When I (now 20f) was 15, I met a guy on a Minecraft server. We would message on Skype about our days. Being an edgy depressed teenager, I talked to him about some dark stuff including thoughts of ending my life. I didn’t feel comfortable mentioning what I was going through to any of my friends from school and so he quickly became my primary support. It felt nice to have someone that cared and listened and told me how amazing I was. This quickly turned into calling for 8 hours per day and my whole life started to revolve around him.

The issue is, he was 20. I was flattered that someone that much older thought I was mature enough to be friends with. However, it didn’t stay friends for very long. Though he now claims differently, he told me loved me etc. An example of some of our other interactions is that one time I was self-deprecating about my appearance and so he cited getting a boner by looking at photos of me as counter evidence. Our arguments were also about things that no 15 year old has any business arguing about, like whether to have kids in the future. A year later (16&21) he flew out to me and I ended up staying the night at a hotel with him at my suggestion. He didn’t tell his parents about the trip and so they hired a private investigator and found out. From that point, it was kinda framed as me being at fault for him needing to be careful about legal consequences. We kept dating online and then I even chose a college across the country to be close to him. At that point it was legal, but it still feels bad to me. Then just after my first year, I realized I had no feelings for him whatsoever and transferred to a different school.

Now that I’m 20, the thought of having any interest in a 15 year old thoroughly disgusts me. He was never unkind to me, but I get this horrible pit in my stomach thinking back on it. Others have called it grooming, but I just don’t know. To some extent I feel that I might have even been the one manipulating him because of the dark things I’d talk to him about. However, I feel as though if a kid came to me talking about that kind of stuff now, I’d encourage them to get help and just contact the police or their parents if I thought they were in danger.

Seeing people online “cancelled” for similar or smaller age gaps and hearing others share stories framing such circumstances as grooming really confuses me. I don’t think he was bad to me, but thinking about it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Is it normal and I’m playing victim? Or is this genuinely weird?