Age is just a number right?

When it comes to relationships there are some people that look at age as “just a number” meanwhile some people don’t and will even judge somebody that is in an age gap relationship. How do I know this? I have been through this and even to this day still deal with it. My husband and I met in 2015 in a Facebook group, I was living in New Jersey at the time, and he was living in Michigan. There weren’t any intentions of ever “dating” I remember when we first started messaging each other I very quickly asked him how old he was “51” he responded. “Wow” is the only thing I could think of, he then asked me how old I was. “22” is what I responded back with and left it at that. We continued to talk on and off for a few months which also included him getting mad at me about something silly, him meeting up with another girl and having a one-night stand with, and him even casually dating somebody local. Unfortunately for him, but yet fortunate for me it never worked out for him. Three months into talking and him failing horribly at finding somebody local he asked me if he could come spend the weekend with me. Keep in mind we still didn’t know at this point if we were going to be together. I was hesitant at first but decided why not we only live once. He drove for ten hours on a Friday where I talked to him most of the way, once he got into town, we agreed that he would get a hotel, which surprisingly I lived directly next door to a rundown hotel, but it had “okay reviews. I was in the middle of getting ready when he text me and told me he was at the hotel and told me which room number, but he would meet me outside first. I ran out my back door with my heart beating a million miles a minute, I reached the hotel parking lot and seen somebody standing in a doorway with their foot sticking out, I turned the corner, and it was him! He instantly hugged for what seemed like a lifetime there in the doorway before he led me up the stairs to his hotel room. It had to be at least 2 am at this point and I was extremely tired, however we laid in bed and cuddled and talked , for some reason it felt as if there wasn’t a care in the world, it just felt “right” with keeping this as PG as I can, let’s just say there was a lot of chemistry in the air that night and neither one of us slept if you catch my drift. He stayed for the weekend and left Sunday morning, I remember he took me out to breakfast before he left and cried for hours after he dropped me off. My home life in New Jersey wasn’t the best as I was dealing with a lot and he knew this, a week and a half after he left, he insisted that he should come pick me up and I would live with him in Michigan. I thought about it for a minute but took the chance, worse case is if it didn’t work out, I had family in Ohio, so I wasn’t too far from home, I agreed, and he drove another ten hours to pick me up with little belongings that I had. On the way to Michigan, I ended up calling my mom to let her know what was going on, and to my surprise she was actually okay with it. Once we got back to Michigan we lived in a hotel for a few months as he was living with his elderly mother and taking care of her, he owned his own business and was gone a-lot. I believe we were living with each other for about a month when I found out I was pregnant with my second daughter (I have a daughter from a previous relationship) we both were very excited and nervous, eventually we found a house to rent and thought things would be happily ever after but boy were we wrong! We couldn’t even go to the store without somebody looking at us weird or even saying something, I remember going once to a restaurant and the waitress asking me if I wanted a kid’s menu, can we say embarrassing? There was another time where we were holding hands in the store and a lady tried yelling at us, so what I felt like was the public was against us. His friends and family didn’t care for our relationship either and told us it would never work, and they were half right! Our first child together was born stillborn due to a fatal disease that she had, and shortly after her passing, I ended up pregnant again, with our second child but my third child all together, shortly after getting pregnant we broke up for a year and a half, which again my life was completely crazy. When our daughter was almost a year old, I reached out to him, we talked for almost 12 hours discussing life and what we could do, we agreed to try and work things out for the sake of our daughter, we ended up getting married 6 months after reuniting and have had two more children since. Will I say our relationship is all peaches and crème? Absolutely not. But it is our perfect even if it’s hectic sometimes. We have been together for almost 7 years now and even to this day his friends and family still have a hard time grasping the fact that we are together, but they also know that nothing can change it. If you are in an age gap relationship just know it can work, even though my husband and I have a Rocky past, we still came out on top, if you are truly happy with that person then yes, I will say age is just a number!