No. As a girl, when I was in high school I would see other girls date men that were well out of high school. Their relationships were legal, but there was no “love”. These men went for them because they had power over them. These girls were young and naive and the men saw that it and took advantage of it. Not all relationships are pure.
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What? I’ve never heard of that before. What is it?
The gist of it seems to be that if you take your age, divide it by two and add seven to the result, you’ll get the youngest age you can date without it being creepy.
For instance, the youngest partner for a 22-year-old would be 22/2 = 11, 11 + 7 = 18 years old, according to that rule.
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Ahhh. Thanks for explaining!
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Yes, it really is as simple as that. I know, I know. I’m hideously old-fashioned, but I believe all adults are adults, so any consenting relationship is perfectly fine.
As for kids in high school dating older people, that’s about kids, not adults.
As for professors being prohibited from dating university students, that’s only at a few US campuses, and the same goes for some companies. They can put in whatever rules they want to, including making people wear a red hat on Tuesday.
As far as I am aware, the only adult relationships LEGALLY prohibited are in the military between soldiers of differing ranks, and again, that’s only while you’re active duty. Retire from the military and it becomes perfectly legal.
Even for psychologists and psychiatrists, dating a patient is usually classified as unethical, not strictly illegal, although I believe it is actually illegal in a few places like New York. Oddly though, it’s perfectly legal (and ethical) to date your oncologist though.
As for writing games and real-life and what age differences between romantic partners that people consider cool or not-cool, that’s entirely subjective. Joe Biden (and Emmanuel Macron 
) certainly married someone far younger than he is, and some folks are cool with that and some not. YMMV.
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I know, I know, I’m a weird neo-puritanical American… but I think the way the rest of your post jumps around between “perfectly fine,” “perfectly legal,” and perfectly ethical suggests that it really might not be quite as simple as that.
Most of the discussion in this thread hasn’t been around what’s legal, so I can agree with you that most relationships with severely skewed power dynamics are perfectly legal and could still think they’re unethical, or un-fine, or (the main topic of the thread) not comfortable material for a self-immersion game.
My own personal view on the last point is that the wider the age gap gets, the more space and thought the author ought to give to exploring its consequences, whether unhealthy or positive. A great game could be made about a May-December romance, or a relationship with a skewed power dynamic that includes a big age gap… but the author had best be prepared to do it justice, not just throw it in as one option among many without any difference in consequence. I’m about to write at least one such relationship into my own game, and we’ll see how well I do.
Not just the US. It’s caused enough problems elsewhere that other countries have been looking to US-like solutions.
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Macron didn’t marry a woman who is younger than him, he married the teacher he had when he was 15 and in a class with her daughter.
Biden met his wife when she was 24. She was born in 1951, and they met in 1975. Their age difference is only like 9 years.
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it’s also always a matter of dynamics:
If there’s a 10+ years agegap, both characters are of legal age AND both have the same/close experience or better ‘awareness’ then it’s fine.
But if either character is completely blue-eyed towards anything relationshippy or has complete wrong expectations, and the other is aware of that and uses it for their own ends, NO.
If the other is cautious about it however, it can work.
In short: Whenever one character abuses the others inexperience/naivity/etc to their own ends, it’s a NO
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I like the ROs to be under 10 years age difference.
I agree with a lot of what’s been said. My addition would be to consider context, cultural and fictional.
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Fictionally, an elf may have a life span >250years. So, what’s 40yrs of age difference? In Greek mythology, Zeus was all but ageless but slept with mortal women. In sci-fi, a cyborg or AI pleasure-bot (Westworld) might be centuries old. Sorry if this seems nitpicky, but speculative fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, horror) seems to make up a large part of CoG/HG. (I should also have included a vampire example.)
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Culturally, life span has to be considered. Even in first-world countries, two hundred years ago, average age could fall somewhere in the 30s. Biological sexual maturity was a prime consideration. The cultural Christian aesthetic defines much of the prevalent sexual taboo, even in secular circles. But, let’s not forget, it’s more or less founded on the marriage of a girl as young as 13-14 (Mary) with a man in his 30s (Joseph). I’m not pro-incest or pro-pedophilia. I’m pro-context.
