Is “Grooming” Just The Regular Courtship Process?
Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2026 9:41 pm
I came across a video the other day that I’ve been thinking about ever since. It features a young adult woman telling her story about being “groomed” by a 19-year-old when she was 12. The video is interesting because it shows not just how these relationships form, but how they later get reinterpreted.
Over and over she talks about how at the time she was truly in love with him. She says he made her feel “special,” like she was “the cool girl in middle school who had the older boyfriend,” and she describes being deeply attached to him. The things he did were pretty standard romantic gestures: gifts, love letters, telling her things like “I think you’re so special… we were meant to be together.” According to her own story, those are the things that made her fall for him. For years she believed he loved her and that they had a real connection.
The reinterpretation only seems to happen later, when other people start telling her she was “groomed” or “taken advantage of.” That’s when the whole story starts getting reframed.
To me this looks like a pretty clear case of retroactive victimhood. The behaviors she describes are basically the same strategies men use when trying to win a woman’s affection. The only real difference here is that the “target” was younger.
She was a vulnerable girl from an abusive home, and he was the first person to make her feel seen and cared for. They were two people in “love” (she even admits to this herself), existing in a bubble that was only popped when the outside world's morality was imposed upon it.
Even in the comments, you see her repeating these thought-terminating clichés like “turn yourself in to the police immediately” to anyone who casts doubt. It’s a complete 180 from how she originally experienced the relationship. At this point she seems to have fully internalized the new interpretation. Drank the Kool-Aid, if you will.
This is where the hypocrisy starts to stand out. If a 19-year-old gave emotional support and stability to a 12-year-old from an abusive home in a purely platonic way, most people would probably praise him for helping a struggling kid. The moment the relationship becomes romantic or sexual, those exact same actions get reframed as manipulation. Nothing about the behavior itself changes, but the narrative flips, and the girl’s own feelings of love and happiness get retroactively rewritten as “trauma.”
It also reminds me of the research by Rind et al., which argued that much of the harm associated with adult–child sexual experiences may come less from the acts themselves and more from the social reaction afterward: condemnation, intervention by therapists, and pressure to adopt a narrative of victimization. Interestingly, the woman in the video even says her foundation for love was damaged because every later relationship was compared to the one she was later told had been “abuse,” not the one she originally experienced as love.
The whole thing starts to look like a process of social identity reconstruction. Instead of simply reflecting on the past, she ends up adopting a new identity as a “victim,” which just happens to be one that is heavily validated in the current cultural climate. The video itself almost feels like a performance for an audience that expects a particular narrative of trauma and empowerment.
The irony is that, in the name of protecting her, society may have convinced her to reinterpret a period of her life when she felt loved and special as a time when she was actually a broken victim.
So the question becomes: who is really doing the harm here?
I’m curious what others think about this, so I made a poll. Feel free to vote and explain your reasoning. I believe this is an interesting case study highlighting many points I’ve seen floated here and on Newgon.
Over and over she talks about how at the time she was truly in love with him. She says he made her feel “special,” like she was “the cool girl in middle school who had the older boyfriend,” and she describes being deeply attached to him. The things he did were pretty standard romantic gestures: gifts, love letters, telling her things like “I think you’re so special… we were meant to be together.” According to her own story, those are the things that made her fall for him. For years she believed he loved her and that they had a real connection.
The reinterpretation only seems to happen later, when other people start telling her she was “groomed” or “taken advantage of.” That’s when the whole story starts getting reframed.
To me this looks like a pretty clear case of retroactive victimhood. The behaviors she describes are basically the same strategies men use when trying to win a woman’s affection. The only real difference here is that the “target” was younger.
She was a vulnerable girl from an abusive home, and he was the first person to make her feel seen and cared for. They were two people in “love” (she even admits to this herself), existing in a bubble that was only popped when the outside world's morality was imposed upon it.
Even in the comments, you see her repeating these thought-terminating clichés like “turn yourself in to the police immediately” to anyone who casts doubt. It’s a complete 180 from how she originally experienced the relationship. At this point she seems to have fully internalized the new interpretation. Drank the Kool-Aid, if you will.
This is where the hypocrisy starts to stand out. If a 19-year-old gave emotional support and stability to a 12-year-old from an abusive home in a purely platonic way, most people would probably praise him for helping a struggling kid. The moment the relationship becomes romantic or sexual, those exact same actions get reframed as manipulation. Nothing about the behavior itself changes, but the narrative flips, and the girl’s own feelings of love and happiness get retroactively rewritten as “trauma.”
It also reminds me of the research by Rind et al., which argued that much of the harm associated with adult–child sexual experiences may come less from the acts themselves and more from the social reaction afterward: condemnation, intervention by therapists, and pressure to adopt a narrative of victimization. Interestingly, the woman in the video even says her foundation for love was damaged because every later relationship was compared to the one she was later told had been “abuse,” not the one she originally experienced as love.
The whole thing starts to look like a process of social identity reconstruction. Instead of simply reflecting on the past, she ends up adopting a new identity as a “victim,” which just happens to be one that is heavily validated in the current cultural climate. The video itself almost feels like a performance for an audience that expects a particular narrative of trauma and empowerment.
The irony is that, in the name of protecting her, society may have convinced her to reinterpret a period of her life when she felt loved and special as a time when she was actually a broken victim.
So the question becomes: who is really doing the harm here?
I’m curious what others think about this, so I made a poll. Feel free to vote and explain your reasoning. I believe this is an interesting case study highlighting many points I’ve seen floated here and on Newgon.