Re: Okay, you make sense.

Note this whole argument is the less important of the age-related change -- the more important one was how much sex really meant to a person.

To compare the effects of betrayals at different ages, you have to consider comparable betrayals. Let's pick a reference situation. A man is at the same summer resort for a week with a 12-year-old girl. After much sharing and affection, they have sex twice on the last day. In later phone calls when she tracks him down, it becomes clear it was just a fling for him. Now make the girl older. I would say the severity of the distress will be much less as she gets to be 18 or 25. To compare that to divorce, the end of a long-term commitment, especially with kids at home isn't fair.

I can easily believe that men are more emotionally fragile about many things, but I wouldn't have guessed that this would be true of sexual relationships ending. If you do have references on that I would be interested in seeing them.

Remember the Rind studies. One of the results was that adverse effects were more common for girls than for boys.

Another intriguing result was that for boys, adverse effects were correlated with consent. But for girls, consent did not have an effect, which lends minor support to the idea of later perceived betrayal being the issue for girls. It was a small effect, as I recall.

It may be problematic to gather data about 14-year-olds, but we could certainly compare data on 16-year-olds and 21-year-olds where the AoC is 16. If we saw a trend there it could be extrapolated downward.