Suspiciously wide age gaps were extremely common in the generations that preceded us, but that doesn’t make them okay.
We’ve moved past the days of expecting actual children to marry grown adults, but for far too many of our grandparents — and even parents — that’s a modern mindset. They were born into a time that didn’t see nearly as much of an issue with silly little things like age gaps, and one TikToker was recently horrified to discover that disposition within her own family.
We often neglect to do the math on our familial relationships until we’re a bit older, and the six year age gap between TikToker @frickleah’s grandparents isn’t even close to the worst out there. He’s no Al Pacino — who in 2023 welcomed a child with a woman three decades his junior — but grandpa @frickleah still got up to some shady dating in his time.
This was all revealed via a conversation between the titular TikToker and her 67-year-old grandmother, who recently divulged that she was only 16 when our original poster’s father was born. That’s a young age to have a child, to be sure, but it’s also not an uncommon one. The element that sent a shiver down @frickleah’s spine wasn’t her grandmother’s age, but her grandfather’s. Given that the man is now 73 to her grandma’s 67, that means he was 22 when his first child came into the world.
Again, it wasn’t considered nearly so creepy 50 years ago, when @frickleah’s grandparents were starting their family, but it’s still a disconcerting age gap. @frickleah’s grandmother was still a child herself when she welcomed her first little one, but her grandfather was at least stepping into adulthood. It seems predatory and discomfiting through a modern lens, but a close examination of the Silent Generation will expose a myriad of age gaps just like it.
Commenters, while still thoroughly creeped out by the revelation, were also quick to point out how comparatively minor @frickleah’s familial age gap was when others are considered. Several far more concerning gaps were revealed in the comment section, where people discussed the age gaps in their own family histories and pondered just how much of a gap is acceptable when discussing our elders.
“My grandma met my grandpa when she was 15 and he was 36,” one commenter noted, making @frickleah’s meager six year gap look like small potatoes. That’s not even as bad as another user, who gleefully detailed “guys my dad is 60 and my moms 37, been married 19 years.” That means their mother was just barely 18 when she married her 39-year-old spouse.
There were also plenty of horrified responses from TikTokers with much more approachable family age differences, many of whom piled onto ask if everyone else’s grandparents are okay. They were staggered by the eye-watering gaps detailed by a huge number of responders, and were quick to the note the months to meager years that separate their own family elders.
At the end of the day, it seems @frickleah’s grandparents — and many of the other grandparents noted in the comments — enjoyed long and healthy marriages despite the seemingly inappropriate ages at which they entered them. So long as they’re happy, we’re happy — even if we’ll be avoiding similar age gaps in our own relationships, from here on out.
