When did you know?

[Enbyfictionwriter]

Apologies if this is already a thread, but I can’t recall one.

When did you first know you were a map? Or is it more that you can see the clues looking back, even into childhood? For me I was right around puberty and getting more intense feelings of happiness and love with younger kids - of course at the time I didn’t make too much of it, and looking back I can see this was my identity starting to emerge.

Another question - how did this impact your mental health, and how is it now? I think this is a very important discussion to have. Mine got very bad once I “woke up” to the truth at 17. It didn’t really improve until I got into therapy and got on meds, 10+ years later.

[PurpleHouse]

About age 14-15. I was still young enough to be in my eventual AoA range but but back then I preferred younger end of the hebephile range, and the upper end of my AoA grew over time. I felt I was ordinary heterosexual but with this "extra" thing going on and for many years assumed I could one day settle in a normal relationship and outgrow the "extra" part of my sexuality.

In subtle ways perhaps I had clues before that but that's when it really showed.

Harder as I got older and realised my "straight" side wasn't growing up with me and I saw more and more hate and less logical thinking out there. So much to suppress. Most people know LGBT people suffer from living in a society that disapproves of them. It is the same for the MAP.

[FairBlueLove]

I recently posted about that here, but it was not a dedicated thread.

[ReArm!]

Pretty recently, I was 15 or even 16 I don't remember exactly, but it was because I realized I liked young-looking boys, like femboys or shotas, and then it was like, Oh shit I'd definetly fuck a 12 or 13 year old if I could.

[MAPallmylife66]

I suspected from as far back as I can remember, that there was something different about me, but it really wasn't until later in life that I realised what those feelings of being different, actually meant.

[Zmap]

i had a feeling when i was 13 as i randomly started to fantasize about playing with my young cousin and what it would be like but i didn't connect it was pedophilia until a few years later on. I don't even remember what brought the thoughts on. Just remember where i was and what i was thinking

[John_Doe]

For as long as I can remember (since the second grade) I had always been attracted to the girls in my age group as well as to teens and I'm sure 'women.' Apparently, I kissed a girl in the first grade and I used to kiss the ballerinas on my wall goodnight but I don't remember that. As a preteen/teen (I started masturbating at 12), I never made a distinction one way or the other between teenage girls and women in their 20s/30s (I'm saying '20s/30s' in retrospect, I don't remember thinking about age at all. I'm sure I was interested in some middle-aged women but I probably wasn't as strongly attracted to them, unless they looked as though they were under 40). It would have never occurred to me to think about a prepubescent girl in that way, lack of exposure might be a factor. At some point in my 20s I was open to sexualizing prepubescent children because of the shift in my views but I couldn't really get into it, it didn't feel realistic (that a prepubescent girl would be interested in sex, I guess. As far as young teens are concerned, I just never lost interest in them and I don't remember thinking that was unusual. Mind you, I never really had a preference for them either. I think all teleiophiles are attracted to teenagers which is why I've never really found the term 'MAP' to be very meaningful). That became easier at times later on, maybe in my 30s, but I don't normally think about them.

I would say I have a mild attraction to them, it's not just the idea of them or a forbidden excitement that can come from the taboo around man-little girl sex, but there have been times when it felt like zero (e.g. when my libido is extremely low) so I'm not sure how to make sense of that. I'm also not attracted to girls under 6, in fact, I can be apathetic to some girls at 6,7,8, etc. even if when look healthy. I would say around 12/13 is when I start to find girls very attractive, there might be some exceptional 11-year-olds (even at 12, or possibly even 13, I might find some too underdeveloped for my tastes. I don't want to 'over-analyze' and properly organize all of this in fear of misrepresenting myself).

I don't know if this relates to your question exactly but the stigma around men my age (I'm 40 and I hate it) being attracted to, infatuated with or dating teens or even just young legal adults is one of the most hurtful things to me (it's a big factor in my mid-life crisis, along with becoming even less appealing to the age group I'm attracted to and the normal problems of aging. This is off-topic but as much we hear about 'adolescent angst,' which wasn't really a thing for me personally beyond specific life/social problems that are still issues for me now, I wish people would acknowledge elderly age-related depression and how much aging can hurt people). It would be so liberating to live in a society where a 60-year-old man could admit to having a crush on a 13-year-old and even if she wasn't interested and he was compassionate enough to leave her alone (for that reason or because the belief was that there was an age-related risk to her in being with a significantly older man), there would be no stigma around his actual feelings. Unrequited attraction (which my body dysphoria is mostly rooted in. My body image problems have been extremely bad lately) and erectile dysfunction are among the biggest sources of pain in my life and it's a problem with no hope of ever solving because things will necessarily only get worse with age (death will free me from it but it's hard to look forward to that because I want to experience happiness, not just be 'at peace'). Even besides that, the world is boring and deeply unappealing to me for reasons that I won't get into, but ideal fantasy sex/romance is one of the things that would make life worth living (for me), and unless some mad scientist alters my brain in such a way that affects my attraction (I would welcome that), the people I'd want to share that with are girls/women in their teens, twenties and thirties.

[jsjc_lover]

When I was 19 I had an attraction for a girl that was 13. But that didn't actually make it click for me, because I just liked her for who she was. It was around a year or two later when one day online I was searching up something completely unrelated and stumbled upon a website whose name I absolutely couldn't avoid clicking and it was some young Eastern European child modelling content, and it made me feel troubled because I liked it, but I knew I shouldn't. That's kinda when it clicked for me, but I denied it to myself for many years after that.