Don't worry, you will find that at every stage of life, there is something to channel your competitive, ambitious, creative drive into.
If you settle down, you can spend a year planning obsessively to have the most fun and creative wedding that your guests have ever attended in their life, and writing the most perfectly brilliant and hilarious toast/speech that will have them all crying with laughter. If you have kids you will find literally endless ways to channel it into them, vicariously. When you buy a home you can endlessly devote yourself to the most amazing renovations and gardens and gatherings you host. Even in retirement you can develop the most admired and incredible gardens or pottery or crafting or whatever the hell old lady hobby you take up.
Don't worry about this at all, it will find a channel. It doesn't get satisfied once you get your man, that just happens to be the goal currently in your sites. Once that goal has been achieved it will almost immediately vector off at the next goal on the horizon and you will no longer spend a second thinking much about the achievement you've already hit. I've experienced this myself and I was entirely not crazy from ages 9 to 39. The things that now interest me and that I pour incredible amounts of obsessive energy money and time into are baffling even to me, because I did not care about any of them previously.
I totally resonated with the weird sense of rivalry/competition here. I think that's normal and can be a very stimulating and fun/fiery part of the mating dance. Plenty of men enjoy it and have no real long-term interest in a woman who is too easy and can't keep up with and challenge them. You're right not to put much (any) stock in the internet rightwing guys who claim men just want pretty and submissive and easy. Some guys ARE like that but they certainly aren't the ones you want. And the big secret is that even the guys who are legitimately like that and propagandize it to others often end up obsessed with and simultaneously loving/hating/furious at a woman who challenges or outdoes them. They'd never admit it but I've seen it a million times and they usually REALLY want to sleep with the women they claim to absolutely hate. So much that's it's a warning sign...if your man claims to hate a woman he knows socially or at work or something and has a weird fury for her, 9 times out of 10 he really wants to sleep with her and will if he gets the chance.
It's commonly said that men only wage war, build monuments, and explore space in order to maybe get laid, and guys don't push back against that (never heard "We built the Pyramids, but only for the fellow male gaze"). So why do you think it's taboo for women to say vice versa? Is it a progressive counter to the idea that women's thoughts and lives revolve around men?
I think it’s because it’s seen as masculine to to be too keen on your career as a woman, and as much as libfeminism and girlbossery has become annoying it is still a thing
That’s interesting, because even when I was growing up in the US in the 90s, my experience was that success at school and career ambition had become somewhat feminine coded things, with the exception being guys who played sports and also got good grades. To be honest, I don’t think that there even were any guys who got good grades who also didn’t play a competitive sport, though there were plenty of guys who played sports but didn’t get good grades.
"This last paragraph is bait for the trads to tell me I don’t have time left and need to forget these high-powered 10s and settle with a mythical nice quiet man (is this a euphemism for men who want to date out of their league?)"
That is EXACTLY what it is. They want women to not shoot within their league while they shoot out of their league, thereby hopefully increasing the chances that a woman like you will go for them.
Yeap, it’s a fantasy that the dating market would be solved if only women had lower standards, most women always have realistic standards but there simply aren’t enough men who are both eligible and willing to settle down
That is the very definition of unrealistic standards. Most women are chasing a small minority of men; there are not enough men for them all, and the standards are such that it is impossible for there to be; it isn’t a matter of men just trying harder and things would work out. Women only want the best men and so many men are just invisible to women; they don’t even register as people. I cannot say what other people mean when they say women need to have more realistic standards, but to me it means that you need to be chasing real people and not the platonic ideal of your partner. I find it really interesting that lesbians do not have the same sort of unreachable standards for what women they date should be; they do not insist on tall, more successful, impossibly stoic women. I suspect it is partially nature and nurture resulting in these standards; women profess to each other that they need only the best men, and women compete with each other for status so it seems to influence what an “acceptable” man is in some perverse version of “keeping up with the Joneses”. This is a relatively recent phenomenon too; just 2 generations ago (for me anyway) nobody had these impossible standards, and while things certainly weren’t perfect they weren’t as bad as people like to make out either.
