01/02/2026
Iāve been thinking about Mikayla and Jaceās dynamic since season one, and I donāt think the show ever addresses the real reason their age gap doesnāt get pushed as a storyline.
Most people look at their timeline and assume the older partner automatically held the power. But if you actually watch their early photos and their energy on the show, the dynamic is completely inverted.
When they met, Mikayla was 16 and already carrying the kind of trauma that forces you into adulthood long before your body catches up. Kids who live through what she lived through often become bold, forward, emotionally older than their age. Jace, at that time, looked handsome but quiet, unsure, still forming.
From that pattern alone, it makes sense that she may have initiated the relationship. Not in a predatory way but in the trauma-coded way that some of us understand all too well. When you survive that kind of instability young, you learn to move first. You learn to attach fast. You learn to choose.
Whatās interesting is how the power dynamic flips over time. Look at them now. He orients to her. His body language softens around her. He defers when she talks. He waits for her cues. That is not an older-man-in-control pattern. That is the posture of someone who shaped his identity inside her emotional gravity field.
This is why I think the producers avoid the topic entirely. The narrative theyād have to tell is too complex for reality TV. It isnāt the typical older-guy younger-girl trope. Itās a trauma survivor who became the adult in the relationship before either of them had the language for it. And he has stayed in that receptive, subservient role ever since.
So no, I donāt think people are imagining the dynamic. The age gap is there, but the power structure is reversed. It started that way, and the show has quietly built its edits around that reality.
Itās just not the storyline they want to touch.
She was a stunning young woman who looked like a full-grown woman long before she actually was one. They were Mormon, and Jace was the quiet, handsome, steady type ā probably the safest energy she had ever come across. I canāt speak to her motives, but I remember being her age and thinking the same way.
Not Mormon, but the psychology matches. When you grow up treated like a street kid, you adapt fast. You learn to survive. You learn how to read people, how to attach, how to mirror whatever gets you to safety the quickest.
Teen girls with trauma often hunt for the calm, reserved partner because it feels like stability. What people donāt understand is that inside that confidence is still a damaged child trying to build a life that feels safe.
