Age Difference

I understand that it feels like we don't have control over who we're attracted to. At the same time, I wouldn't be doing you a service if I didn't point out the inherent problems.

Of course, I realize that my saying that in no way helps how you're feeling toward older men. What we commonly see in most of these situations with someone around your age is that the younger person is usually lacking a healthy and emotionally connected father figure growing up (either he's not there at all, or if he is, he's emotionally unavailable/checked out.)

So what happens in these cases is, the younger person inadvertently seeks out the connection he's missing from lack of a father figure in a romantic interest. And that's extremely unhealthy because the two roles are very different; a romantic partner should be someone that you are equals with, someone where rather than a father/son or mentor/mentee relationship, it is two people who are on mostly equal footing and can help each other grow.

When you have a major age imbalance, you end up with a dependent relationship that doesn't foster your growth toward self-sufficiency, self-confidence and independence, and in most cases it does the opposite.

Additionally, when you look at it from the perspective of the older person, there's no way an emotionally healthy and balanced person in their 30s or even in their 20s is going to want to go out with someone 15. This has nothing to do with you personally, it's just that there are so many differences in life experience, maturity, and other aspects, that a healthy adult is not going to go out with a mid-teenager, so by definition anyone willing to do so, and particularly anyone willing to be sexually intimate with someone your age has pretty serious psychological issues.

And the last piece is... it would be a felony in most states.

I understand that it feels shaming to hear this, and that isn't my intent. You're not a bad person because of what you feel; as you said, you can't control it. But the difference is, unlike sexual orientation, this is something that is very changeable. As I said, in most cases, it arises because of a loss of proper bonding to a father figure, and so seeing a therapist to talk about what's going on will help you address that.

By working with a therapist to separate out the desire for a father/mentor figure from romantic attraction, you'll find, with a bit of work, that you'll be able to feel attraction to people your own age. You can also seek out a safe, healthy adult mentoring relationship through Big Brothers (a nonprofit that helps people in this situation) or, simply, by openly talking about it with your parent(s). I've seen this identical situation a number of times (including here at EC), and with those who have done the work, the result has always been that they were able to adjust, feel attraction for people their own age, and get into healthy, age-appropriate relationships.

I hope you take the above in the way it's intended, as a way to help you understand and perhaps begin the steps to help yourself, rather than as a way of devaluing your feelings or experiences. Please feel free to continue discussion here, or contact me if you want to talk more about this.