I’m 45 and my boyfriend is 19. I don’t know if I’m a “hero” to him, but I can say this: he had a not-very-nice childhood in which every adult in his life let him down in one way or another. I promised him that for as long as he still wants me, I’ll be the one elder that never lets him down. That doesn’t mean we’ll never quarrel or that I won’t have my normal human failings, but that I won’t do what the adults around him did when he was growing up, which was to put their own happiness first and basically forget that he existed.
And that’s a promise I intend to keep - forever, if he’ll let me.