I am going to start collecting signatures from all the short losers who have rejected me and other “high standard” women to finally convince people on the internet that men of lower mating value do not immediately make good or available partners
Not that I was asked, but a few years ago I got curious as to why the US had so many kids growing up without living with their biological fathers. The US is a huge outlier on this, even compared to other developed countries with high out of wedlock birthrates. What tends to happen in those non-US developed countries is that people live in what in the US would be common law marriages. I noticed that the UK was also an outlier on this, but not as much as the US. I thought that it might be something about Anglophone culture, but places like Canada and Australia aren’t outliers, so I looked for commonalities between that US and the UK shared but that other Anglophone countries didn’t. One thing that the US and the UK share are high incarceration rates relative to other developed nations, though of course the US has a much higher incarceration rate than the UK. So my theory is that what is going on in the US and the UK at least is just imbalanced sex ratios among early adulthood to middle age cohorts, and the knock on effects that a generation or two of imbalanced sex ratios have on how men and women pursue relationships and invest in themselves. There is a good book on this titled “Marriage Markets” by Carbone and Cahn. Income inequality plays into their account as well, but the basic argument they make is that when women outnumber men, neither sex invests much in finding long term partners or doing the work of trying to develop the habits and characteristics of a good long term partner. It looks a bit like this dynamic might be starting to spread to the college educated as well. If women cannot find a good stable mate, then it seems like they will settle for unstable relationships with sexy men. So men focus even more on short term mating strategies than they otherwise would, and you get a whole dynamic where no one expects relationships to last, and so people focus on what is gratifying in the moment. I mean, why would women want to have anything to do with a man who is neither sexy nor would make a good long term partner? Another thing is that men are more likely to have substance use disorders (in the US at least) and there are substantially more gay men than lesbians. It might also be the case that the US has an abnormally large military, and women shy away from men in the military (family life is notoriously difficult for those in the military, for obvious reasons).
New Zealand and Australia have higher incarceration rates than the UK. (source: Corrections NZ 2017.) About 29 percent of NZ's familes with children are lone parent families, the overwhelming majority of them headed by the mother.
The US's combined armed forces personnel number about 1.33 million. Assuming they are all men and there are about 60 million men 20 - 49 in the USA, this may be enough to tip the balance, but probably not. Jon Birger's book "Date-onomics" explains the numbers tolerably well and broadly correctly.
The US does not look like an outlier in Anglophone countries.
Also, you omitted an answer to the more important question: what to do? I admit I can't think of policies inside the Overton window. Certainly there are no quick fixes. Equally certainly, wagging a finger and saying "men need to step up" is counterproductive.
for one I tdo think no everyone is wired for a family, then for those who could be but are not I think too much isolation, being glued to technology, not being paid enough attention to as kids and not being raised with enough human affection and to value human contact and relationships as much as the attaintment of material goods and social status. It could just be more the former though, as in, a lot of people where not suitable parents already but were forced to get married previously by religion whereas now people have a choice.
"Not being paid enough attention to as kids and not being raised with enough human affection": the very definition of daycare/childcare, the last resort of the working mother.
High turnover of "carers" (for various values of care) seems to affect male infants worse than female, for some reason. (No doubt the neuroscientists will get around to telling us how/why in a decade or two.) This is one possible explanation for why males are so avoidant, ADHD, on the spectrum, and/or alexithymic these days. We've had daycare/early childhood care as a widespread thing for about thirty years now.
Note: this is speculation about statistical facts. I make no normative claims ("should" claims) whatsoever.
I think thats a pretty good assessment. Though, even if there are a lot of people who arent wired for families, Id argue that everyone still looks for love, to one degree or another. The fact that so many people of all stripes are struggling with basic relationship formation indicates to me that there has been a major breakdown in the way men and women to relate to one another across the modern world.
