Men, Middle-Aged, and Single

Your options when it's truly too late

So, you’ve wasted your youth with situationship after situationaship. You lacked direction, never realised your potential due to passivity and self-destructive behaviour. You self-rejected whenever you had an opportunity with a woman you felt inferior to. Feeling inferior to a woman made you actually inferior to her. You thought you had time, but life isn’t short — youth is short.

There’s a lot of “advice” out there for young males, but very little for men past their prime. It’s like, if you miss the boat, nobody gives a fuck about you, or nobody knows what advice to give you.

Disclaimer

This isn’t some subtle nudge to the ridiculous ‘men going their own way’ (MGTOW) movement, which is like a crybaby playing hard to get, secretly hoping it’ll get the attention it pretends not to need — looking back as it pretends to rage-quit. It’s also not a push to becoming a monk or a gay (often, they are the same).

This article is a simple, practical analysis of this particular kind of predicament: a man past his prime, having missed the boat, with only tramps and barges left on the horizon.

Do you settle, or do you give up? I won’t presume to tell you which is better for you because there is no ideal solution. I hope this analysis helps you make the right choice for you.

The reality of loneliness

A friend who used to work in radio confided in me she could tell how much loneliness existed in the world, judging from the phone calls she received from listeners late at night — so many people calling up just to talk to someone, anyone, for a few seconds. They had nothing better to do in their free time, no one to talk to. Listening to her live radio show was their only substitute for a conversation. Sad, really.

Most of them were male. None of them was under 30. Maybe women handle loneliness better, or it’s the 4:1 ratio (or 80/20 rule) at play here, where multiple women settle for the shared attention from a single, top male. Regardless, loneliness is a real thing.

Too late

“It’s never too late” is some of the worst advice you will hear. Sure, it’s never too late to join a gym, but after a certain point, it’s too late to train for the Olympics. It’s too late to start a new career after a certain age — who in their right mind would give a 40-something guy an internship or entry-level job?

People who insist that “it’s never too late” may secretly want to deprive you of your sense of urgency, misleading you to miss opportunities you presume will come again but never do. Be suspicious of people who maniacally seek to convince you that “it’s never too late”.

And finding a good romantic partner is one of those things: at a certain age, it’s too late to find a good person with whom to share your life.

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It’s not just your age and the fact that all the good ones are already married. It’s also the fact that, as you age, there are fewer opportunities to meet new people. You’re not at school anymore, where you keep meeting new people, most of whom are single. In middle age, you don’t get to meet people — and when you do, they’re either single but too young, or your age but taken.

Sure, you can go out, but who will be your wingman? It’s easier to find a woman (hanging out at bars alone like a creep) than to find a wingman to help you find a woman. All your good guy friends are taken and won’t spend their Saturday night with you. Your loser/single friends? You don’t want them as wingmen — they drag you down, and you look like the “What is love” Saturday Night Live skit. Creepy.

And online dating? Forget it. The male-to-female ratio is so disproportionate that it gives women a false sense of scarcity and thus value. They feel entitled and superior, plus women accustomed to online dating will never value you, because you’re one swipe away from being replaced. They will also not respect you because, deep down, they consider online dating to be cowardly, even though it’s become a desperate necessity. Maybe more so. Women in online dating are just as problematic (if not more) than the guys in online dating. There’s a reason why you resorted to that.

But please, be my guest and join activities clubs, and let me know how that goes — reeking desperation and dishonesty, with everybody knowing why they joined while pretending “it’s for the hobby”.

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It takes courage to admit it’s too late; otherwise, you end up as that older guy who dyes his hair and lies about his age, and thinks younger women won’t notice. Undignified and unmanly, to say the least; own up to it, ffs! I’ve met tons of dudes like that working as a bartender for years. Misery.

Early bird catches the worm

If you don’t snatch a good romantic partner early on, you’re fucked. Every year that passes means you’re competing more and more for less and less.

Let’s face it — all the good ones are snatched early by the good ones. They were good enough to identify and value the rare good, and thus offered their commitment early. Otherwise, neither of them would be good. If they don’t snatch (or are snatched) early, it means they weren’t good… You weren’t good.

Don’t give me that “I wasn’t ready” crap, or “I wanted to live my life first” or “I wanted to focus on my career”.

Bullshit.

You wanted to fuck around to satisfy your crippling insecurities. You gifted your youth to the worst people — people whom you objectified and who objectified you back. And then you had the gall to expect a good partner to take you past your prime: without your youth, with all the emotional baggage and your incapacity to connect from all your promiscuity. This goes for men and women. For me too.

Early snatchers tend to be the good ones. Yes, some people have unprotected sex early and marry due to an unwanted pregnancy. I’m talking about the ones with control over their impulses who made the rational choice of identifying the good people early, and then forgoing all their future potential for securing a good partner.

If you are good, you never say, “I have time to fuck around ‘cause I’m young and I have options”. If you are good, you recognise how rare ‘good’ is, and thus you have the wisdom to create artificial scarcity for yourself. You value that one good person next to you, and you consciously choose to forget about the rest.

