I am 30 years old. I am not an old man by most definitions, including my own, but the signs are starting to show.

There are the physical ones, of course—those are the most obvious. Gray hairs now hide among the (thinning) crowd on my temples. My crow’s feet are more prominent than ever, little rippling waves of wrinkles living under my eyes that make smiles look more like half-winces. My body continues to soften, introducing new pieces of flab for me to over-analyze in the mirror every morning. That’s all to be expected.

The signs that have been harder to adjust to are those external to me—i.e. my interactions with others. High schoolers call me “sir.” I haven’t been ID’d at a bar in at least 7 years. Someone recently asked me if I had kids, and it took me a few beats to remember that, yes, I am indeed at an age where having a family is a plausible and even downright normal thing. In a similar vein, my romantic interactions have turned a new page, thanks to my age. There are two flavors of people I’ve seen more of than ever before while doomscrolling Hinge and Tinder: divorced parents of young children and precocious undergrads who fetishize “older” men.

The former is incredibly common; to live in the southern US means to live under the influence of Christian mores re: sex and marriage, so ill-advised shotgun weddings before your boo thang gets shipped off to boot camp/before your brain fully cooks to the point where you realize that you are, in fact, not your high school sweetheart’s ride-or-die/before whatever white trash canon event you want to insert here are par for the course. Hell, the two times a year I work up the nerve to re-activate my Facebook, I see the same story play out opaquely on the digital walls of loose acquaintances that I don’t really give a shit about (and yet I can’t help but peep from the binary bushes). Spouses become conspicuously absent from Christmas photos. Mentions of “new chapters” or shares of JPEG-artifacted affirmation images talking about "independence” appear at a more regular cadence. It’s a whole bit. The microtragedy plays out silently and without fanfare, and as I watch from afar, I wonder which is worse, uprooting your life then choosing to advertise yourself and, by extension, your kids on a godless meat market like Tinder, or gawking at the upheaval of said life while shirtless and unkempt in a small apartment lit only by the glow of a computer screen (howdy from yours truly). Anyway! I’m getting off topic here.

My encounters with the latter category are more common than I would prefer them to be. While I have a strict lower limit for the age range I have set on the dating apps, sometimes people outside of that range slip through the cracks because of whatever algorithmic tomfoolery goes on behind the scenes. I’ll occasionally receive likes from fresh-faced 18- and 19- year-olds who are living on their own for the first time, hungry for “authentic” “experiences” and blissfully unaware or simply unwilling to admit that just because someone is 12 years their senior, it doesn’t mean that person has their shit together. Sometimes, they’re looking for a leg up: career advice, a referral, some usable insight from my lived experience as a relative oldhead. Other times, they’re looking to get two legs up (that is to say, their interest in me is purely prurient).

Don’t get me wrong; I can appreciate being objectified. As someone whose looks could realistically be rated a Los Angeles 3.51, piquing someone’s interest based on my aesthetic qualities alone is a rare occurrence, the novelty of which is not lost on me. And sure, the perverted, lizard brain part of my being has considered the dubious benefits of abandoning shame and good sense when these situations present themselves—becoming a stolen-valor Lothario, putting in make-up work to counteract a lonely and awkward adolescence. Outside of the obviously problematic power imbalance between two people with that large of an age gap, the practical considerations of such a dynamic present an equally impassable roadblock. What the hell do you even talk about with a person that young? You have very few shared experiences. They weren’t alive when 9/11 happened. They didn’t live through the cultural chokeholds of Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em, Runescape, Heelys, and all the touchstones of the pre-smartphone world like downloading porn on a dial-up connection.2 On top of all that, it’s safe to assume the sex is going to be terrible. Was I good at fucking when I was 18? Of course not! Come to think of it, that’s one shared experience between the youths and me. Some things never change, I guess.

I am 30 years old. I am not an old man by most definitions, but I watch as the hallmarks of age are slowly pulled into focus. The picture resolves. I will be older soon. I continue to avoid dating anybody who is too young to remember the original theatrical release of Napoleon Dynamite (2004). Life goes on.