September 20, 2015

"I was almost rooked in by this," says a high-rated commenter at a NYT "Modern Love" essay titled "'Quirkyalone’ Is Still Alone."

"To read here on Modern Love, one imagines he is about 29 or 30 or so. Ha! he's 48," the commenter writes.
Come on. He's not a lonely singleton looking for love. He's a middled aged player. I note he does not discuss whether he dates women 45-50 (his own age range) OR if he's trying to make it with 20-somethings. Huh. What do you think?

He doesn't want kids, and he's successfully avoided committed relationships for....OVER THIRTY YEARS.

He's a player, and he likes it. In NYC, there is always a new crop of hopeful young women crowding into the city, and playing right into his hands....he gives them hope, then shoots them down. In Men's Journal, he admits to dating two women at once....
Here's the referenced Men's Journal article by Tim Kreider: "Is Monogamy Insane?/You can blame evolution, chemistry, or just our own dogged libidos, but one thing is certain: It can be a bitch."

One thing I noticed was he used the word "swinish" in both articles.

In the NYT:  "Lately I’ve been having a lot of conversations with friends who find themselves still single in their 30s and 40s and are starting to worry that it’s not those swinish men/crazy women or New York City’s cruelly Darwinian dating scene or bad luck. It’s just them...."

In Men's Journal: "Behavior like my friend Kevin's, or the stereotype of the swinish middle-aged man who ditches his wife for some young chippie, is looked on by most women with a contempt that's ostensibly moral but is clearly more personal...."

14 comments:

buwaya said...

A. It's probably New York. San Francisco is similar. Any reasonably presentable, reasonably well paid man 20-60 can have as many women as he wants. I'm no spring chicken, and never terribly good looking at my best, but I'm still hit on.

B. This is where the whole business of general moral collapse bites. People just don't form families, youth and fertility are wasted, life no longer is about obligations but a shoddy business of transient affairs, followed eventually by desperation and despair. People aren't meant to live like this.

chickelit said...

Writes the author: Recently I got all crushed out on someone for the first time in a long time. She was someone I had known for years, but I had always assumed she didn’t consider me a candidate for a boyfriend, or even fling material.

Obviously he's into casting pearl necklaces. That also explains the swine references. YMMV.

madAsHell said...

I had to look-up the definition for "swinish" because I pronounced it with a short 'i'. I notice that it is derived from the word swine.

I'll guess that both articles were written by the same person.

Sebastian said...

"Quirkyalone" -- is that something like serial solitude? like spending only every other night with a new woman?

fivewheels said...

"the stereotype of the swinish middle-aged man who ditches his wife for some young chippie, is looked on by most women with a contempt that's ostensibly moral"

I noted long ago that in every one of those pairings, along with the spurned wife, there is a corresponding young guy, probably poor and struggling to establish himself economically, whose pretty young girlfriend dumped him for a wealthier older dude. Yet that subject isn't harped on by Oprah, and no "First Boyfriends Club" movies get made.

Having been on the wrong end of that when I was young, I now have no guilt about turning around and dating women who are younger than me. Of course, for women it travels in the other direction: They have all the advantages first, and then the downside hits. I suppose I can see why so many are stunned and bitter when they hit the point that young-woman privilege deserts them. And suddenly their poor behavior (swinish, even) is not so quickly excused by the men around them.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

Men's Journal seems to me to be a lot like Cosmopolitan.

Etienne said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
rcocean said...

I would say dumping your old wife because you're tired of her old body is swinish, but then it also depends on the marriage and wife. Each marriage is unhappy in its own way.

OTOH, when are women going to stop whining about middle-aged men preferring young women? Young men get passed over as the young chicks want an older man with more money, this is just the other side of the same coin.

eric said...

Is this man the Pope?

I Have Misplaced My Pants said...

Some of the middle aged women I know who have been left, put little to no effort as the years went by into being the kind of person their husbands would want to stay with.

David said...

It's never clear to me why older guys avoid (or are accused of avoiding) the 45-50's. The right women in that age group are about as good as it gets.

tim in vermont said...

I don't understand why the hate for the article. It seemed like pretty standard rom-com fare to me. He pretty clearly seemed to be well past his 30s, but I suppose that young people reading it can't possibly know that, given the scale of their ignorance.

Peter said...

"when are women going to stop whining about middle-aged men preferring young women? Young men get passed over as the young chicks want an older man with more money, this is just the other side of the same coin."

Darwin. Swinish Darwin. How dare he destroy illusions by pointing out the hard realities of the mating dance?


Besides, now that boys can be girls just because they think they are, why can't we just define reality to be what whatever we want it to be, whenever we want it to be that way?

SGT Ted said...

"Behavior like my friend Kevin's, or the stereotype of the swinish middle-aged man who ditches his wife for some young chippie, is looked on by most women with a contempt that's ostensibly moral but is clearly more personal...."

Meanwhile women who blow up their own families and wallet rape their husband because they aren't haaaaappy or want to bang other men are not discussed or held a count but rather are enabled by Femicentric laws.