Appearing on Call Her Daddy, the former Nickelodeon star revealed that her first significant relationship was with an older man she met through work while she was still a teenager—and that he had a live-in girlfriend at the time.
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“Thinking that I was mature, thinking that I was so smart that this could happen,” she said. “I’m special. I can connect with older people. Younger people aren’t on my wavelength.”
“Like that. Like f--king that,” McCurdy said when asked how he justified the relationship. “‘You’re so mature. I can’t talk to anyone this way. I can’t believe how smart you are.’ Are you kidding me?”
A Relationship Built on Secrecy and Control
The relationship unfolded in secret, largely confined to brief meetups at McCurdy’s apartment. She described being new to independence, inexperienced with alcohol, and unaware of just how intoxicated he often was.
As the relationship progressed, McCurdy said she became emotionally exhausted by the imbalance.
Only when she tried to walk away, McCurdy said, did he promise to leave his girlfriend.
McCurdy also reflected on how sex functioned within the relationship—and how deeply it affected her sense of self-worth because she was a virgin when they met and he convinced her to try things like oral sex and eventually intercourse.
"But having sex with him was, there was this, the only way I can describe it is that there was an addictive component where it was, that's the thing that I'm chasing, that's the thing that my nervous system is sort of hijacked in waiting for. And then when it happens afterward, there's the crash. And then it just kind of ramps up again in anticipation for the next sexual encounter ... whatever it was that I was confusing as a legitimate connection. But then sex always, I mean, it's going to taper off. It's going to fade."
She later realized that the intensity she had confused for connection masked deeper incompatibility.
Writing Her Way to Closure
McCurdy said she didn’t initially realize how much unresolved anger she still carried about the relationship until she began writing Half His Age.
She described fiction as her path to understanding and closure—both for herself and for readers who may recognize similar dynamics in their own lives.
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