Wife worries when 36-year-old husband of 8 years lies about buying dinner for 19-year-old classmate after returning to school: '[He] took her out for her birthday dinner and paid $78 for it'

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Mar 3, 2025 12:00 PM EST

I remember being in university lectures and having fellow students who were much older. I remember thinking about just how old they were, being in their early 30s or so, compared to me at 19-20 years old. That 10-year gap seemed impossibly huge to me and it was hard for me to think about how we could possibly be doing the same thing at such different points in our lives.

I've thought about this throughout the years, and at some point accepted that I was just naive. Now I realize that while naivety was involved, I was actually on the right track, but not necessarily in the way that I thought I was.

It wasn't that those in their 30s were old—well, maybe they were… but I like to think, now in my 30s, that it was more so that I had so little experience that I couldn't conceptualize that age difference and what it really meant. When you're in your late teens and early 20s, practically every day, week, month, and year has been different for you for your entire life, and it's impossible for you to conceptualize that being any different than it has been.

Then you hit someone in the range of 25-28 and your frontal lobe develops, you settle into your career and it's as if time has frozen while also silently slipping past you. With it, the nuances of popular culture and their urgency and the importance they once offered your life blend into a blur of cyclical trends with cynical driving forces and insistent vapid emptiness. And, before you know it, you're in your 30s and thinking about going back to school and wondering what it would be like to be the mature student and on the other side of the whole thing.

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"I’m not cool with him hanging out after school or talking online/social media to 19 year old women. It doesn’t sit right with me."

via Andrej Lišakov

_{The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.}
The point here is that if you're thinking of going back to school at any age, you shouldn't let it stop you, but you should also take into consideration what your relative age and experience in the world means when sparking up relationships of any sort with your much younger peers.
Here we reach the point of the fact that I truthfully don't know what I'd talk to someone in their late teens or early 20s about. What might their interests be? Their concerns? Would we share anything in common that would prove a mutual interest? Outside of things pertaining to what they might be following in internet culture, I wouldn't have a clue.
Still, it doesn't mean that trying to fit in and strike up conversation is necessarily wrong either, but there are definitely lines and boundaries there somewhere even without age gaps being involved. Making friends with your "peers" is fine in some sort of sense, but by the time you've reached the point where you're secretly paying for a young woman's dinner and lying about it to your spouse, you're already chest deep in bad decisions driven by questionable ethics. As was this woman's partner, who she discovered had been developing a closer relationship with one of his classmates than he had been forthcoming about.
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"AITA for asking my 36m partner not to have 19f friends"

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_{The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.}
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$The h l it isn't!! What he does affects you. You have a big stake in this relationship. You are NTA but your husband partner...he is definitely TA and it sounds. like he's trying to re-live his youth...without you. :\ You're right, you can't just tell him to not hang out/talk to them. You can, however, adjust your behavior in light of what he's doing.$

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Wife worries when 36-year-old husband of 8 years lies about buying dinner for 19-year-old classmate after returning to school: '[He] took her out for her birthday dinner and paid $78 for it'

"I’m not cool with him hanging out after school or talking online/social media to 19 year old women. It doesn’t sit right with me."

"AITA for asking my 36m partner not to have 19f friends"

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