I don’t like the trads, and I think that the idea of settling is terrible advice. Speaking as a parent, what I want for my children is for them to do the work of figuring out what kind of partner and relationship would actually work and be good for them and pursue that (or maybe find a matchmaker to help them out with that). That isn’t settling, but it also isn’t chasing after the most desirable or high status partner they could plausibly find.
I agree with you, where I draw the line is I don't tthink you should 'settle' with someone for whom you have not managed to develop real loving feelings and with whom you have sexual chemistry but equally you need to be patient with your lovers and give them time to show you their true colous, not be put off by flippant 'icks' that are based on your own projections and biases.
Better to have the libidinous life force come out as personal ambition (with a side of spite) than as total spite. I have noticed the hatred that grows when the libido is not fed. And like most human reactions, rather than solving the problem, it makes it worse. I've seen virginous teenage girls rub their superior achievements in the face of boys while declaring men unneccessary, and of course the basement dwelling incels are the opposite end of the horseshoe. The horseshoe meets at angry sexist celibacy. So, don't give up the hunt.
Good to know this is a universal experience. In the 5th grade, I convinced my parents to send me to a private school because I had an all-consuming crush on a boy who went there (we had never even spoken). Every decision I’ve made after that one has been similarly influenced. You and Caitlin Moran are both right… I’m sure that everything I’ve ever done has been motivated by a desire for “redemption” from heartbreak. After my last breakup, I thought… ok. Well. Now I have to write the next Great American Novel. And I must get started on that pensive indie rock album STAT! I have started both and finished neither. Here’s to hoping the next breakup pushes me over the edge of creative greatness…!!!!!!
It's all so exotic; in my youth I chose the ascetic path (in fear of success, not of rejection — rejection is relieving, always has been), never even asked for a date, let alone having one; and now that I'm pretty persuaded my love life is over, such a way to go through life is so interesting to read
what an interesting comment. it takes a lot of self-knowledge to admit that rejection is relieving, I believe that's the case for a lot of people. Success is terrifying because it means you have to 'do the thing'. why do you think your love life is over?
Self-knowledge is basically where I've been directing what I might call my ambition, so. I do believe it's the case for many people too, the supposed "men's fear of rejection" is quite often the opposite in fact. I was a fairly special case only in how much the thing terrified me; in the sense of my inadequacy and what I could do wrong, actually — which is why I used to fancy older women, seeing them as "more able to take the hit" (and I'm even a pretty meek guy, except for words sometimes). With time that faded a bit, leaving a trace in the form of "if she were about my age or older, I wouldn't mind". They say that's contrary to biology, but so is appreciating new music in your 40s and I am totally into that, so.
As for why I think this is over: basically age combined with inexperience, and too much to build from scratch in other aspects of life, if I'm ever even going to manage to do it. I even think I'd be able to 'do the thing', and after years living alone I've been seeing the appeal pretty clearly, but, heh. Not that I'm *sure* or *convinced* — imagining the future in every detail to feel safe is my sin, I acknowledge that —, I just don't really see it coming
Interesting. What do you mean by take the hit? You taking the hit of eventual rejection because they are older and thus less desirable by society’s standards or more mature so they would do it kindly, or them taking the hit of being disappointed when they eventually get to know you and in your head you won’t measure up?
I see… I am always surprised when I realise men feel like this.. it’s like people forget most people have flaws and are aware of them and thus are willing to be generous with the shortcomings of their potential lovers
Or love them partly for those perceived shortcomings rather than in spite of them. I've never really fallen hard for someone who wasn't a little bit quirky/eccentric - probably quirks some of those girls would rather be without.
In retrospect, I think I started looking at personal relationship as problems to crack too early, when I was too neurotic and too young (and thus, ill-equipped) to do so. Before being 30 yo I had basically gone through every existential phase in the book
Partnership might be "for them" but if they can't find a partner who wants to be "with them", monkhood is a good alternative to living alone and bitter.
