Cringe & Facepalm

my husband started a job a few months ago. its a night shift job, and they sometimes stay long enough to interact with the opening staff. this morning he was in the break room for a quick drink before finishing up for the day. the coworker asked if he was married as she noticed his wedding band, and followed it up by asking how old he was, commenting that he looked too young to be married. he told her that he was 24, and that we have been happily married for 5 years. she said “so you were 19 when you got married?” and my husband responded “yes, i was 19, almost 20, and my spouse had just turned 20.”

she said “so you were groomed.” he said “… no? we were both over 18 when we got married, and its a 5 month age gap. we were both definitely adults.” she said “thats exactly what someone who was groomed would claim.”

she kept pushing at it, saying the small age gap and 18+ facts didnt matter, and that it was disgusting that a 20 year old would marry “a teenager.” he pushed back as well, saying that it definitely wasnt grooming. she was incredibly insistent and was making snide remarks about me. here’s the comment she reported him for: “even if it was grooming- which it wasnt- i would do it all over again the same way because its worked out great so far.”

after the conversation ended and my husband got back to work, she approached him informed him that she had called hr to report him. he said “sounds good, ill be giving them a call myself because your behavior was inappropriate.” she ignored him and stomped off.

after he got off work, he called to report her as well. hr thanked him for calling before they had to call him. apparently she told them exactly what happened, and they were really confused as to why she was coming out of this thinking she was the wronged party. he apologized for making the comment and told them he knew it wasnt work appropriate, but that he was beginning to get angry about the way she was talking about his spouse, and responded without thinking. the hr rep said he understood, and that it was an inappropriate response, but it wasnt anything worth being punished over. they did, however, ask him if he wanted to follow through on a complaint against her, because her commenting that aggressively about me and accusing both me and him of really serious things was behavior that was punishable. he told them he would.

we both find this super baffling, mostly because we both come from a small town in a deep southern state, where young marriages are very common. we’re currently in a larger city in a western state, and while we’ve gotten comments or questions on our young marriage, nobody has ever mentioned anything about grooming over a 5 month age gap.

I don't know how to link the original post or if it is even possible.

I didn't expect this to blow up like it has, certainly didn't expect over a thousand comments. I have tried to read them all, and some were very creative and amusing to read. First of all, we don’t want to hurt anyone or alienate our neighbors. We just don't want people using our pool without permission and we don't want the liability associated with this activity.

A few things I feel I need to clarify. Yes, our backyard is fully fenced in with two gates. One in back is double locked from the inside, the side gate on the side of garage nearest the neighbors in question has a double latch that you have to reach over the top and find not one but two releases to open the gate. There is also an auto-close that automatically closes the gate and latches it. I personally can't open the gate from the outside of the fence because I can't reach over that far to reach the two latches. The previous owner put this in and it has worked well for our yard crew and the pool maintenance people. We do have some cameras, a doorbell camera and a camera over our garage area. The garage camera picks-up if someone goes towards the gate from the front, but we didn't want to invade our neighbors privacy by recording their side garage door and gate to their backyard. We even shared the camera angle with them because we didn't want them to be concerned about us recording their children or their coming and going. I guess we were more concerned about their privacy than they were about ours.

Anyway the update, Thursday, July 4th morning, I was loading a few things in my vehicle to take to my cousin who just got out of the hospital. Neighbor/husband, who has been gone a lot for work recently, saw me and came over and asked if I was getting a late start going to the lake. I let him know that we were staying home because we are helping my cousin who just got out of the hospital. He asked if we were going to be home all weekend, I said yes one or both of us be around all weekend. He quickly wished me a happy 4th and went home. I went back in to grab my purse and tell my husband about the conversation with the neighbor before I left.

When I got home our friend, Mike was there. Mike does security cameras and home automation systems (gadgets) and my husband loves gadgets. Mike and my husband have a plan for multiple cameras and several gadgets. Some of which involve us going ahead and having the pool opened. I agreed to all but one of the new cameras and almost all of the gadgets, I think husband put some in the plan knowing he would have to give up a few of them. Mike also suggested talking to our homeowners insurance agent because we might be able to get some discounts with the security upgrades.

So on Friday the 5th, Tom, our insurance guy comes over and Mike is back and he has a drone to help him find the best camera positions. Really I think he just wanted show off his gadget. So husband, Mike and Tom are outside and all around the house and occasionally inside. I look outside every so often and at different times other neighbors have come outside and down to our end of the street.

So neighbors want to know what is going on, so husband tells them we are concerned that someone or several people may have used our pool without our permission while we were not home. It turns out that two different neighbors had witnessed some friends of the neighbor children come over last year and they and the neighbor twins had gone into our backyard. One neighbor even asked the girls and they claimed that we let them come over all the time and use our pool.

