Every week in youth group, my husband starts the evening by asking “Who has the best story of the day?” Students get to share things that happened – and the story that won this week was the announcement that two of them had started dating. They were sitting a little closer to each other than normal.

So after the expected “what?!!”-s and “oooooooohhhhhh!”-s, I asked the guy if he was going into high school next year. He isn’t. She is.

Then I wondered, “Is that considered robbing the cradle?”

So I started thinking out loud to one of my sweet senior girls and defining “robbing the cradle” a la Jett.

• It’s “robbing the cradle” when you bridge certain gaps: high schooler dating a middle schooler or a college student dating a high school student (and creepy old guys dating younger girls…and vice-versa, I guess).
• Age doesn’t matter as much as grade level. For example, a fifteen-year-old dating a fourteen-year-old isn’t as weird as a ninth grader dating an eighth grader. Back to the school gap, again.

And then I realized that none of this really matters anyway because the majority of teenage relationships don’t last long enough for it to be an issue.

Weigh in: is it weird to date someone in another grade system? Is there an age where you feel it would be inappropriate to date someone (ex: 50 year old man with a 21 year old girl)?

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