I’m, like one of the other posters, a perpetual adult. I was responsible enough to graduate from college before my twentieth birthday. When I finished graduate school, I moved back to my parents’ home – for two weeks (it was two thousand miles closer to my job than my graduate school was). I’ve been out on my own since then. I’ve saved money, shown up at work every day, and done all the things that one would normally associate with being an adult, except get married. I’m fifty-five years old, straight as can be, and single.
Why? I think that not only marriage, but virtually anything involving any sort of relationship with women, is stacked against me. At least a significant minority of American women of my generation really don’t like men. It shouldn’t be a surprise that I don’t want the company of people who don’t like me. The usual response from women when I say something like that is “you just want somebody subservient.” I don’t. I want somebody who is as nice to me as other men are. I don’t want somebody who will twist what I say to make it an insult. I don’t want somebody who wants to change me.
Kay Hymowitz, whose writing I have admired greatly in the past, writes “give young men a choice between serious drama on the one hand, and Victoria’s Secret models, battling cyborgs, exploding toilets, and the NFL on the other, and it’s the models, cyborgs, toilets, and football by a mile.” I’m certainly not a young man, but it’s not battling cyborgs and exploding toilets for me, and only rarely Victoria’s Secret models and football. It’s chamber music, the opera, and good books, and it’s been two of those since I was a young man; opera has come later in life.
Even in 2008, I have to be the one who asks for a date, more than 90% of the time. I’m the one who ends up even more often than I do the asking (perhaps I’m just foolish that way). What’s in it for me? Sex is far less important to me than it was twenty or more years ago, and it carries with it the risk of an accusation of date rape. Women, when I mention that, ask me about the pleasure of conversation and a woman’s company. It’s not a pleasure with me to talk with somebody who really doesn’t like men, and there’s pleasure in men’s company, with a whole lot less effort.
Kay Hymowitz is free to regard me as a perpetual adolescent, but I view myself as a mature man who’s decided that women, at least American women of my generation, aren’t worth the trouble.