So at this point husband and Tom discuss this and Tom says we should send a registered letter to the neighbors resciending our permission from entering our fenced-in backyard.

So before Mike and Tom left, the neighbors on the right (pool party neighbors) come home, both husband and wife. My husband asks to talk to them, and with Mike and Tom as witnesses he tells them that for insurance reasons we are resciending our permission for them or any member of their family or guests, to enter our fenced-in backyard. And we will be sending a registered letter stating this as requested by our insurance. Husband never accused them or their children of using our pool but said we had reason to believe that in the past our pool had been used without our permission. He did say that we had reason to believe that their older children might be friends with someone who has been in our pool.

Husband also told them that we are changing the gate to have an automated lock and cameras will be installed around the pool area. He also assured them that we avoid the cameras pointed at their windows or backyard. Husband indicated that we were taking these measures to hopefully lower our homeowners insurance rates. Husband said that they exchanged a few looks between them but they said they understood and appreciated the heads-up.

So hopefully this saga is over, but if there are any other updates I will try and post them.

When I was a teenager, I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome (now called Level 1 Autism Spectrum Disorder) and sent to a special school where I got formal social skills training. The assumption was that if I couldn't pick up social skills by osmosis, I could learn them by rote, the way you learn to play an instrument. I had a rotating cast of teachers and therapists, but most of them were Boomers or Xers. This gave me unusual opportunities to talk to older generations in depth about how they viewed and navigated the everyday social world.

One thing that came up again and again was that Boomers were taught to interact with men and women in completely different ways during their childhoods in the 1950s and 1960s. It's not just the obvious stuff, like holding doors and saying "sir" or "ma'am"; tone of voice is different, eye contact is different, handshakes are different, "soft" vs. "firm" word choice is a thing, and so on. Boomers essentially have four books of social scripts in their heads: man interacting with women, man interacting with men, woman interacting with women, and women interacting with men. Some of the content of these (internal, mostly unconscious) books is so divergent it could describe the social norms of different civilizations. It's no coincidence that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus became a runaway bestseller when Boomers were of reproductive age.

Therefore, when a Boomer cannot tell what's in your pants just by looking at you or your email signature, they experience a gut-wrenching moment of social anxiety. They don't know how to act. They don't know how to relate.

Millennials and younger grew up in a world with more women's equality in the workplace -- thanks in large part to the work of Boomer feminists (let us give credit where it's due.) Having gender-neutral interaction scripts is an important professional skill. If a 25-year-old encounters a physically androgynous or nonbinary person, they have lots of gender-neutral programming to draw on to keep the interaction running smoothly, even if their political or religious beliefs are not aligned. This is not true of Boomers, whose socialization took "are you a boy or a girl?" as possibly the single most important question that had to be 100% resolved before even the most casual conversation.

After the humbling experience of being packed off to autism school, I find it easy to admit when I'm experiencing social anxiety or feel unmoored in a social situation. Most Boomers are too proud for that. So they huff and puff and rage and blame wokeness for putting too many androgynous people in their orbit, and they demand to know what's in your pants in situations where it's not remotely appropriate to ask. Even liberal Boomers who support binary MTF/FTM trans people get visibly flustered over they/them pronouns. They could use some social skills training of their own.

Literally at graduation for my masters program my mom and step dad made the "joke"...."well good thing you're gonna make a bunch of money, cause you're our retirement plan". It makes my blood boil they lived through the best economy America has ever seen and apparently have....only social security....to live off of? What happened?!

Same people who get cold calls from companies offering discounts and gift cards for signing up family members (MLM adjacent) so he gets a 50$ gift card when I sign up....and calls it a favor to me. Can't do anything for anyone unless there's something in it for them....just baffling.

A boomer relative called my wife and me spoiled for not rushing to buy a home this week. However, her own life story includes inheriting land with oil rights that brought substantial wealth until the oil dried up last year. She had a job in her twenties but quit due to "asshole managers". Now retired in a million-dollar home, she enjoys 3-month winter vacations and buys a new car every few years.

In contrast, my wife and I had different upbringings. She grew up to young parents so fairly poor but securely in a middle-class environment with a decent amount of security, at 18/19 she was working and taking out loans to attend university abroad. My background was different— with a disabled parent and another who occasionally was laid off from minimum wage work we grew up poor. I experienced homelessness at 17 and struggled through poverty, I clawed my way out pretty quickly as I was working full-time at 19 away from my family while studying every evening for eight years to earn an engineering degree. After an international move back to her country, we're now on a path toward stability, though not quite there yet.

Yet, despite this, we were labeled as the ones who are "spoiled" simply for wanting to take our time and find the right home as we enter this new phase of our lives.