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well, pro-context then
- barely any of zeus’ ‘encounters’ were really consensual
- the context of these games being fictional, thus using ‘cultural context’ as excuse to have a sexual encounter with a 13 year old is a major NO, no matter how much you may rage and rave and rant about ‘cultural context’.
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True! And Zeus had a thing for animals too. In the Greek custom, it seems that, in the way that people were “above” animals, the gods were above people. So, a human killing an animal isn’t murder, but a human killing a human is. In the Greek tradition, gods didn’t always seem to morally or legally need consent from lesser life forms–people or animals. There’s no record of the Holy Spirit asking Mary’s permission before the immaculate conception.
Maybe I shouldn’t have entered into a heated conversation? I would think it’s apparent I’m not ranting, raving, or raging. As for the context of games being fictional, that cuts both ways. It’s not an excuse to do something, but it’s also not an excuse not to do something. It doesn’t actually happen either way. If the issue is too polar, you might consider it in the context of murder? There is a legal obligation in publishing–Game of Thrones had issues with this in the television series, but not the books. The ages of medieval marriages could be portrayed in text but not the screen. Sansa and Daenerys, for instance, were much younger than portrayed. I’m not vested in this argument. It’s just that, principally, “tolerance” seems to be very faddish–from place to place, time to time. Sorry if I’ve offended you in some way. @MeltingPenguins
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You might want to re-read the story. 
Mary consents. Fiat mihi secundum verbam tuum… they’ve been writing songs about it for centuries. And there’s no textual evidence for the age of either Mary or Joseph. Despite one tradition that she was a teenager, that’s not “the” Western cultural aesthetic; an image search for “Madonna and child” will turn up a dozen adult Marys for every teen. If you want to take civilizational context seriously and not just wield it to be provocative, it’ll need a little more care than you’ve been showing…
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(Slightly off topic, but it’s a bugbear) Despite what you see in ASOIAF and its like, in real life medieval marriages of girls that young were actually pretty rare! It was legal (with parental consent, I think), but generally happened in cases where it was really necessary for solidifying a political marriage or something, as in the case of Eleanor of Aquitaine. In Tudor England, the average age of first marriage was actually in the mid-twenties, and they considered old men marrying teenagers to be creepy (they were also well aware that very young mothers were more likely to have health issues in pregnancy)
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My words (you quoted them) say that the Holy Spirit didn’t ask permission. The passage you refer to in Luke has Mary speaking to an angel. Gabriel. Moreover, the response is to a command, not a question. Paintings also depict Jesus as fair skinned. Consensus, popularity, and tradition aren’t grounds for truth. And, there are extra-biblical texts which suggest Mary’s age. I am showing care. I am not trying to be provocative. People who find provocation might not be trying to understand or engage. I’m now also sorry if I’ve offended you. I just wanted to talk about something interesting. @Havenstone
@Scribblesome That’s interesting. I wonder if that age doesn’t decrease the further back you go? Do you know? Daenerys was married into a nomadic tribe. I know, from my own time in the Middle East, that tribal custom revolves largely around age of fertility. I’ve always wondered if Sansa’s North weren’t more an allusion to Russia rather than Tudor England–vast frozen wasteland. Do you know anything about the marriage customs of that region? Thanks for taking my words at face value.
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But in the case of the Zeus or Mary stories you’re explicitly talking about culture – about what was imagined and believed by most people, which is all about consensus, popularity and tradition. As @Scribblesome noted, it’s a common mistake to think that medieval European culture (to say nothing of “the” cultural Christian aesthetic more broadly) normalized the marriage of very young girls. Lifespan notwithstanding, most non-nobles married in their twenties, not their teens, as people did in plenty of other agrarian societies with low life expectancy worldwide. (There have of course also been societies where teen and pre-teen marriage was more common – they’re just not as common or as causally connected with short lifespan as many people assume.)
Most people in that culture didn’t depict or think of Mary as a young teen – that was a minority cultural current. Whether she “really” was or not is both unknowable (there’s no compelling reason to think we have texts written by anyone who met her, certainly not the extra-Biblical ones) and irrelevant to the point you raised.
