Dear Tony,

Dear me, aged seventeen,

You don’t know this yet, but the law’s about to change while you’re still growing into yourself.

Right now, you’re careful. You measure your words, your gestures, your silences. You’ve learned that being discreet isn’t the same as being safe, but it feels close enough to survival. You understand, far earlier than you should have to, that love can be legal in theory and risky in practice.

In a few months’ time, Parliament will lower the age of consent for men like you from twenty-one to eighteen. Not to sixteen, like everyone else. Closer, but not equal. There won’t be any announcement that reaches your bedroom. No sense of relief that lands in your body. Just a line in legislation that moves, almost imperceptibly, toward your life without quite arriving.

On your eighteenth birthday, your boyfriend will write in your card: “Legally yours.”

You’ll laugh. You’ll keep the card. You’ll understand exactly what he means.

What I want you to know is this: the law changing doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly feel you belong. Those things catch up at different speeds, sometimes decades apart. It’s not a failure on your part that you feel uncertain even when the rules shift. The uncertainty was learned honestly.

You’ll spend years navigating institutions that like to believe progress is neat and linear. You’ll learn that most change happens unevenly, and often without much thought for the people caught mid-transition. You’ll also learn that your story matters precisely because it sits in those gaps. Between before and after. Between allowed and affirmed.

I wish I could tell you that the world becomes immediately kind. It doesn’t. But it does widen. You’ll find language, community, and purpose. You’ll help others ask better questions than the ones you were given.

So hold on. Be gentle with yourself. The caution you learned was never weakness. It was adaptation. One day, you won’t need it in the same way. And when you look back, that birthday card will still make you smile. Not because the law finally caught up, but because love was already there, waiting.

With solidarity,

Your future self, Tony x