I've had 4 incidents like this in the past 2 years with women 18 to 27 years younger than me. I won't go into all the details except to boil it down to what I really think is going on in all these cases. I haven't read or seen enough to know if this is what is going on in your case.John wrote:Earlier this year, I had a notable experience in a workplace
situation.
The youngest girl e-mailed me a few days after the stock market crashed in October. She said she and her mother would like to come and visit and would that be OK. She said her mother wanted to meet me. I said sure, you and your mother are welcome here any time. They spent a couple hours here. The girl has moved back home and is going to school and working. Her mother said she had heard a lot about me and at one point referred to me as a "nice young man." Her mother is 4 years older than me. She wanted to take a picture of me with her daughter. As they left, the girl asked me to give her a hug. Similar to what you did, I hugged her with great gusto right in front of her mother. I could tell she wasn't expecting that and was uncomfortable with it.
A few days after she left, I IM'ed a friend of hers and got on the subject of economic collapse. Her friend, said, yeah, I told her this economy isn't going to get any better and now she's figured it out too.
My sister has been baffled by all this. I explained to my sister that the families may be in debt, the father may be in danger of losing his job, and that when an economy collapses in many cases the only asset a family has is their young daughter(s). They can either send her into prostitution or marry her off to a man with money.
I haven't heard from this girl since the stock market has recovered. When the economy collapses, I will hear from her again. That's been the history anyway - when things worsen, they tend to show up.
On Thanksgiving I told my Dad, who was born on a farm with an outhouse and no running water in 1933, what had transpired. He kind of grinned and said, oh yeah? Nothing more needed to be explained.
I would add that when the Millenials are involved the stories are wholesome like the above, but with the Xer it was really filthy and nasty. The particular Xer has gone into prostitution to support herself and her child from a nasty divorce similar to what you described.
Along similar lines, as previously mentioned, I was in an old factory town in the former Soviet Union about 5 years ago. It's rare for Americans to venture deep into the bowels of the former Soviet Union and the young women were curious. So 4 women were gathered around one night and they decided that I should look at pictures and tell them whether or which of the women in the pictures were the most attractive. In one of the pictures there was a gathering of people where a very attractive woman in her late 20s was sitting with an ugly old man. For some reason, they went to the next picture without comment and I then asked Angelina, the woman who had set up my visit, to flip back to that picture. I asked Angelina (who was married and had a family) what that attractive young woman was doing with that ugly old man. She first explained that the man was from England and that he had bought the young woman an apartment, a car, clothes, etc. Then she looked at me very seriously and said something like, you don't understand, oh, this man, this is a very good man, when you get close to this man, oh, it is different than looking at the picture, he is such a good man. She said the young woman was very happy being with this man. Her manner of speaking was very earnest, heartfelt, and serious. This was quite remarkable to me even though my intent, as explained in a previous thread, was to try to learn how a society is different post collapse, and this was foremost in my mind.