I clearly remember a conversation I had with my friend N immediately after my ex-husband had kicked me out. I was wondering, in a wine- fuelled moment of depression, whether I would ever meet anyone ever again and at that moment, it struck me that thirty was the worst age to be single. She, being ten years older than me, was commenting on the lack of decent single men her age, and I remember thinking that at least lots of forty year old men have been married and are separated and divorced and ready to go again. I figured, at that time, that all thirty something men are happily settled and having babies. However, I was wrong.
Some of them are. They must be, if the number of my friends who are pregnant at the moment is anything to go by. But I strongly believe, from looking around at my other friends' love lives at the moment (well, why not, there's nothing happening in my own) that many thirty-something men are busy breaking their girlfriend's hearts.
Women just get better with age. Every single one of my friends now looks better and has more confidence than they did in their twenties. Men just get fatter. And lose their hair. Men also seem to have a wide held belief that, at thirty, every woman turns desperate, and starts looking at babies in prams with the intent of stealing them when the mother isn't looking. That every woman has a biological clock that turns them into controlling, child obsessed maniacs. But you see this is just a conspiracy, a rumour spread by men to divert us all from the truth. It's not the women that panic, it's the men. And that's when the problems begin.
A friend of mine (C, thirty one last October) commented on the fact that every guy she has been out with has called her a 'psycho'. She's not a psycho at all. But, she maintains, she was driven to exhibiting some decidedly stalker-like behaviour by the crazy immature mind games that these men played. “And,” she added “They all seemed to think that I was desperate to get married, settle down and have kids. Which I'm not. I'd just like to meet a nice man and see how it goes.” Reasonable enough, non? Hot FB Guy also said to me on a number of occasions that he thought I wanted to have a relationship with him and but that he wasn't ready. I didn't not want to have a relationship with him. But to be honest, I was more interested in checking out his hairy chest and then seeing where it went from there...
It seems to me that many men in their early thirties suddenly have some kind of epiphany, almost like a mid life crisis but ten years early. Then everything in their lives is suddenly brought into sharp focus (including their beginner beer bellies) and they realise that their inoffensive, loyal and loving girlfriend may possibly want to get married and have kids one day. And that they are never going to be a lead guitarist in a rock band. Or an astronaut. Or marry Cameron Diaz. Then they panic and go a bit loopy and tell the girl who has been picking their wet towels up off the bedroom floor and enduring their sneaky under-the-duvet farts for the last five years that they aren't ready and they need space and they need to find themselves and they still love her but they aren't in love with her and that they're confused.
Women, in general, are pragmatic. We're tough. Women are able to carry on, whatever life throws at them. We get on and whenever life is crap we anaesthetize ourselves with gallons of wine and support from our closest girlfriends. When we get dumped, we go shopping and emerge that night in a fabulous outfit and a pair of ' break up' shoes that we bought in the sale that day. (Mine are known as my 'divorce boots' and have studs on. Purchased in New York a year and a half ago)
Women come to terms with the fact that maybe we are going to end up having a 'normal' life. We come to terms with the fact that from now on, it's him and me. Together. Men don't talk, so they come to terms with life's tedium with the purchase of a new sports car, hair plugs or the ministrations of a young Polish waitress. I kid you not. It happened to my friend. Apparently her boyfriend of eight years came home one day, announced that he was confused and moved out. Turned out that he was more confused about the fact that somehow, he was about to have a baby. With the afore-mentioned waitress.
My own ex-husband hammered the final nails into the coffin of our relationship when he announced that I had to move out because he wanted to live on his own. Apparently I was too 'mumsy' and controlling. He wanted to 'work on his music'. With the help of a female pianist from down the road who apparently 'got him'. He had realised that domestic tedium with me was pretty much the way forward from that point and he couldn't cope. Funnily enough, six months later, he wanted me to move back in. I declined. He'd had his little crisis, realised it wasn't actually that fun being single and was ready to move on with our relationship. I was also ready to move on. With a hot African man I'd met at salsa. It was too late.
Pretty soon, it will be too late for my friend L's idiot of a boyfriend to get her back. And it will be too late for F's sometime bloke to commit properly to her. And it will be too late for all those silly men who think that there is something more out there for them. Something or someone more than that loyal girl who manages a demanding job, cuddles them at night and still irons their shirts for them every Sunday evening.
Which is why, for the past week, I'm thinking about calling my ex. He's older (nearly forty) and has always been very straightforward about what he wants. No ifs and buts with him. He's remarkably decisive. He left me a message on Friday night and I texted back but he hasn't replied. The Rules would say I shouldn't call him but then do they apply to ex-boyfriends? What's the worst that could happen if I do call him?
Anyway, what is the moral of this story? Is it that instead of going out to bars and clubs to meet men, we should go to train spotting conventions and darts competitions, garden centres and fishing spots? That we as thirty something women should be actively pursuing older, greyer men? Maybe. A forty year old man will at least have been through his crisis with another woman. Most probably he will be house trained too....
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