Why the Hell Bother at All?

Dating a waste of time after 60

Of course "dating" sucks after age 60.  Why the hell would anybody bother to do it at all?  One doesn't have the luxury of time anymore.  Not only that, but who wants to play the stupid games you have to play to "attract" somebody?  For women, it costs a fortune to buy clothes, makeup, and all the other shit men demand women get in order to satisfy the male fetish of "femininity."  It isn't just transvestites who obsess over the femininity crap; most straight men also have a femininity fetish--for women.  That is because most men "other" women regarding them as inferiors to them, and they want to make sure women fit in a certain box in order for these men to understand they are NOT "the other."  Many men are also completely fucked-up with porn, especially men under 40.  I would NOT want to be a young woman in the dating market today.

Getting back to the topic.  Women, especially those who have been married a long time and then find themselves "single" in mid or later life, have a hard time facing reality.  They have been socialized so much to think their sole purpose in life is to be a caregiver for a husband and kids, plus they have gotten addicted to the much-higher standard of living, that they find it hard to grow the fuck up and give up the Prince Charming horseshit.  You can see some women are still desperate for a relationship with a dude and go to dating "coaches," wasting hundreds if not thousands of dollars for "advice" they would get if they got some dogeared self-help book from the 1970s at a secondhand bookstore.  Many of these "coaches" are worse than useless.  I used to subscribe to one of them on YouTube for about a year until I was weary of the same old nonsense she was peddling.  She is one of these New Age-type women who thinks women can find their "soulmate" "at any age" if they only work on themselves and make themselves desirable.  She claims her program is "positive"; in reality, it is anything BUT positive.  When people believe in the b.s. of "the law of attraction," then you know these are the people to avoid.  New Age thinking is rife with this, and it is destructive because in the end, it is all about blaming the person if that person is poor, is sick, or doesn't have a soulmate.

It is all garbage.  The REAL problem women face in dating past 60 isn't that the men are chasing younger women--that is baloney.  Few younger--meaning YOUNG women (under 35)--won't have anything to do with these old coots.  What people have to understand is that Hollywood and the celebrity culture pairings are aberrations and aberrant.  Huge age gaps are NOT common and NOT advisable, especially if the woman is the junior partner, for she is going to end up spending her middle years being a caregiver to a sick or dying man.  Who the hell wants that?    The REAL issue with the lack of suitable men is simple demographics.  Men age quicker, get sick earlier, and die sooner than women.  A lot of them, especially those who worked in blue collar fields, are disabled.  Even if the men are healthy and available, many of them don't bother dating at all, preferring to pursue other interests.  Women all too often have not developed themselves fully and have instead oriented their entire lives and interests around relationships.  They need to knock it off and actually get real interests that are not man centered.  This will give them a lot of fulfillment, and women might find they actually have some untapped talent and interests  which would not surface if they were busy taking a ton of HRT (which I am convinced has a lot to do with these desperate women who want to date again) long past when they should, wasting money on "beauty" products and cosmetic surgery, wasting tons of money on clothes, and wasting money on dating coaches.

People of both sexes, grow up and enjoy the time you have left.

From the article:

Even with that assistance, though, many older Baby Boomers aren’t going on many dates. A 2017 study led by Michael Rosenfeld, a social demographer at Stanford University, found that the percentage of single, straight women who met at least one new person for dating or sex in the previous 12 months was about 50 percent for women at age 20, 20 percent at age 40, and only 5 percent at age 65. (The date-finding rates were more consistent over time for the men surveyed.)*

Indeed, the people I spoke with noted that finding someone with whom you’re compatible can be more difficult at their age. Over the years, they told me, they’ve become more “picky,” less willing—or less able—to bend themselves to fit with someone else, as if they’ve already hardened into their permanent selves. Their schedules, habits, and likes and dislikes have all been set for so long. “If you meet in your 20s, you mold yourselves and form together,” said Amy Alexander, a 54-year-old college-admissions coach. “At this age, there’s so much life stuff that’s happened, good and bad. It’s hard to meld with someone.”

More to the point, it is hard to find anybody still alive, especially past 65. I can't begin to tell "you" how many men I went to high school with who are now dead, both married and single. Many of them have died of cancer, and cancer is bad stuff at any age. Those who survive cancer usually have bodies all but destroyed by chemotherapy and especially radiation.

