The Peter Pan Myth: The Real Reason Men Won’t Settle Down
I’m going to be entirely serious for a change and say I have my own theory on this.
I think keeping young men in school too long and pressure from various sources to shun the uncool company of older men has a lot to do with it.
Most of my friends and I left shhol at 16, some of us went into higher education a while later but in the early sixties we could not wait to get out of the highly disciplined, regimented school environment.
Suddenly we were in the workplace, in the company of older men and women who had no qualms about letting us know where we stood in the pecking order. We learned what no school can teach, we learned to be members of a grown up society. Now I find that where, at seventeen, we looked forward to being thirty, now thirty year old men men still act seventeen.
Maybe in my case though following the advice of the 19th century aristocrat Lord Chesterfield had something to do with it. He said: “There is nothing sets up a young man o well as having an older mistress.”