Re "I embrace the theory that all life energy is libidinal energy": you might be interested in J. D. Unwin's "Sex and Culture", in which he makes that argument by comparing several civilizations and many more non-city-making cultures in history. He found that cultures are energetic in various ways (arts, military expansionism, cultural soft power) when the libido of their members cannot be satisfied in the obvious way.
Reading between the lines here, I wonder whether you've essentially been sleeping your way up the Labour Party ladder.
I don't have any direct experience with the Labour Party cultural milieu, but if it's anything like a lot of American lefty milieus that I've spent time in over the past decade or so, I can only assume you've been able to do so more or less with impunity, because it's probably simply not worth it for any man involved in that world to question you on any of this. The potentially career ending risk of being accused of being a misogynist is simply too high.
For that matter, whether you're aware of it or not, and whether or not you'd ever use it, you've had a secret weapon in the form of an allegation button in your back pocket at all times for years that could sink any of these guys.
Mostly right, but at the gym stage mostly wrong. Tha vast majority of women would be better off with 40 minutes more in the gym every day, even if that costs them an hour of work.
Note Rob H’s advice to men to make it a habit to exercise daily. (Says the guy recovering for months from a torn Achilles tendon.) Maybe start slowly, but it should be a higher priority than another coffee break (or tea).
Of course, it might also be better to work towards policies like market capitalism that have good results in the real world, unlike the college where Bernie’s wife was president.
It depends; for me I have been training for the last 8 years very meticulously, so for a while, I can afford to exchange one discipline for another. I still exercise most days but do lighter things like pilates and running. I find it more motivating to see my work improve than the lines on my stomach.
I genuinely think you are mistaken about what men are looking for. Your speculations about what the men who reject you will finally settle down with do not seem realistic. In my experience men want women who make them comfortable and make them want to be better people but they don’t really want someone who is trying to compete with them. You seem, from your writings at least, like a genuinely nice person who is very driven to succeed, which is not at all a bad thing, though your reasons for choosing what to strive for seem petty. I don’t think they are that out of the ordinary though; I imagine most people do things for fairly petty reasons at least some of the time if not most of the time. I wish you the best but it seems like achieving your goals will not bring you happiness.
Also, my imaginary expectation of what men are looking for here are obviously meant to be the e exaggerated voice of my insecurities. You are taking my artistic license at face value. And, you are assuming I am not happy, not true.
"One of the reasons I don’t kiss and tell more explicitly is that I need these talented, powerful men to continue dating me"
What is your take on the journalists who do write a lot about their dating lives? I think a lot of talentless and powerless men would also be put off by the idea that a woman's take on date that didn't work out could appear online.
You should only do so if you are writing a memoir or something, or if you have a really good point to make, you should hide their identities. Otherwise it stops being about your writing being good and it becomes about the gossip, which can get boring pretty quickly like te hee I slept with a person whose name you've heard of !!1! No one really cares apart from the same tired Westminster circles.
Torn between hoping you find relationship happiness because I hope that for everyone and hoping you don’t so you can keep generating great writing.
is it ridiculous that I had the same thought? :-P how will I complain about my dating life if I happy and romantically fulfilled
Don't worry, you will find that at every stage of life, there is something to channel your competitive, ambitious, creative drive into.
If you settle down, you can spend a year planning obsessively to have the most fun and creative wedding that your guests have ever attended in their life, and writing the most perfectly brilliant and hilarious toast/speech that will have them all crying with laughter. If you have kids you will find literally endless ways to channel it into them, vicariously. When you buy a home you can endlessly devote yourself to the most amazing renovations and gardens and gatherings you host. Even in retirement you can develop the most admired and incredible gardens or pottery or crafting or whatever the hell old lady hobby you take up.
