NEVER Date or Marry a "Self-Employed" Man

There is a guy in this trailer park, who I will call "Jeff," who seemed to have an attraction to me for a time, but the other day he was parading around his girlfriend, who like him is in her fifties and has been ridden hard.*  Oh, she was fashionably slim, with real tight jeans and dyed blond hair, but she didn’t fool me as to her age.  I had to laugh to myself at the folly and stupidity of this woman.  She might be the “girlfriend” who was “just friends” with him a couple of years ago after having had a relationship and they decided to rekindle it or some goddamned thing.  Anyway, I think the woman is an idiot for taking up with a man who clearly doesn’t have a stable income of any sort, and he is pushing 60 (another liability for yours truly as I do NOT particularly like younger men).  I looked at the SUV or crossover SUV she has.  It is a late-model SUV, and I thought, how the fuck could she afford a nice vehicle like that?  I figured she either has a stable job, or most likely, she has a stable job but also came into a fat divorce settlement.  She probably owns a stick house on top of it.

Anyway, Jeff was parading this woman around the mobile home park last week.  He was holding hands with her while walking his dog, showing her off trying to make me jealous or some stupid shit.  My heart, such as it is, belongs and always will belong to somebody else, and I don’t need to mention his name here.  I wouldn’t have this Jeff character or whatever his name is.  But here this well-dressed woman with a nice vehicle is dating this guy who has a pickup with a canopy that isn’t anywhere near as nice as what she drives.  He lives in a goddamned older mobile home, for crying out loud.  My guess is this guy does remodeling floors and such for a living.  He has this guy who comes and picks him up many mornings, and they go to “work” together.  It’s a bunch of bullshit.  It is like these guys who do yardwork and have a “business.”  It is complete and total bullshit.

Because the Rogue Valley doesn’t have much in the way of blue-collar employment and manufacturing anymore, not since the early 1980s, such dudes who don’t have an education beyond high school figure they can “make money” having their own “business.”  There are a glut of “contractors” in this town, probably far more “contractors” than there is demand for them.

 

I remember my dad having his dairy and then his sand and gravel business.  He did pretty well for himself, and Ma made sure he stayed on the straight and narrow so they would have a decent retirement, which they did for the rest of their lives.  They paid into Social Security; my mother made goddamned sure of it and nothing was “under the table.”  My dad worked his ass off to support Ma and us kids.  There were weeks at a time I didn’t see him because he and his small crew would go out of town on projects  in that godawful Alturas, California, or Oakridge, Oregon.  He sure as hell didn’t fart around like this Jeff guy does, who seems to work only about half the time.  That is because there is a glut of “independent contractors” in the Rogue Valley.  You’d think a guy pushing 60 would look into working for somebody else and at least get some financial stability in his life before his body is totally wrecked from physical labor.  He already is pretty shot now.

I would NEVER, EVER have a man like this with no stable income.  He and his partner might make a few thousand for each “job,” but expenses eat it up.  I doubt this dude pays into Social Security and certainly doesn’t have anything remotely like a pension or investments of any sort.  If he actually made “good money” remodeling floors and shit, he would not be living in an older mobile home in a trailer park with the least expensive monthly rent in Medford.  He would be living in a stick house on a lot in the better suburbs of Medford.  He dresses like shit, almost like a street person, unless he goes out and sees his “sweetie,” which is almost every single day.  Like clockwork, this dude goes over to his squeeze’s house to sponge off her because she is a moron who cooks “his” dinners for him.   The minute this dude gets dropped off or returns home from “work,” he gets cleaned up, grabs his dog, and he goes over to her house.  He very seldom stays the night with her, and I don’t think she has ever spent the night at his place.  My guess is she still has kids living at home.  In any case,  I don’t understand women who even do this bullshit for men like cooking.  I don’t understand women who would ever date a guy like this.  He must be good in bed or something, for the guy has red flags all over the place.

Does that mean he is a bad guy?  Nope, but the fact he isn’t working for somebody else means that if she marries him, and I think she is stupid enough she will at some point, she will be supporting that business and him and not the other way around.  This guy has NOTHING to offer her at all.  At their ages, financial security becomes paramount.  He will be nothing but a parasite to her.

Women often marry men who are self-employed, like a childhood friend of mine did with her husband, or they will help a spouse get established in a business (and husbands also help wives get established in self-employment while they work for employers), and they KNOW upfront they are going to have to make sure there is an income stream in order for that business to get off the ground.  In my friend's case, her husband had inherited the business from his father, and they have been able to keep that business for over 40 years and are gradually turning it over to one of their sons.  They are able to afford to retire.  There is nothing wrong with that because she knew what she was getting into when she married him over 40 years ago.   What they have is an established business.  There is nothing wrong with that.

