As you grow up, it’s quite normal for the nature of your friendships to change. After all, in your twenties and thirties, you’re going through a new stage in your life, and the people that you were once close to may no longer fit your life so neatly.

Some people choose to have kids, others choose to remain childfree. Some people priorities their careers, others prefer to focus on travel. Some people want big houses and flashy cars, others opt for experiences and living with love and happiness at the forefront.

Regardless of your personal choices or the aspects of life that draw you toward them, none are right or wrong – even though your choices might be very different from those of your friends. But as you stray down your own path in life, it’s normal to make new friends with similar interests and approaches to life – and as a result, some of your childhood friendships might start to wane.

For a long time as an adult, the guy in this story thought he had a friend who he saw eye-to-eye with, and naturally felt he could trust. But when this friend accompanied the guy and his roommate on a night out, he realised he had plenty of reason to stop trusting him, with the guy’s behaviour making him question everything about the friendship he thought they had.

Read on to find out why.

Am I overreacting for losing respect for my friend and not wanting to see him anymore after he hooked up with my 18-year-old roommate?

I’m 25 and have had an 18-year-old roommate for about four months. She moved to this city pretty spontaneously, and our dynamic has always felt a bit like a big-brother situation. We communicate openly, and I generally feel protective of her.

One of my close friends is 33. Before this weekend, we’d talked multiple times about age gaps and how uncomfortable I am with people in their thirties pursuing 18-year-olds.

This came up because another guy our age openly swipes on 18-year-old girls on dating apps, which I personally find weird.

My friend seemed to understand and agree with me at the time.

My roommate and this friend already knew each other and had seen each other a few times before. It was kind of lingering in the air that she was interested in him.

Read on to find out how the roommate and the friend ended up hooking up.

Last weekend, I went out with this friend, and my roommate ended up joining us. We’d never really gone out together as a group before.

Later that night, they went back to his place together.

Afterward, my roommate told me she initiated it. We talked openly about it, and she seems genuinely happy and doesn’t regret what happened.

I’m not worried about her or trying to control her choices. What I’m struggling with is my view of my friend.

Let’s find out why he’s struggling with his friend’s choices.

Given how much we’d talked about this exact kind of situation beforehand, I feel disappointed and feel like he wasn’t being honest with me about where he actually stands. I thought he was more mature than this, and I’ve lost a lot of respect for him.

Because of that, I don’t really want to see or hang out with him anymore, at least for now. Not out of anger, but because my respect for him has changed.

I know everyone involved is a consenting adult, and nothing objectively “wrong” happened. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that with a 14–15 year age gap, the older person has more responsibility to set boundaries.

Am I overreacting for losing respect for him and distancing myself, even though my roommate is happy and doesn’t regret it?

This is a tricky situation, especially given he seems to feel very protective – in a platonic way – of his roommate.

In the end, she is an adult and she made her choices. But that doesn’t mean that he has to respect his friend.

However, given the conversation they recently had, it must be difficult to reconcile his friend’s choices with the morals that his friend led him to believe that they shared.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person disagreed with his feelings, believing that he must have ulterior motives in order to be upset.

However, others were more empathetic, casting suspicions over why his friend chose to hook up with an eighteen-year-old.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought he did a good job in how he handled things, given the circumstances.

At heart, it’s not about the fact that his friend hooked up with his roommate. He’s fine with her making her own choices and being with whoever she wants to be with – after all, she’s an adult. More than that, it’s clear that his feelings towards her are nothing more than brotherly, a mentor of sorts as she settles into her new life in the city.

His problem is with his friend. It wouldn’t be so bad if they hadn’t recently had a conversation about men in their thirties dating women half their age – but given the fact that his friend led him to believe that they shared the same morals toward the situation and the inherent power imbalance that can lurk within impromptu hookups, it’s natural that he feels betrayed.

And let’s be clear: so long as things are consensual, there’s no problem with age gap relationships or hookups – in fact, they can make for some of the happiest couples. The issue here lies in either lying to your friend about your morals, or presenting them as firm when, in fact, they are very flexible. In the end, he showed himself to be someone very different to the standup guy he was portraying him as. No wonder his friend is upset.