and insurmountable, but nobody tells you that until you’re twenty. at the time, though, i was not yet not-eighteen, and so i remember feeling a buried sense of pride at the fact that i was dating real guys, with real jobs, who had lived big, expansive lives beyond my reckoni