Don't worry about this at all, it will find a channel. It doesn't get satisfied once you get your man, that just happens to be the goal currently in your sites. Once that goal has been achieved it will almost immediately vector off at the next goal on the horizon and you will no longer spend a second thinking much about the achievement you've already hit. I've experienced this myself and I was entirely not crazy from ages 9 to 39. The things that now interest me and that I pour incredible amounts of obsessive energy money and time into are baffling even to me, because I did not care about any of them previously.
I totally resonated with the weird sense of rivalry/competition here. I think that's normal and can be a very stimulating and fun/fiery part of the mating dance. Plenty of men enjoy it and have no real long-term interest in a woman who is too easy and can't keep up with and challenge them. You're right not to put much (any) stock in the internet rightwing guys who claim men just want pretty and submissive and easy. Some guys ARE like that but they certainly aren't the ones you want. And the big secret is that even the guys who are legitimately like that and propagandize it to others often end up obsessed with and simultaneously loving/hating/furious at a woman who challenges or outdoes them. They'd never admit it but I've seen it a million times and they usually REALLY want to sleep with the women they claim to absolutely hate. So much that's it's a warning sign...if your man claims to hate a woman he knows socially or at work or something and has a weird fury for her, 9 times out of 10 he really wants to sleep with her and will if he gets the chance.
It's commonly said that men only wage war, build monuments, and explore space in order to maybe get laid, and guys don't push back against that (never heard "We built the Pyramids, but only for the fellow male gaze"). So why do you think it's taboo for women to say vice versa? Is it a progressive counter to the idea that women's thoughts and lives revolve around men?
I think it’s because it’s seen as masculine to to be too keen on your career as a woman, and as much as libfeminism and girlbossery has become annoying it is still a thing
That’s interesting, because even when I was growing up in the US in the 90s, my experience was that success at school and career ambition had become somewhat feminine coded things, with the exception being guys who played sports and also got good grades. To be honest, I don’t think that there even were any guys who got good grades who also didn’t play a competitive sport, though there were plenty of guys who played sports but didn’t get good grades.
"This last paragraph is bait for the trads to tell me I don’t have time left and need to forget these high-powered 10s and settle with a mythical nice quiet man (is this a euphemism for men who want to date out of their league?)"
That is EXACTLY what it is. They want women to not shoot within their league while they shoot out of their league, thereby hopefully increasing the chances that a woman like you will go for them.
Yeap, it’s a fantasy that the dating market would be solved if only women had lower standards, most women always have realistic standards but there simply aren’t enough men who are both eligible and willing to settle down
That is the very definition of unrealistic standards. Most women are chasing a small minority of men; there are not enough men for them all, and the standards are such that it is impossible for there to be; it isn’t a matter of men just trying harder and things would work out. Women only want the best men and so many men are just invisible to women; they don’t even register as people. I cannot say what other people mean when they say women need to have more realistic standards, but to me it means that you need to be chasing real people and not the platonic ideal of your partner. I find it really interesting that lesbians do not have the same sort of unreachable standards for what women they date should be; they do not insist on tall, more successful, impossibly stoic women. I suspect it is partially nature and nurture resulting in these standards; women profess to each other that they need only the best men, and women compete with each other for status so it seems to influence what an “acceptable” man is in some perverse version of “keeping up with the Joneses”. This is a relatively recent phenomenon too; just 2 generations ago (for me anyway) nobody had these impossible standards, and while things certainly weren’t perfect they weren’t as bad as people like to make out either.
I am going to start collecting signatures from all the short losers who have rejected me and other “high standard” women to finally convince people on the internet that men of lower mating value do not immediately make good or available partners
That is a very unkind interpretation of what I said.
Are you not suggesting that I have very high standards and that this is making me unhappy?
Bear in mind, you are not the first person to commend that on this Substack, but like other commenters it feels like a projection from
Internet discourse rather than a reflection of the things I am
Actually describing.
Whats the cause of this? What you're pointing out here is a crisis of masculinity. More importantly, whats the solution?
