Why do people on the internet say that people with large age gaps “have nothing in common?

This whole discourse is so demented. It’s just completely a wrong, harmful way to think about how humans relate to one another.

There are some nods to “life experience” in the thread — which varies hugely with the person and is just not very generalizable — but a lot of it is about what pop culture references one knows invalidating the relationship, e.g.:

To me that’s one of the really fun things about having friends of different ages, even in non-romantic relationships (but the same goes if they turn romantic). When I was mentoring an intern at a previous job, we had a great time discussing relics from the 1980s that she’d never heard of, and her trying to stump me with new slang and music that I usually had heard of (but sometimes not). Our age gap actually helped us relate because we were both smart, curious people.

Of course, this “age gap” nonsense is not really about protection from harm. Has nothing to do with that at all, in any way. It’s about enforcing proper assortative mating, and mostly detrimental even to the people it is allegedly helping. It’s actually better — yes, even for women — if you date and have life experiences with people of a wide variety of ages (as long as they are not minors for romantic relationships). It’ll make you into a more whole, better, more capable and fully-realized person.

When people from other countries come to the US, they are often shocked by how weirdly age-segregated it is here. And it sure is. Just such an oddball thing when you think about it.