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Dear Family Beef,

My Dad’s (58) new girlfriend (28) is only two years older than me (F26). I want him to be happy but I can’t get over how creepy it is that she was in elementary school the same time I was, that she was still in diapers when he was changing mine. It’s just weird. He has had other girlfriends since divorcing my mom, but they were all in their 40s and 50s and felt more age appropriate. So I’ve never had a bad reaction like this.

He keeps asking me and my boyfriend to go to dinner with them and making comments about how we’ll “get along so well” and I keep finding excuses to avoid it. I find the whole thing embarrassing and don’t want other people in my life to see and judge him as a creepy old cradle robber..

Is this something I should talk to him about or ignore until it hopefully goes away?

— I Don’t Want A Sister Step Mom

Dear Sister Step,

Oh, you’re absolutely allowed to be weirded out. Validating the weird-out here. That’s not to say that their relationship itself is weird, though.

This is one of those situations where what you feel matters, but not nearly as much as what the two adults in a relationship feel about each other. But your ambivalence isn’t uncommon or necessarily irrational either. Two things can be true!

These days, so-called “age-gap” relationships get a lot of flak because, as you allude to in your letter, there’s a lot of judgment floating around. There are situations where the older partner may have more obvious power or sway over the younger partner (emotionally, financially, etc.), and the cartoonish stereotypes of older individuals perpetually chasing youth or younger people looking for a “sugar parent” to spoil them. These dynamics can happen and can be frustrating to watch from the sidelines — but, ultimately, it’s up to those two adults to decide what kind of relationship they want to be in and how they are with one another.

“An adult child has come to understand power dynamics and is used to a level of separation with their parents’ generation,” sexologist and couples clinician Dr. Lexx Brown-James, told HuffPost. “So having a parent dating someone of similar age can feel discomforting because we make the connection that a parent could be dating one of our friends or someone that we could even date.”

To me, it’s not a bad idea to take a little space while you figure out why you feel the way you do. Talk with some trusted neutral parties (friends! your partner! a........

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