Not that I was asked, but a few years ago I got curious as to why the US had so many kids growing up without living with their biological fathers. The US is a huge outlier on this, even compared to other developed countries with high out of wedlock birthrates. What tends to happen in those non-US developed countries is that people live in what in the US would be common law marriages. I noticed that the UK was also an outlier on this, but not as much as the US. I thought that it might be something about Anglophone culture, but places like Canada and Australia aren’t outliers, so I looked for commonalities between that US and the UK shared but that other Anglophone countries didn’t. One thing that the US and the UK share are high incarceration rates relative to other developed nations, though of course the US has a much higher incarceration rate than the UK. So my theory is that what is going on in the US and the UK at least is just imbalanced sex ratios among early adulthood to middle age cohorts, and the knock on effects that a generation or two of imbalanced sex ratios have on how men and women pursue relationships and invest in themselves. There is a good book on this titled “Marriage Markets” by Carbone and Cahn. Income inequality plays into their account as well, but the basic argument they make is that when women outnumber men, neither sex invests much in finding long term partners or doing the work of trying to develop the habits and characteristics of a good long term partner. It looks a bit like this dynamic might be starting to spread to the college educated as well. If women cannot find a good stable mate, then it seems like they will settle for unstable relationships with sexy men. So men focus even more on short term mating strategies than they otherwise would, and you get a whole dynamic where no one expects relationships to last, and so people focus on what is gratifying in the moment. I mean, why would women want to have anything to do with a man who is neither sexy nor would make a good long term partner? Another thing is that men are more likely to have substance use disorders (in the US at least) and there are substantially more gay men than lesbians. It might also be the case that the US has an abnormally large military, and women shy away from men in the military (family life is notoriously difficult for those in the military, for obvious reasons).
Anecdotally I also come across a lot more men hooked on drugs than I expected I would given I am not the drug-taking kind of person
New Zealand and Australia have higher incarceration rates than the UK. (source: Corrections NZ 2017.) About 29 percent of NZ's familes with children are lone parent families, the overwhelming majority of them headed by the mother.
The US's combined armed forces personnel number about 1.33 million. Assuming they are all men and there are about 60 million men 20 - 49 in the USA, this may be enough to tip the balance, but probably not. Jon Birger's book "Date-onomics" explains the numbers tolerably well and broadly correctly.
The US does not look like an outlier in Anglophone countries.
Also, you omitted an answer to the more important question: what to do? I admit I can't think of policies inside the Overton window. Certainly there are no quick fixes. Equally certainly, wagging a finger and saying "men need to step up" is counterproductive.
for one I tdo think no everyone is wired for a family, then for those who could be but are not I think too much isolation, being glued to technology, not being paid enough attention to as kids and not being raised with enough human affection and to value human contact and relationships as much as the attaintment of material goods and social status. It could just be more the former though, as in, a lot of people where not suitable parents already but were forced to get married previously by religion whereas now people have a choice.
"Not being paid enough attention to as kids and not being raised with enough human affection": the very definition of daycare/childcare, the last resort of the working mother.
High turnover of "carers" (for various values of care) seems to affect male infants worse than female, for some reason. (No doubt the neuroscientists will get around to telling us how/why in a decade or two.) This is one possible explanation for why males are so avoidant, ADHD, on the spectrum, and/or alexithymic these days. We've had daycare/early childhood care as a widespread thing for about thirty years now.
Note: this is speculation about statistical facts. I make no normative claims ("should" claims) whatsoever.
I think thats a pretty good assessment. Though, even if there are a lot of people who arent wired for families, Id argue that everyone still looks for love, to one degree or another. The fact that so many people of all stripes are struggling with basic relationship formation indicates to me that there has been a major breakdown in the way men and women to relate to one another across the modern world.
I don’t like the trads, and I think that the idea of settling is terrible advice. Speaking as a parent, what I want for my children is for them to do the work of figuring out what kind of partner and relationship would actually work and be good for them and pursue that (or maybe find a matchmaker to help them out with that). That isn’t settling, but it also isn’t chasing after the most desirable or high status partner they could plausibly find.
