While it's always fun to invite the Devil's Advocate to these intellectual sparring matches, I don't think suggesting the slim possibility that this could be love is in any way helpful to the LW.

Yes, I too have a (female) acquaintance from high school who had a relationship with, and later married, a very young teacher. In retrospect, the age difference could really only have been 4 or 5 years, and now, 20 years later, they are still together, so the age gap doesn't necessarily mean that true love isn't a possibility.

BUT . . . and it's a really big BUT . . . the LW is not a young, unencumbered single girl "mature for her age." LW is just the opposite: 28, married, a parent, preparing for a professional career, yet immature, insecure, and seemingly completely clueless about what exactly she is doing to herself and others. Pretending that this disaster in any way resembles some kind of true love is just adding to the deception.

And regarding the "revolutionary" 1970s: You know, I was a child in the 70s, and I am deeply aware as an adult about the social history of that time. I remember starting in 1980 how every day it seemed that yet another one of my classmates came in and told us that their parents were getting divorced, sometimes for very good reasons and sometimes for reasons that to this day I cannot understand.

The 70s decade is often looked back on as a time of crazy, tacky and mostly harmless fun, but some people (ie many, many kids of my generation) suffered real debilitating emotional injuries because of their parents' inability to commit to their love and basic survival needs. (And I mean the most BASIC needs: edible food on the table once in a while, heat in the house when it was -40ºC, cleaning the sh*t up off the floor, protection against the latest live-in "boyfriend.")

I was blessed with great parents and a stable loving family, but many of my friends were not, and many of them bear the scars to this day. The "Me Generation" wanted to "find itself" at everyone else's expense and left quite a carnage in their wake. What's even worse now is that we have a second and yes, a third generation now having children and repeating their parents'/grandparents' idiotic patterns.

If you want to romanticize the 70s, enjoy the music, the movies and the fashions. But do not pretend for a minute that they were a time of great "revolutionary" happiness and joy for all those innocent children who had to suffer through their late baby-boomer parents' selfishness and cruelty.

So: telling a grown woman to stop treating her husband and child like garbage is really just bourgeois middle-class small-mindedness from prissy old ladies. "Tsk, tsk tsk," our obviously sexless and passionless selves say as we peer disapprovingly over our glasses through the lace curtains. Kids today. What's next? Wearing white after labour day?

Clearly my previous posts have been in error: Perhaps we all should have said, No really, random sex is harmless fun for everyone!!! Then by all means LW should PLAY!!! EXPLORE!!!! DISCOVER YOURSELF!!!!! BE MYSTERIOUS AND FEMININE!!!!! WHEEEEEE!!!!

And then go home alone and find your wonderful husband and child gone from your life forever.

What you do on your own time, within the bounds of the law and the codes of your profession's ethics is your business. You may have whatever relationship agreement you choose with your husband, BUT if you mess up your child's right to a happy stable family home—for no reason other than you thought it would be fun for him or her to be a "divorce kid"— I guarantee he or she will never, ever forgive you.

There has been ONE post that I would agree was genuine puritanical nagging and scolding. Almost everything else posted here has been an attempt to convince someone to change their course before they do irreparable harm to themselves and a number of innocent people.

I maintain that if the LW wants to play, explore, and discover like they did in the carefree 1970s, then I suggest macrame class might be a better option than having sex with kids who are four months out of high school.