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I'm not going to address age differences according to different cultures because that's an argument that has been hashed out again and again and again and it ultimately means nothing. The culture Nyla and I live in is US culture, and according to US culture, this relationship was wrong.

I do, however, firmly believe our relationship to have been an exceptional one. As Nyla stated many times over in her own post, she is incredibly mature in many areas. She dropped out of school at 14 because of extreme stress and anxiety and immediately began working on becoming fully self-sufficient. She has undergone a battery of mental health evaluations from the court, from her therapist, and from her employers to prove that she is of sound mind and able to work professionally in the security industry at 16. She has been an active and very valued contributor to a large open source security-related project for multiple years and has now moved on to work for a proper cybersecurity company with Fortune 500 clients. She is an EXTREMELY exceptional individual and absolutely does not deserve to be treated like a child who can't make her own decisions.

Again, she is incredibly mature in many areas; in some ways, she has FAR surpassed me. In other ways, she is still a 16-year-old girl and that did end up causing issues in our relationship. Towards the end, I planned to break up with her myself if things didn't improve after a couple of weeks. I didn't have to, however, because she noticed it as well and decided to end things first. I accepted without argument, and while I was devastated about losing a close companion, I knew it was for the best and it honestly felt like I was dodging a bullet.

We did have a pleasant relationship though. We talked about keyboards and gaming mice and Thinkpads and Linux and security, troubleshooted our YubiKeys together, she helped me improve my email server, I provided her with email accounts when she wanted to change her public pseudonyms, we edited Wikipedia pages together, I helped her with Linux stuff when she asked and gave her remote access to a physical rack server sitting in my bedroom, we talked about philosophy and ethics and morals and so much more. It was a genuine relationship with deep intellectual discussions, not some fetishised and hyper-sexual relationship.

Nonetheless, deciding to date her was absolutely a mistake and one that I adamantly decided not to repeat directly after the relationship ended. I do sincerely believe that the relationship was acceptable from a moral and ethical standpoint, but there were many issues caused by maturity differences that neither of us expected going into it. It was a bad decision that will not be repeated.