Talk:Ezra Fitz/@comment-187.149.34.81-20120818174555/@comment-5409042-20120818181259

As I said before (verbatim): I disagree. Up until now, Ezra has been depicted as the most earnest and generous character in the series.

Whether that is plausible/believable or not — or rather whether such a character could realistically exist in real life is another question altogether (which I won't address).

But the reason Ezra seems sleazy/slimey to many, in spite of all the attempts of the writers to the contrary, is that a lot of people (in particular Americans) are used to viewing specific relationships in a very bad light. They are conditioned to think this relationship is disgusting despite any other evidence, and even if Ezra were a saint, they would not be able to see it.

(This puritanism is related to the reason why in America, and on American shows, every teenager seems to be getting pregnant, because the US has teenage pregnancy rates that are 10/20 times higher than elsewhere in the developped world.)

If we were going to discuss things seriously, then we would use statistics. A very significant portion of marriage have an age difference of over 7 years, and surprisingly, this tendency is actually increasing throughout the decades. To take a specific example, in the UK, in 2003, approximately 25% of marriages had the guy at least 7 years older than the woman. Why this doesn't shock anybody is a question of maturity. (But Aria is depicted as extremely mature, a fact compounded by her year abroad in Europe.)