I agree with you, where I draw the line is I don't tthink you should 'settle' with someone for whom you have not managed to develop real loving feelings and with whom you have sexual chemistry but equally you need to be patient with your lovers and give them time to show you their true colous, not be put off by flippant 'icks' that are based on your own projections and biases.
“I fucked every man that I wanted to be” - Neko Case, Curse of the I-5 Corridor
Better to have the libidinous life force come out as personal ambition (with a side of spite) than as total spite. I have noticed the hatred that grows when the libido is not fed. And like most human reactions, rather than solving the problem, it makes it worse. I've seen virginous teenage girls rub their superior achievements in the face of boys while declaring men unneccessary, and of course the basement dwelling incels are the opposite end of the horseshoe. The horseshoe meets at angry sexist celibacy. So, don't give up the hunt.
I would do anything for love, I would do many things for my career, but giving up on love is not one of them
Good to know this is a universal experience. In the 5th grade, I convinced my parents to send me to a private school because I had an all-consuming crush on a boy who went there (we had never even spoken). Every decision I’ve made after that one has been similarly influenced. You and Caitlin Moran are both right… I’m sure that everything I’ve ever done has been motivated by a desire for “redemption” from heartbreak. After my last breakup, I thought… ok. Well. Now I have to write the next Great American Novel. And I must get started on that pensive indie rock album STAT! I have started both and finished neither. Here’s to hoping the next breakup pushes me over the edge of creative greatness…!!!!!!
lol, classic. Same here Piper x
It's all so exotic; in my youth I chose the ascetic path (in fear of success, not of rejection — rejection is relieving, always has been), never even asked for a date, let alone having one; and now that I'm pretty persuaded my love life is over, such a way to go through life is so interesting to read
what an interesting comment. it takes a lot of self-knowledge to admit that rejection is relieving, I believe that's the case for a lot of people. Success is terrifying because it means you have to 'do the thing'. why do you think your love life is over?
Self-knowledge is basically where I've been directing what I might call my ambition, so. I do believe it's the case for many people too, the supposed "men's fear of rejection" is quite often the opposite in fact. I was a fairly special case only in how much the thing terrified me; in the sense of my inadequacy and what I could do wrong, actually — which is why I used to fancy older women, seeing them as "more able to take the hit" (and I'm even a pretty meek guy, except for words sometimes). With time that faded a bit, leaving a trace in the form of "if she were about my age or older, I wouldn't mind". They say that's contrary to biology, but so is appreciating new music in your 40s and I am totally into that, so.
As for why I think this is over: basically age combined with inexperience, and too much to build from scratch in other aspects of life, if I'm ever even going to manage to do it. I even think I'd be able to 'do the thing', and after years living alone I've been seeing the appeal pretty clearly, but, heh. Not that I'm *sure* or *convinced* — imagining the future in every detail to feel safe is my sin, I acknowledge that —, I just don't really see it coming
Interesting. What do you mean by take the hit? You taking the hit of eventual rejection because they are older and thus less desirable by society’s standards or more mature so they would do it kindly, or them taking the hit of being disappointed when they eventually get to know you and in your head you won’t measure up?
The latter, with their (kinda indefinite) suffering added in the mix
I see… I am always surprised when I realise men feel like this.. it’s like people forget most people have flaws and are aware of them and thus are willing to be generous with the shortcomings of their potential lovers
Or love them partly for those perceived shortcomings rather than in spite of them. I've never really fallen hard for someone who wasn't a little bit quirky/eccentric - probably quirks some of those girls would rather be without.
In retrospect, I think I started looking at personal relationship as problems to crack too early, when I was too neurotic and too young (and thus, ill-equipped) to do so. Before being 30 yo I had basically gone through every existential phase in the book
"It's all so exotic; in my youth I chose the ascetic path "
More young men should become monks.
