I was just thinking about the guy above who insulted 35 year old single males while claiming to be happily married to a woman his own age. I saw the way he seemed to want to earn "brownie points" for being "politically correct". Sometimes I wonder if such men doth protest too much, to use a line from MacBeth.
I can write a thick book on this subject, but here is a reasonably pertinent anecdote for that...a few year's ago I was in the sauna of the Marriot Copley Hotel in downtown Boston. A man my age was there and we were talking. I told him I was in Boston to meet someone I'd met on the Internet, a Harvard medical student. He got this lost look in his eye and then said "You know, if anything ever happened to my {same-age} wife, and God forbid I lost her to cancer or a car crash, I probably would want to search for my new wife among the students at Harvard myself."
In other words: If you were lucky enough as a man to marry at 20 to a 20 year old...and you are now happily married and things are going well...your wife can still die of cancer or a car accident. And if this happens, you don't want to be living in a society where "political correctness" makes you, the older white male, persona non grata with the younger women who would comprise the vast majority of what your unmarried replacement base could be.
You don't want to be a widower at 50 and have the Church Single Group's pastor tell you that you are not welcome in anything but the "Senior's Group"...if you have grey hair, you don't want to hear feminists cackle about how young women aren't going for the "greying set" these days. Or do you want that? Do you think, as a married man with a few life insurance policies, that you are really *insured* against becoming a single man again and experiencing the full wrath of the feminist fight against the patriarchy's entitlements?
Do you know the dating service "Harmony" (I forget the actual name because I won't live in the USA anymore)?
I investigated them. They are so incredibly politically correct...half of my matches were a different race, which was fine in theory but more related to the fact that I lived near Oakland and they had a stupid theory that living next door was a huge match trait...but the most insulting and laughable thing of all was that they match everyone in a tight 3 year age range, up and down, under the theory that this is best for "harmony". I'd sooner accept Michael Moore's theory of the Iraq War before I accepted that load of tomatoes. Harmony.com is just one big scam.
When I was 31 I walked into a Seattle dating agency once and the 20 year old receptionist flirted with me before I went into speak with the scam artist who wanted me to pay $1400 to get "matched." The scam artist, a woman, tried to butter me up with talk of my being a "busy professional", etc etc, and when I finally asked her to be specific about whom she had in mind to match me with...she shuffled papers and eventually revealed that nobody younger than I was ever joined. I said "what about the receptionist?" :-)
Now let's look at why anyone would still be single at 35:
High School: I was a nerd with a Beatles haircut and no body. I thus missed having a "highschool sweetheart" like in the movie "Grease." There was no prom for me as I graduated early at 17.
College: At age 17 I was a freshman at college. I was too young to know what I was doing there, so I just studied for four years. In my freshman year, I did start to look better and I dated a high school cheerleader, but I didn't get out of college knowing what I was doing in conversation with others or socially. I didn't have a "college sweetheart." I was a late bloomer I guess.
Army: I got an enormous amount of self-confidence in the military and learned languages quickly. In my experience, however, soldiers were not seen as eligible bachelors by anyone on the left or right. My first German girlfriend only went out with me because she thought I worked FOR the US Army and not IN it. The world has changed since 9-11 on that score, I hope. I got out of the army and took my MBA among a bunch of liberal elitists at the University of Toronto who were insufferable to socialize with. The undergrads at the U of Toronto DESPISED graduate students. I couldn't understand this, except that grad students were normally leftists with bad hair. I hadn't thought MBAs and law students would be thrown into the same pile. I still didn't understand "leftism" the way 9-11 was later to describe it to me.
One of the worst things about the University of Toronto was that a 28 year old MBA student was considered WAY TOO OLD for ANY undergrad. One undergrad coed shrugged and explained to me "Guys our own age are simply F-able." Canada scared me! I didn't understand that it was liberalism that encouraged so much hatred for "older white males", but I was only 28 and didn't CONSIDER myself to even be an "older white male."
This was my first exposure to the idea that leftists don't want younger women dating older men: "Stupid White Men" as Michael Moore calls us. Did you know that the Canadian and British version of that book has a chapter called "Don't Date Whitey?"
Michael Moore is well-known in Canada for encouraging white women to date Muslims.
The only time I have stuck my middle finger out at anyone or anything was when I caught a plane out of Canada and the plane dipped with the city of Toronto before me out my window. I thought "take this Canada. I didn't have to live her and keep taking abuse simply for being a white male over 25." I went back to New York where a now 30 year old man still had a chance.
But a chance only among the chain-smoking, black wearing "Sex in the City" types who revolted me, some of them only dating me because I had become an Internet paper millionaire. Then the paranoid Boston, Seattle and San Francisco environment...Paris and London can be bad, but the American cities were impossible. In Boston, it is standard practice for a woman to lie about what her job is because the man might FIGURE OUT where she works! God forbid!
Someday, after I write a book about liberalism the working title of which is "It's Not About Iraq", I am going to go a lecture tour, taking along a great European wife, in the cities of Boston, Toronto, Seattle and San Francisco. I will explain exactly why I left the places and how the liberal, anti-white-male social infrastructure needed to be completely rebuilt.
Now I am leaving out some girlfriends that I did have in some of the above harsh environments. They were wonderful and I could have married one...but they were all hard-core liberals and, although I didn't understand the difference between right and left until after 9-11, I knew enough not to marry a liberal.
Later, I was on the beach of Waikiki at sunset and met a young conservative woman from Idaho. She was 6'1" feet and 19 years old, she looked great in a summer dress on Waikiki...and she adored me. A guy her own age had married her and then divorced her after cheating on her in the first year of marriage (same-age guys will often do this).
When her "Christian" father found out about me, he hit the roof, telling her that he would completely disown her financially if she continued seeing me. The only factor was my age. Age, age, age. It is all some American parents think about. She still writes to me and says she is now unhappily married to a Mormon drunkard her own age. Her protestant family found the prospect of Mormonism and drunkenism and abuse more reassuring than a 12 year age difference.
Now in Europe, if I don't marry soon, you could honestly say it is because I have a commitment problem. But even here there are a lot of liberals...as FR wisely documents. At least you don't get the paranoia here. You don't get parents going insane because an employed, articulate, non-smoking, non-drinking male who knows a few things about life and spent much of his twenties in the military, might date their daughter.
There is a common root cause for a lot of these problems:
This was my first exposure to the idea that leftists don't want younger women dating older men: "Stupid White Men" as Michael Moore calls us.
American television promotes the idea that "Stupid White Men", especially those who are over 30 and hold responsible positions in corporations, are the root of all evil. The people who frown at a representative of the Evil Empire dating one of their friends don't think, they just react to the images they have been programmed with.
In Boston, it is standard practice for a woman to lie about what her job is because the man might FIGURE OUT where she works! God forbid!
Amercian television taught her that a high percentage of men are violent rapists. She doesn't think - she reacts to the images she has been programmed with.
Age, age, age. It is all some American parents think about.
American television taught them that men more than a couple years older who interested in their daughters are predators...and probably pedophiles. The parents don't think - they react to the images they have been programmed with.
Television provides a form of social shorthand for people with limited experience with the world: they can watch and learn how to judge groups using the same biases that the producers of the programming have, then feel themselves to be as sophisticated as others who actually have that experience. I can only conclude that other parts of the world have medias with a less mendacious social agenda.