Men, Women, Redux

Laura Nolan, your recent col­umn in the Times of Lon­don is extremely amus­ing:

Men are like eggs. They must hatch or go bad. I came to this con­clu­sion after see­ing in the new year with a gang of uni­ver­sity friends and hear­ing one of them, a sin­gle guy of 35 called Jamie, declare with com­plete sin­cer­ity that his res­o­lu­tion for 2008 was not to get a girlfriend.

I groaned. His vow struck me as odd, not just because Jamie is a remark­ably warm, kind and enter­tain­ing indi­vid­ual rather than some ropey Lothario, but because I knew him ten years ago when he was mus­tard keen to marry his then girl­friend. And when I thought harder about it, I realised that over the past decade Jamie has effec­tively been degen­er­at­ing from the man he was at 25 years old to the boy he is today.

The per­son who fell in love and believed that when you found a great girl you counted your bless­ings and mar­ried her has mor­phed into some­one in search of noth­ing more than a bit of fun, who views any rela­tion­ship that he can’t get out of at the ping of a text mes­sage with gen­uine unease.

Where have all the men gone? Instead, we have an over­load of man-boys – which leaves a gen­er­a­tion of sin­gle, thir­tysome­thing women who are their nat­ural mates bewil­dered. I am one of those women.

You want to know what hap­pened? Read my lengthy essay here. And if you want some­one who is more con­cise and blunt, read this.