A man’s basic offerings

A man has six basic qualities of attraction, six fundamental things to offer to a woman in a romantic relationship. Without these, there is nothing a woman will want from you. They are:

1. Appearance (face more than body),

2. Height (yes, height),

3. Money (women need to feel safe, and money offers safety — it is what it is),

4. Status (not always synonymous with money, and vice versa),

5. Charisma or social skills (taking the lead with your demeanour),

6. and youth (You can have none of the other qualities, but if you’re young, you’re still in demand — you still have some relative value, even without anything else going for you).

These are the basic things a man has to offer to a woman. It’s through these that he could potentially offer her the safety she needs to feel next to a man. Without these, you cannot offer her anything else. Why would she be with you?

Your personality, principles, values, kindness, virtues, or your artistic flair don’t matter — these are over-and-above nice-to-haves. But unless you have one of the six basic qualities listed above, nobody cares about the nice-to-haves. You’ll be good enough as a friend, but not as a romantic partner that women can commit to.

And it’s fair.

Just like you, as a man, you’d never consider even the most virtuous woman if you weren’t the slightest attracted to her. Similarly, women will reject you at first sight if you don’t offer any basic attraction: the six qualities above. Don’t blame anyone; it’s the biological programming we received from nature, not of our choosing, no less.

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Funny thing about these qualities, you can’t really work on them much:

1. Your face? Good luck getting plastic surgery, dyed hair, or Botox and not looking like a creepy old lady. Yes, you can improve your body, but good women don’t care that much about your fabulous body — in my experience, the better my body looked, the worse the type of women I attracted. On the contrary, a good woman will see chiselled abs and your feminine obsession with your appearance as a red flag: something to do with self-obsessed narcissism and your hopeless dependency on cheap validation from invalid people.

2. Your height? Impossible to increase, unless you go with excruciating limb lengthening surgery, sacrificing your structural balance and general health for a few centimetres of height. Good luck managing the back pain after that. You’ll look weirdly out of proportion, anyway.

3. Money and status? Yes, you can improve your wealth and status, but you are limited to the opportunities (sheer luck) presented to you in your environment and circumstances. It also depends on the principles you’re willing to give up to get there — joining gangs, political parties (same thing), or bullshit-selling freemason-style clubs requires a level of self-denying subservience that isn’t worth the juice. The strings attached to that kind of money and status weigh more than the actual money and status. Gone are the times when your ability to gather resources was tied to your masculine energy. Now it’s all politics, sucking up, pretending, submitting, and more ass-kissing — toxic feminine traits.

4. Social skills and charisma? How much can you work on your communication before you begin sounding fake and disingenuous, and then be perceived as even less attractive? You are who you are from your early developmental window. You can’t become someone else on command. Acting and self-delusion are not only unconvincing but also exhausting, and the gains from them are meaningless.

5. And youth with its prospects: the one thing that you can’t improve at all, and you lose day by day.

Whatever your case may be and what explanations (not excuses) for your misfortune, you find yourself without any of these qualities, without a spouse, without a family.

It’s time to take stock.

Your options

OK, so you know you’ve fucked up and missed the boat. Can’t reverse time. So what can you do now? What are your options?

1. Baggage woman. After wasting your youth, any woman you’ll find around your age will come with baggage: a divorcee, a single mom, or a woman who’s had so many romantic partners that she has zero emotional capacity left, zero way to connect and attach with anyone new. The sticker analogy is vapid but accurate: Every time you detach a sticker and reattach it, it loses its stickiness. Same with people. So, you’ll have to settle — a lot — if you truly need a woman. When a woman has children, all her love goes to them, and it’s fine if they are your children too. If she has some other man’s children, no matter how badly they split up, that man is more important to her than you will ever be — she cares for his children more than she cares about you. And if she’s just a divorcee without kids? Well, she loved someone before you enough to want to spend her life with. You’re a rebound. And if she’s widowed? Then you’ll compete with a dead man, the idolised memory of someone she loved and lost. Whichever the case, you will carry her heavy baggage.

2. Mail-order bride. You get a much younger woman from a third-world country. Your passport and mediocre income will be paradise for her. It’s an arrangement, like a business agreement: you both know what it is. She’ll respect you for giving her a slightly better lifestyle, but keep in mind that this is all relative; she respects you due to external circumstances beyond your control. You just happened to be luckier than her. It wasn’t her fault she was born with a third-world passport, and you don’t deserve any credit simply for being born in a less shitty country. You didn’t earn her; you exploited her, and she exploited you. You feed on each other’s desperation. You didn’t want each other; you needed each other, and that’s not ideal. Don’t delude yourself that you’ve found love, or that you’ve attracted a much younger woman. You haven’t, and you didn’t. She’ll never respect you as a man because you resorted to such an arrangement. She’s young, and she’s sacrificing her youth with you to escape a hellhole. She can’t wait until you die and leave her some cash. I wouldn’t blame her.