There is also nothing wrong with a man who goes into self-employment after he has had a long career in public sector work or in a private business with a strong union or a high-paying job and then decides on self-employment as a second career following retirement.  Such a man has a history of financial stability and has the wherewithal to tide himself over when there are slack periods.  Given this guy’s current lifestyle, I doubt this situation applies to him.

There is also nothing wrong with men who are in professions like medicine and law and have their own offices.  Those are more often than not lucrative.

Those are the exceptions to the rule.  However, since most self-employment goes belly up within a few years if not a few months, dating and marrying men who engage in it are extremely high risk for women.  Yet women like this dude’s sweetie date these guys knowing the risks.

It is all in the mentality women think they are nothing without some dude around to “love” them.

Women, once they are past their so-called “sell-by” date in the idiot “dating market” meaning they are past 35,  get desperate.  This is especially true with divorced women—not so much widowed women, who tend to be older and certainly not never-married women—who think that any man, even one like this who I think is a loser, is better than none at all.  They just absolutely waste their time putting men at the center of their lives.  They will go from man to man to man, marriage to marriage to marriage, because they think that being alone is a mark of failure as women.  Women are totally invested in these relationships.  They are often in dire financial straits themselves after losing that big lifestyle that a two-income household provides.

When I see this dude walking around the trailer park, and he probably won’t be there too much longer once he gets his tentacles into this sugar mama and marries her, I think of my ex-brother-in-law, who was married about 11 times before he snared my sister, who had been single for about twenty years.  She got sick and tired of the grind of having to work menial jobs and wanted to get out of the rat race.  Well, you know the saying, “be careful what you wish for.”  He had a “business” driving a truck, but he drove a junker truck, poured tens of thousands of dollars into this wreck, and then of course plunged my sister into bankruptcy by the time the marriage had ended.  He was also a bigamist and had to wear an ankle bracelet for a brief time.  My sister married this guy knowing he was already married.  God, this was an episode straight out of the Jerry Springer Show.  She eventually divorced him for good the second time, and it has been a tough life for her ever since, but she is free from that parasite.  He went on and married at least one more time.  Two good things happened out of that marriage, however.  My sister got to visit most of the states in the country having traveled with him, and she did get a dog out of the relationship (it was his, but he didn’t care that she ended up taking care of the dog until the dog died in 2010).  I also got a dog out of that relationship by the name of Tony.  He had been my ex-brother-in-law’s daughter’s dog.   He was my love for 11 years, 3 months until I had him put to sleep in August of 2010.  I have a picture of him on the sidebar of this blog, in the "about me" section.

I am also reminded of one of my nephews, who also has a history of “self-employment,” now “freelance writing,” which he is good at, and has been able to eke out an existence, but he has been heavily reliant on—or I should say “attracted to”—women with a lot of money.  His first wife came from a millionaire family, his second wife wasn’t a millionaire, but she had ambition and had her own business.  Other relationships since have been with women who are from wealthy families or have had big settlements from ex-husbands.  He is a good guy, but it seems his main career has been as a kept man.  What he should do is get a job at a local university where he lives,  Oregon State University, and he would probably have a really good career in public relations or similar work and get that all-important state pension.  His brother has been smart and has been in public employment for years..  He has his hobby that he loves, filmmaking, but he has a very stable job at a community college in the Portland area.  He should be set pretty well when he retires in a decade or so.  I wish his brother would stop the gigolo bullshit.**

NEVER get involved with a “self-employed” man (exceptions noted above).  NEVER.


*--Update, August 2019:  This dude and his girlfriend, who was apparently at least a decade older than he was, broke up about three months ago.  There was no way this arrangement was going to last.  She has never been back to visit him.   For about a year after I wrote this blog post, they were really laying it on thick, with her visiting him about three times a week, and he doing the same thing.  Then, as he started working more, they alternated their time "together" during weekends.  Finally, all of a sudden, she was totally out of the picture.  These days he stays mostly at home with his aging dog.  

**--Second update, August 2019:  My nephew now supposedly has a really good job working from home, so he can live pretty much anywhere he likes.  His current girlfriend is much younger, and they and my nephew's dog go out hiking and camping quite a bit.  I hope his "gigolo" days are finally over.