Fourteen and in love with a nineteen-year-old

It’s totally normal that girls fall in love with older boys. Crushes come and go without anyone directing them, and girls are often obsessed with older boys and easily fall in love with them.

It’s not abnormal for people of different ages to be friends or to date, but if the gap is big then there will be challenges. Age differences can be big when you are young, but the difference will seem less when you’re older. So an age difference of one to three years is quite normal, but when your friend is fourteen then three years can be a much too big age difference, and even more so when the gap is five years. That is because people are developing so much at this time – they develop and mature very quickly at this stage. The older people are, the less significant the age difference will be.

When one person is fourteen and the other is nineteen, they are at totally different stages in life. Your friend is still in junior high school, while the guy is almost finished college. This means that they are at different stages of life and have different interests and social circles. When a person is nineteen they are allowed to do things that a fourteen-year-old can’t do, so this may mean that she is pressured to do things she is not ready for, because she doesn't want to be a party-pooper. She might think it’s cool to be with older teenagers, and she might be tempted to do almost anything to fit in. This can include partying, smoking, drinking, nightlife, sex and so on. Even if the boy is a committed Christian who wouldn’t pressure his girlfriend to join in these things, the best thing to do is to just put the crush on hold, don’t encourage it and let it just pass. We would not recommend teenagers to date someone so much older.