10 Questions People Ask Me About My Teenage Affair With My Friend’s Mom (NSFW)

I slept with my friend’s mom for about 8 months when I was 15/16; she was 29/30.

Did I run around telling everyone? No, of course not. Was I “scarred for life”? Hell no; I learned some valuable lessons that year. Do I want my kid to get into a situation like that? Not at all.

1. How did it happen? Was it her idea?

I spent the night at my friend’s house a lot. He went to bed at about 2030 after taking a battery of medications, most of which knocked him out, and I’m sort of a night person, so she would sit up and talk to me. I’m a fairly bright person and it wasn’t unusual for me to end up in conversation with adults. After awhile, it sort of turned into something else (mutually, I should stress).

2. How did it go on so long?

I used to spend the night once or twice during the week, and on alternating weekends I’d stay from Friday night through Sunday (because there was shared custody and my friend would be gone, etc.). It lasted because it was very easy to get away with, and while we weren’t in love (I wasn’t that young), we did like each other and enjoy each other’s company. We didn’t solely have sex- sometimes we’d go out of town (for obvious reasons) to watch a movie or eat out or whatever, and a lot of the time we just hung out and watched movies together or something. It also helped that I hadn’t been baited or coerced into anything. I was made an equal partner in something rather than simply somebody’s boytoy, and I was treated like an adult making a decision for one of the first times in my life, which was definitely appealing.

3. How did it end?

It ended when I started dating somebody in my own grade, basically. At the very start we had a frank talk about certain things- discretion in particular- and she told me that, if and when I met somebody my own age to date, she’d step aside. She didn’t expect what we were doing to last forever, she told me, and said that I also should understand that- we weren’t going to get married when I turned 18 or anything, not that I expected to. I ended up dating a new girl toward the end of my junior year and she was perfectly fine with it… we remained friends, and I still hung out with her son. I might be a little warped, though, because while I get that it wasn’t a cool thing to do behind my friend’s back, I didn’t then and don’t now feel guilty about it somehow. He never found out about it, as far as I know, and his mom ended up getting married a few years later (I think she still is; I haven’t seen her in 5 or 6 years).

4. What lessons did you learn?

Well, aside from sex (I wasn’t a virgin at the time, but my eyes were somewhat opened by this, obviously), I got a good primer in how to have a girlfriend, basically. We didn’t only have sex, we also spent a fair amount of time just talking and watching TV, or going out of town (duh) to eat or see a movie. We weren’t in love, but we liked each other’s company, and I learned a lot about the give-and-take of dating somebody, no matter how not-serious it might be. I also feel like I’m a great deal more sex-positive than I would be had this not happened, and I definitely count that as a bonus.

5. Why wouldn’t you want your kid in a situation like that? Is it more the fact that it was your friend’s mom or the age disparity?

I wouldn’t want my kid in a situation like that because I think I was grown-up enough to handle it (as evidenced by my having handled it), but I definitely don’t think that to be the norm. I’m a fairly intelligent person, I was extremely adult for my age, was pretty well-informed at the time, and had a good dose of street-smarts and common sense; but I don’t think that I was a usual case. I think that, on average, both people’s lives would be ruined by something like this. Also, the person involved with me in this was key- I wasn’t forced, tricked or coerced into anything, everything was very much negotiated and made clear on both sides from the get-go, and I was treated like an adult the whole time. The end was clean and friendly (as in, it was prenegotiated from the start that if I met somebody my own age, we’d end things and remain friends)- we did continue to be friends, as good as and perhaps a little better than before, up until I moved after high school, and we remained in touch a few years after that. The age thing meant nothing at the time because I was already very attracted to her and knew that 29 wasn’t really that old, though I’d be very hesitant to date somebody 15 years older than me now (I’m 34).

6. How did you go about getting it started?

It kind of grew out of conversation. I spent a lot of time there, and she and I had a lot of one-on-one conversations and a lot of alone-time (see Edit 1). Out of a combination of that, her loneliness and busyness (she owned a business), my attraction to her (if I ran into 29/30yo her now my head would turn, let alone when I was 15), the fact that we were in a perfect situation for something to happen escaping neither of us… it was a tension-rich environment, let’s say, and somebody probably would’ve tried something at some point anyway.

7. How often did it happen? Were you ever close to being caught?

I feel like I should stress here that, while we did have quite a bit of sex, it wasn’t all we did. While it wasn’t a “forever” relationship, we definitely just hung out and talked a lot. That said, I was at her house a couple times a week and every other weekend (her free weekend).

The closest we ever came to getting caught was one weekend when I drove her car to Taco Bell and ran into a classmate at work, who recognized both the car and me. I told him it was my aunt’s or something and he let it go. Other than that, no, not really. Discretion was job one, you might say.

8. What do you think made her not think “damn, this guy is half my age and my son’s friend, I can’t do this”?

A few things, I think. I knew her independently of her son, for one. Her son was younger, and while we did hang out, we weren’t extremely close- I mostly spent the night because I liked hanging out with his mom. She was intelligent, she was a good conversationalist, she was fun, she was gorgeous, and she talked to me like an equal. You could tell she didn’t get out much and didn’t get a chance to just sit around and shoot the shit much, and she told me later she’d looked forward to when I came over for that reason. Our conversations got steadily more and more personal, and eventually pretty frank. We realized we were mutually attracted to one another and we both wanted it to happen,so we negotiated first; discretion and the definition of what we were doing- friends with benefits rather than gf/bf- were first and foremost. I think the fact that we could look each other eye-to-eye, admit what we wanted, lay out a groundwork for how to handle it, and treat each other as equals was what decided that for her.

9. Was there a connection between you two that she couldn’t resist? Was she lonely as a, I assume, single mom?

Look, I don’t mean this in a conceited way, but I’m smarter than your average bear. I was used to conversing with adults and seemed to make a favorable impression on them most of the time, and I know that she appreciated that we could have actual conversations because she mentioned that to me more than once. I’m sure she was lonely; she owned a business that kept her busy and didn’t really have much of a social life aside from a few close friends. She was attracted to me, she told me, but she was also interested in my brain, which I appreciated. We had similar personalities and outlooks, and it made the times we spent together more than just sex. I’ve said somewhere else that I knew we weren’t in love and that is true; but we definitely vibed with one another and enjoyed spending time with one another.

10. Did you share this with any of your (current) girlfriend(s)? Or would they be grossed out by it so you didn’t?

Oh yeah, for sure I tell anybody I’m with. And anyway, I tend to date the sort of people who won’t castigate me for some high-school shit (one once said, “If you learned that from her, I need to send her a thank-you card”).