These girls are still friends and we are still close, that "romantic" part just died off as they got older. More so due to them, as I would have loved to let it go to the next level once they were legal, they weren't interested though, but I digress.

One of the biggest myths that anti culture promotes is that when a MAP and a girl share romantic feelings for each other, and it hypothetically blossoms into a romantic relationship, it's the girl who takes the bulk of the emotional risk because (as the belief goes) the adult will callously kick her out of his life once she gets older. A corollary of this is the common but misguided belief that when a girl falls in love with an adult she will bond with him this way for life even though it's readily accepted that they very often do not do this even with peers. It's understood that younger people change much faster than adults on average, and that they tend to move on from romantic bonds as time goes on as part of the natural course of things, but somehow the belief is that this doesn't hold true when it comes to such romantic bonds with adults.

Of course, the common societal prejudices towards such relationships can only be maintained if the public develops belief systems that make no logical sense and make strange "exceptions" to romantic relationships between adults and kids that do not apply to relationships between peers. This is similar to the strange but common beliefs that a girl being intimate with an adult in a mutually consensual manner will somehow traumatize her (without iatrogenic and sociogenic prodding) but will not do so with a peer, or how it's readily accepted (and often lamented) that kids will be defiant about listening to adults about pretty much everything except for sexual contact, to which it's believed they will strangely acquiesce to adult requests for that with no questions asked no matter what they may actually want.

Logic and reality take a back seat to belief and the strong emotional need to hate in these cases.

Thanks for the input.

Glad to be of help, my friend.