Nooo they shouldn’t 😂 unless they are sure partnership is not for them, then again, it takes a lot of self knowledge to know what you need out of life
Partnership might be "for them" but if they can't find a partner who wants to be "with them", monkhood is a good alternative to living alone and bitter.
Re "I embrace the theory that all life energy is libidinal energy": you might be interested in J. D. Unwin's "Sex and Culture", in which he makes that argument by comparing several civilizations and many more non-city-making cultures in history. He found that cultures are energetic in various ways (arts, military expansionism, cultural soft power) when the libido of their members cannot be satisfied in the obvious way.
hahhaha another feather in the trads' hats !!!
“I embrace the theory that all life energy is libidinal energy (I think Freud said it, google it losers I am on holidays!!”
I think one of your cultural ancestors considered himself ignorant in everything except in erotics: Socrates. For him Eros was everything!
Great writing. I think boys are as good a motivation as any (don't quote me out of context on that one).
I won’t x
Very enjoyable & relatable essay, nice one
thanks !
Reading between the lines here, I wonder whether you've essentially been sleeping your way up the Labour Party ladder.
I don't have any direct experience with the Labour Party cultural milieu, but if it's anything like a lot of American lefty milieus that I've spent time in over the past decade or so, I can only assume you've been able to do so more or less with impunity, because it's probably simply not worth it for any man involved in that world to question you on any of this. The potentially career ending risk of being accused of being a misogynist is simply too high.
For that matter, whether you're aware of it or not, and whether or not you'd ever use it, you've had a secret weapon in the form of an allegation button in your back pocket at all times for years that could sink any of these guys.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
are you high
Mostly right, but at the gym stage mostly wrong. Tha vast majority of women would be better off with 40 minutes more in the gym every day, even if that costs them an hour of work.
Note Rob H’s advice to men to make it a habit to exercise daily. (Says the guy recovering for months from a torn Achilles tendon.) Maybe start slowly, but it should be a higher priority than another coffee break (or tea).
Of course, it might also be better to work towards policies like market capitalism that have good results in the real world, unlike the college where Bernie’s wife was president.
It depends; for me I have been training for the last 8 years very meticulously, so for a while, I can afford to exchange one discipline for another. I still exercise most days but do lighter things like pilates and running. I find it more motivating to see my work improve than the lines on my stomach.
I genuinely think you are mistaken about what men are looking for. Your speculations about what the men who reject you will finally settle down with do not seem realistic. In my experience men want women who make them comfortable and make them want to be better people but they don’t really want someone who is trying to compete with them. You seem, from your writings at least, like a genuinely nice person who is very driven to succeed, which is not at all a bad thing, though your reasons for choosing what to strive for seem petty. I don’t think they are that out of the ordinary though; I imagine most people do things for fairly petty reasons at least some of the time if not most of the time. I wish you the best but it seems like achieving your goals will not bring you happiness.
I am driven independently of men but I thought looking into how libidinal energy interacts with our drives in other parts of life is interesting
Also, my imaginary expectation of what men are looking for here are obviously meant to be the e exaggerated voice of my insecurities. You are taking my artistic license at face value. And, you are assuming I am not happy, not true.
So it is true getting what you want won’t make you happy
what do you mean?
If you are already happy then achieving your goals cannot make you so.
I am confused, what goal are you referring to? My career aspirations?
"One of the reasons I don’t kiss and tell more explicitly is that I need these talented, powerful men to continue dating me"
What is your take on the journalists who do write a lot about their dating lives? I think a lot of talentless and powerless men would also be put off by the idea that a woman's take on date that didn't work out could appear online.
You should only do so if you are writing a memoir or something, or if you have a really good point to make, you should hide their identities. Otherwise it stops being about your writing being good and it becomes about the gossip, which can get boring pretty quickly like te hee I slept with a person whose name you've heard of !!1! No one really cares apart from the same tired Westminster circles.
wow. spot on. I really felt that.