3. Much younger woman. Any woman more than 5 years younger than you is too young for you — unless you have money, status, height, and you look like Brad Pitt. Relative height might even be more important than being handsome. Anyway, you might be in your 40s with little to show for yourself, and still find a woman in her 20s. But that’ll still be a woman attracted to someone who could be her dad — daddy issues and more red flags than a communist parade. Plus, how long do you think she’ll stay attracted to you? When you’re pushing 60, she’ll still be in her 30s, still young-ish, and still getting lots of attention from males younger than her. It’s a matter of time until she resents you and feels like she did you a favour, like she gives more than she gets. She’ll feel like you wasted her youth. And she’ll be right. You’re wasting her life because you’re consuming her youth, and she isn’t consuming yours. She’ll resent you because you accepted this unfair arrangement when you should’ve been older and wiser.

4. Prostitution. There’s a reason strip clubs and OnlyFans are booming: loneliness. Loneliness — when our biological nature punishes us for being alone. But nobody wants to be alone; circumstance or the lack of wisdom (still circumstance) force us into solitude when we miss the boat, and opportunities to meet people become scarce. Frequenting brothels of all kinds is popular amongst philosophers (see Nietzsche) — not for hedonism, but for addressing a basic need not of our choosing. No, it’s not ideal, it’s not moral, but let’s not stigmatise it more than it has to be. As long as prostitutes are consenting adults, it’s none of your business what people choose to do with their bodies. Prostitution is more honest and moral (by far) than any job in politics. And prostitution is not hedonism either — there is no greater pleasure than a loving family. If anything, a family is peak hedonism, and it’s ok. Being a patron of prostitution is like drug and alcohol use: mitigating your depression in the now, paying for it later with more depression, then consuming even more substances. It’s a valid option, though.

5. Dignity in solitude. You maintain whatever self-respect you have left by gracefully exiting a game you played and lost — a rigged game in which you were dealt a bad hand, no less. You must have the courage to admit you lost and the strength to live with failure. Not everyone wins. And most relationships are miserable anyway: two co-addicted people who settled for each other — people who can’t stand each other but stick together regardless, because they fear loneliness more than they resent each other.

When you’ve lost your youth without having secured a committed relationship, it probably means you didn’t have the other basic qualities to begin with. So you didn’t stand much of a chance from the start — you only had youth (and its countdown). Or you had all of those qualities but not the wisdom to choose one to settle down with (not to settle with).

When you reach a level where the only available women are either women with baggage or women with issues (usually both), then giving up is the only dignified option — otherwise you’d have to settle a lot, make do, lower your expectations, make concessions. As the French say: mettre de l’eau dans son vin.

Yes, if they’re old and single without baggage, there’s a reason they are old and single — just like you. You could say, if they’re the bottom of the barrel like you are, then you’re a good match — you deserve each other.

But perhaps, when you’re that bad, being self-sufficient is preferable to being with someone as messed up as you. You have nothing to offer to each other. You’ll only drag each other further down.

You have no buoyancy to give to each other, only dead weight.

Need vs. want

Why solitude?

Because if you can’t get what you want, there’s no value or meaning in what you need.

Once you become desperate, you become needy. And needing is not only pathetic, but it makes you resentful of what you need. You can’t be grateful for satisfying a need — it’s hypocrisy to claim otherwise. On the contrary, if you are self-sufficient, and you choose to want something regardless, then that something is meaningful to you — you appreciate it.

However, when you can live without her, yet you still choose her, she is much more important to you than she’d be if you couldn’t live without her.

This is why desperation reeks, and we can’t stand needy people around us. They don’t want us; they need us, which means they objectify us. We know that, if for them we’re just a means to satisfy their need, then they don’t really value us for being ‘us’.

Conclusion

It takes courage to admit it’s too late for some things. There is nothing more cowardly and delusional than pretending that “it’s never too late” and becoming that creepy older guy trying to hit on much younger women. The younger women who fall for such guys are equally creepy, by the way. Wouldn’t trust their intentions, nor their emotional balance.

Besides, the need for a relationship is an instinct — biological imperatives not of your choosing. What possible meaning is there in such a thing?

You missed out on obeying your biological imperative. If anything, that should be an ode to free will.

How do you mitigate your sexual urges?

So you chose to stay alone. You still have urges, needs imposed on you by cruel, indifferent nature or “god”. It’s like breathing, eating, or taking a piss — biological functions not of your choosing.

You can still have non-committed relationships with women your age who are as messed up as you are. Non-committed means you can go out together, meet up, hang out, but you don’t have to live together, you don’t meet each other’s parents, you don’t burden yourselves with each other’s problems.

You’re still lonely, just not alone. You’re lonely together.

There are plenty of women without baggage (e.g. single mums) who also gave up on proper relationships, and only want some company, some satisfaction of their biological needs, not of their choosing. And that’s ok. We didn’t choose to be this way.

Signoff

I wish I had a more positive message to share with you. I don’t. This is life. I can’t sell unfounded fairytales like a religious cultist or a “motivation” guru-scammer.

Better to muster the courage to face reality than live in delusion, living in denial, constantly fighting the scepticism from ever surfacing, always horrified of it creeping up from behind you.