When Alex* (21, they/them) started talking to Emmanuel at age 12, they thought he would be the right person to make them feel loved and wanted, until it was revealed that he had lied to them about his age. Alex speaks to us about their relationship with him and how they felt when his real age came out.
This is Alex’s story as told to Sofiyah
I was 12 when I decided I needed a partner. At that age, I felt unloved and lonely, so I believed that a romantic relationship would fix me. It was this desperate need to have my own person that pushed me to look up “teen dating sites,” and it was on one of those sites that I met Emmanuel.
Emmanuel was Mexican and had immigrated to the United States when he was much younger. Our very first interaction started with something along the lines of “i like ur pic”, and from there, the conversation progressed. Emmanuel told me he was 16, and right off the bat, the warning bells in my head went off. The face in the pictures he sent suggested someone older. He had an obvious beard, and when I asked him about it, he said it was genetic. I looked it up, and while it wasn’t common, it wasn’t impossible, so I decided to ignore my gut.
Emmanuel became my first boyfriend. I remember having to go behind my strict Nigerian parents’ backs to date him, and while that was tricky on its own, I didn’t mind. I liked him, and I was naive enough to believe that the feeling was mutual. Sometimes when we talked, he would casually say, “I love being with you. I’d literally kill myself if you broke up with me,” and although this concerned me, it also made me feel like an important figure in his life.
I craved the feeling of being wanted, and Emmanuel provided that. That made my 12-year-old brain ignore every warning sign the universe threw at me. We didn’t do video calls, and I even had to beg for his pictures before he sent them. I barely got voice notes either. We texted for nearly two years, and in that time, I only got four voice notes from him. Some of my friends were like that, so I didn’t think much of it. I simply convinced myself he was shy. He also had this habit of asking me for selfies with my tongue out, and if it didn’t look good, he would tell me to retake it. When I told my friends and sister about him, there was initial concern, but they eventually shrugged it off.
Being with Emmanuel felt like my heart was floating around my body, but when his replies started to dwindle, I became really confused and sad. His texts grew curt, and he began taking hours and then days to reply to my messages. I had a personalised notification sound for him, so once it rang, I replied fast, only for him to vanish again.
It was during this period of trying to regain his interest that he became super invested in getting my nudes. I lived in a three-bedroom flat with seven of my family members, so there was no way I could take a picture of my naked body without someone catching on. My parents also had a habit of randomly seizing my phone to go through it, so I couldn’t risk it. There was a time I considered giving in, but I wasn’t comfortable, so I didn’t go through with it.
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I’m glad I didn’t because everything changed in the week leading up to my 14th birthday. He had fallen ill and ended up in the hospital, and while he was there, he texted to apologise for vanishing. Around this time, WhatsApp had introduced the status feature, and he never posted anything on it. But a day after he apologised, I saw he had posted for the first time. When I opened it, I saw a picture of his right hand giving a thumbs-up. The caption was something like “I made it,” but here’s the kicker: on his wrist was a hospital tag, and from the angle, I could see his age and sex. It clearly stated ‘Sex: M, Age: 21’. My entire system went into shock.
I closed the app and just stared at my phone. I thought, ‘Maybe if I go back, it won’t be there.” But when I reopened WhatsApp, the picture and that ‘21’ were still staring at me. I eventually replied, “Nice to know that you’re 21,” and his response was quicker than it had been in months. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember him taking the picture down and blocking me afterwards.
I initially felt like I had done something wrong, so I tried reaching out to him through my sister’s phone, but he blocked that, too.
That happened almost 10 years ago, and it would be nice to say the story ended there, but it didn’t. I remember obsessively checking the news from where he lived in California to see if there were any cases of a male around his age committing suicide because of how often he said he would kill himself if we ended. Eventually, I learned that people who say things like that are usually just manipulative.
The entire situation pushed me to download a meditation app. I cried a lot because I knew I shouldn’t have been with a 21-year-old while I was 13. I was a mess, and I knew I needed to talk to someone. I couldn’t approach my parents because four months into the relationship, they found out about him after going through my messages while I was asleep, and they made their disapproval obvious.
My mum had confronted me about it a couple of times, and my dad once woke me up in the middle of the night and threatened to beat me until I had to confirm our relationship. I definitely couldn’t have told them about the age difference, so I confided in an older friend from church. She was very kind in her response, and in that moment, I felt calm because I thought I would be blamed.
I don’t think I have completely healed from what Emmanuel did. While I continued to practice meditation, I also found my first healthy online friendship in an art-oriented community. I documented my entire experience in an online forum, but I never sought therapy for that particular incident. My brain has done its best to repress the memories. Whenever I talk about it, like I’m doing now, I automatically become exhausted because I really do not like to remember that period in my life. It wasn’t a fun time.
Now that I’m 21, the age he was back then, I can fully recognise how twisted and predatory his actions were. He knew my real age, and yet, he didn’t hesitate to date me and ask for nudes. To me, 13-year-olds are children, and your role in their lives should be guiding them and helping them grow. Taking advantage of their naivety is sickening and deeply disgusting.
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