There is perhaps no greater mystery on a college campus than why some seniors — people who are allegedly preparing for careers, graduate school and the terrifying concept known as “real adulthood” — continue pursuing freshmen who moved into the dorms three weeks ago and still get lost finding their lecture halls. Technically, there is nothing illegal about an 18-year-old freshman dating a 22-year-old senior. Both are adults. Both can vote. Both can theoretically make decisions for themselves.
But if your defense of a relationship starts and ends with “it’s legal,” you may already be losing the argument.
The issue with senior-freshman relationships is rarely about the number of years separating two people. Four years between a 28-year-old and a 32-year-old barely registers. Four years between someone learning how to do laundry independently for the first time and someone updating their LinkedIn profile for post-grad jobs feels … different. A little bit peculiar some might say.
This is because college years are not equal.
Freshmen come to campus in survival mode. They are figuring out where their classes are, learning how office hours work and discovering that “I’ll just skip this lecture once,” becomes an incredibly slippery slope. Many are away from home for the first time. They’re finally finding out who they are, separate from their families and hometowns. What a time..
Seniors, meanwhile, have spent years learning campus politics, building social circles and understanding exactly what student organizations have influence. Some have leadership positions. Some have jobs. Some have apartments. Some are debating graduate school applications.
One group is learning to exist in college. The other is preparing to leave it.
And yet, every year, somewhere on campus, there’s a senior who sees a freshman and thinks: Yes. This person in an entirely different stage of life is definitely my intellectual and emotional equal.
Because that’s the first thing people think when they see someone who is fresh out of the high school womb. How interesting.
Just to be clear, it’s not that age-gap relationships are automatically unhealthy. Not every senior dating a freshman is manipulative, and not every freshman is naïve. Humans are complicated and relationships are nuanced. But nuance does not, and should not, prevent scrutiny.
Experience is power. Knowing how social environments work is power. Having established networks, confidence and years of institutional familiarity is power. Power imbalances do not guarantee harm, but pretending they do not exist because everyone involved is legally an adult feels less like critical thinking and more like a convenient denial.
College culture often romanticizes dating older people. There is a strange prestige attached to it, as though attracting someone further along in life automatically signals maturity. Spoiler alert: Being chosen by someone older does not magically accelerate emotional development. Likewise, dating younger does not automatically make someone predatory, but at some point, reasonable questions emerge.
If someone is one or two quarters away from graduation and their ideal romantic partner is someone attending their first residence hall icebreaker or their first club meeting, it becomes suspicious. Not because age alone determines compatibility nor because adults cannot make their own choices. At the end of the day, choices still deserve examination, and some things must be scrutinized.
Healthy relationships require more than legality and attraction. They require a relatively equal footing — comparable ability to advocate for oneself, establish boundaries and navigate conflict without disproportionate influence.
College is already an uneven playing field. Some students arrive with connections, money or familiarity with higher education, while others are learning every system from scratch. Relationships can either reinforce those imbalances or challenge them.
Coming into college, many freshmen are struggling to not only make ends meet, but even survive day-to-day. There is a financial barrier present in these relationships as many seniors have more solid footing in terms of income. A reliance is built as these younger folk find a safety net with this more established individual.
The conversation surrounding seniors dating freshmen is not about policing attraction. It is about asking why someone nearing the end of college repeatedly finds themselves interested in people who have barely begun.
At some point, the question stops being “Is this legal?” and becomes “why does your dating preference seem to reset every academic year?” It shouldn’t.