Your words followed on from “gods didn’t always seem to morally or legally need consent from lesser life forms,” so I figured pointing out the consent in the story would be relevant. You’re right that nothing in the story is phrased as a permission request, but mistaken to suggest that it’s phrased as a command. I don’t see anything in the imperative after “be not afraid.” It’s an announcement of things intended to come; the question of what would have happened if Mary had resisted or fled rather than assenting doesn’t come into the text, but the mainsteam tradition has seen her acceptance as both real and important.
Don’t read me as offended, please – I’m not at all. Just trying to help you in your goal of being pro-context.
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Okay, whew! 
To clarify, my use of “consensus, popularity, and tradition” in the OP was about the depiction of Jesus as Caucasian and/or of Mary as a post-teen mother. I agree that societal norms are precisely dictated by that list, but I wouldn’t call them “truths.” Like, it can be true that most Americans find that xyz is creepy, but not “true” that xyz is creepy. Something definable and measurable, like skin color or birthing age, I would see as closer to having a truth. Maybe “objective fact” is a better descriptor? If it matters, I think there is census data which you can reverse engineer from the date of the data to determine Mary’s age. I’m not hung up on the point. Herodotus’ accounts have been used to back up Jesus’ existence, despite being extrabiblical.
Re: immaculate conception. Immediately following “be not afraid” (v.30) comes what I interpreted to be a directive (v.31): “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.” I’m open to the idea that it isn’t. But, I maintain that the HS (which did the conceiving) didn’t speak with her and that there wasn’t a question involved. I’m not implying anything beyond it. Way back, I was using it as an example of how things are more complicated and relative than can be easily judged. Just because the gods (Greek or Christian) didn’t say their own acts were “sin,” doesn’t mean that I, personally, think they aren’t wrong. On the contrary, U.S. courts would (possibly) contest Mary’s ability to give consent.
I think this is a really important conversation. Much of the draw of IF seems to be romance. And, much of the IF material seems to deal with either history, other cultures, or fantasies (I clumped mythologies with elves and cyborgs). That’s my longwinded way of saying thanks for talking to me about things my neighbors would punch me in the face for even thinking of. 
@Havenstone
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Hm perhaps it should be mentioned that only because a marriage was legal, that does not mean such a marriage was normal.
In Germany the avarage age in 1700 was about 27-28.
For the middleages in europe historians mention that Common folks married later than nobility because for a marriage people had to have enough money for a Family, so the age would be over 20, too.
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Half my age plus 7 would be the youngest I feel comfortable with, or twice my age minus 7 for older. I know it’s a silly rule, but like it works. 20 feels too young for me, but not creepy, and 45 is certainly pushing it, but I can see it being tolerable.
You started out talking about the “cultural Christian aesthetic” and how it continues to shape attitudes and taboos. I think that’s the right thing to be focusing on here, rather than objective but unrecoverable facts of history. We know Jesus wasn’t Scandinavian looking; we don’t know what shade of brown he actually was; but we can also know lots of facts about the cultural impact of the widespread depiction of him as a blond white guy, and we could I think have a much more interesting conversation about that (on another thread!) than we could about his fundamentally unknowable actual skin tone.
Whatever Mary’s age was, European culture has been slightly shaped by traditions and depictions of her as a teen and much more shaped (I’ve been arguing) by depictions of her as an adult mother. The songs people sang, stories they told, and pictures they painted of her-- that’s what matters when it comes to how it affected their thinking on age gaps in relationships.
The historic fact of Mary’s age is unknowable – even if we could cleverly work out the average age of first marriage in 1st century Nazareth, believe me, there’s no contemporary evidence of which side of that average Jesus’s mother might have been. Her actual age is also kind of irrelevant to the impact of Christian culture on age taboos – the culture has been driven by how people imagined Mary, regardless of the historical validity of those imaginings. (And btw I think you mean Josephus and/or Tacitus rather than Herodotus.)
“You will conceive” is predictive, not imperative. I agree that nothing in the story is framed as a question, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not a story about consent being sought. We could talk more about what it means for an angel to appear and whether that simply is how God speaks to people in these stories… but I think that would derail the thread further.
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