Another reason why "dating" is a waste of time and an exercise in futility.

*--My comment on the statement in the parentheses:  Men are far more likely to lie about how sexually active they are than women.  Let's quit pretending these men are out screwing everything that walks.  No sane woman would want these breeding grounds for disease anyway.  Men just think they HAVE to lie in order to feel "masculine."

"Maintenance" Sex

If you have a car, yes, you have maintenance done on it, at least fairly regularly (and this reminds me that I desperately need to get my car's oil changed and lubed--I am embarrassed to admit how long it has been since these necessary things have been done).  What gets me is now this "maintenance" is supposed to apply to heterosexual relationships, specifically marriage.  The big thing, which deserves every bit of ridicule and condemnation possible, is this notion of "maintenance sex."  What the hell is that?  This bullshit of saying (mostly) women should go through with it with their husbands even if they don't want to is telling women it is okay for husbands to rape them as the women aren't fully consenting.  This nonsense providing sex to a dude as a woman's duty needs to die a quick death. 

There is this notion, which our society finds it hard to get rid of, that claims men "need" sex and they have a "right" to it.  No, they don't.   Men aren't going to die if they don't have it.   They aren't entitled to anything from women (and women aren't entitled to anything from men).  It doesn't matter if the guy is married or not.  Men aren't entitled to anything from women.  A woman is not a thing for a man to put his dick in and pop babies out.  This rendering women as subhuman simply dies hard in our society, and it needs to stop.

In many ways our society hasn't grown up one damned bit since the 1950s. 

A husband raping you--and, horrifying as it is, more than a few of these dudes rape their wives while the wives are asleep--is not a way of "strengthening" any marriage.

To me this is distinctly sick.

The Right to Make Mistakes

From earlier this month is this NYT column asking whether third parties should share what they know about one of the parties in a relationship based on past experience.  My feeling is people need to butt the hell out unless that person is a criminal of some sort.

I was a person from a family that had severe boundary issues, chiefly my mother.  I think in retrospect she suffered from a personality disorder thanks to having lost some babies during the course of her life.  She overcompensated and thus started dictating several of the rest of us children how we should live our lives.  I don't want to go into further details because of time constraints, but it was not a particularly great childhood for me growing up.  I was verbally abused by both parents and one brother on an almost daily basis.  It tore away at me, and I think it was done especially by my mother in order to make me more dependent on her and give meaning to HER life.  That is narcissism, and it is destructive as hell.

Anyway, anybody who takes it upon himself or herself to "warn" me about somebody else would be dropped like a hot potato.  I would have nothing to do with these people.  I can find information out about somebody all by myself without having people coming around with unsolicited advice.

People HAVE to make mistakes in life, for that is part of what makes a person confident in his or her own abilities.  If you aren't allowed to make mistakes or have failures, you can't grow as a person.  You have to the ability to take risks.

Besides, if a relationship doesn't work out with one person, that doesn't mean the relationship can't work for another person.

The only exception to this is people who have violent/criminal tendencies.

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.

Certainly a Sign of the Times

Unfortunately, the author of this article about a man who used an online dating site to scam numerous women out of their assets romanticizes "con men" when in fact this guy is not a mere "con man" but an outright sociopath.  There is nothing--NOTHING--admirable or romantic about people who have utterly no conception of the feelings of others and take them for everything.

One family member of mine was taken in by somebody who was somewhat like this man though on a much lesser scale.  He had a few--very few--virtues, and he certainly didn't go around impersonating men who served in the military.  That of course is a crime, and this dude will no doubt will spend a few years in prison at least for it.  Too bad he gets away with scamming the women.

This is one reason why I haven't and never will use online dating sites.  I don't have any idea what is on the other end of the "transaction."  It is way too risky, and I think these scumbags like the criminal in the article are more numerous in the older age brackets.  These guys (and occasionally women scam men) take total advantage of vulnerable women, who still think they are worthless unless they have some man around.  They never learned what I learned at a young age that men are not necessary for women to feel "complete."  This criminal in the article never targeted never-married women.  No doubt he preferred the divorced or even widowed women because they were even more vulnerable to scams than never-married women.

When women are raised in the straitjacket called "femininity," they are sitting ducks for scammers.