"Men are like Eggs"

Men are like eggs. They must hatch or go bad!!!

I came to this conclusion after bringing in the New Year with a gang of friends and hearing one of them, a single guy of 35 named Hari, declare with complete sincerity that his resolution for 2010 was not to have a girlfriend! 

I groaned.... His vow struck me as odd, not just because Hari is a remarkably warm, kind and entertaining individual rather than some ropey dude, 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 realized that over the past decade Hari 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, forty something women who are their natural mates bewildered. I might have ended up being single!

I am often told that our problem boils down to bad timing!! In our early twenties (the age at which our parents tended to meet and marry), we, arguably the first generation of properly educated and professionally ambitious women, were not ready to settle down and start having babies. 

By our late twenties many of us did end up reconnecting with our first love, or met men of a similar age who were still young enough to want to match and hatch! 

But for those who didn’t, life is increasingly complicated – and infuriating. 

The assumption seems to be that it is our fault that we can’t find “him”. Don’t wait. Mr. Right can turn into Mr. Wrong overnight: there are no certainties.

And we wonder why men are afraid to commit, when women are depicted as hormonally charged sperm-bandits interested in nothing beyond the urge to have a child!!!

Nobody expects these guys to settle for Ms. OK, either, but it’s fair to say that most of them are not looking to settle for anyone – and, in fact, dating a series of Ms .OK's fill the gap nicely....

“In theory I’d like a family,” says one. “But it doesn’t feel urgent and in the meantime I have a great life with plenty of sex – all on my own terms.Love has sort of disappeared from the menu! And yes, now I’ve learnt that I can, I mess women around in ways I’d never have done in my twenties.” 

Horror stories from friends abound, too. “I spent most of last year with a guy who used to weigh me every day and refused to sleep with me if I got too heavy,” admits a colleague. Gosh! How bonkers was that?

But the awful thing is that once you pass 38, you find it's single men rather than single women who are the prize commodity!

Many of these guys would be living happily as husbands and fathers had they taken the plunge. But they haven’t.... So what’s the answer?

Become more hard-boiled and accept that, in return for children, we will have to make do with someone only OK? Go after men years younger than us? Or try bruised divorcees ten years older? 

There is another option, of course!!! And that is that the whole generation of single man-boys starts behaving like men.

Meanwhile, everyone else could stop asking single women why they’re not married yet, and wrongly assuming that it’s because they are so work-obsessed that they don’t want to be!!

They sometimes love their eggs “unfertilised”

Believe me; I have studied single women!
They are not single through want of trying!!