Read Online Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This by Blue Sullivan - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Blue Sullivan
Ads: Link
seventy-six years, which means you’ll likely outlive your mate by about five years. [xxi]
If you’ve had a plentiful dating life up to now, chances are you’ve dated more than a few men that could be described as “average,” according to the norms mentioned above. Unless you’ve been outrageously “unlucky,” you also have a pretty fair idea of what most men are like, at least the single ones. Despite occasional attempts to consign mystery to my gender, most guys don’t require a CIA inquiry in order to determine their values, their motivations, or their character.
Consider the results of the 2009 report by Rutgers University National Marriage Project [xxii] , an annual study of men’s attitudes about dating, sex, love, and marriage. Single men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-three from all across the country were surveyed, and the results showed strikingly similar responses from men across the spectrum of age and location. Here is what the study discovered about modern single men:
They’re resistant to commitment. (This will likely be a revelation to no more than six of you readers.)
The social pressures to marry that once existed are now largely gone. In the past sixty years, the average male marriage age has risen from about twenty-three (in 1947) to about twenty-eight in 2010. It has gone up almost two years in just the last two decades. To put this striking recent cultural shift in perspective, the average age actually decreased slightly from 1947 to 1967.
Single men believe they can have sex more easily and more often when single. They also believe that the single life is something to be enjoyed as long as possible before getting married. (Marriage kind of sounds like conscripted military service, doesn’t it?)
Single men believe that marriage entails too many changes in their current lifestyles, as well as too many compromises. They also want to delay having children, which most associate as a natural inevitability of marriage. Most even believe that buying a house precedes (and often supersedes) marriage as a life goal.
The greatest cause of hesitation among single men is fear of the financial cost of divorce. For this reason, single men are far more willing to live with a mate than marry her. Fear of financial strain (and changes in lifestyle) also makes single men reluctant to date women who already have children.
Finally, single men believe in the idea of a “soul mate,” just like single women do. However, single men commonly express a need to find the “perfect” soul mate. This attitude, along with easing social pressure to marry, makes it easy to understand why men get married later now than at any point in US history.
Take a look at these conclusions about single men. They aren’t my observations or “guesstimates” about them; they’re the dominant beliefs of a range of single men of varying ages and locations. What these beliefs all have in common is that they’re likely to inspire the following reaction:
Well, no shit. Of course, that’s what men think!
This is one of the rare areas where “common knowledge” actually has the ring of truth. If we did a poll of single women asking them to summarize their male counterparts’ attitudes in this area, their answers would likely be identical to those borne out by research. Ladies: men aren’t complicated, and here is the proof. You understand them implicitly, whether you realize it or not.
Nevertheless, many women profess to have problems “reading” the men in their lives. I think the problem lies not in women being willfully blind to all the available evidence about men. I think their natural understanding becomes perverted by those few experiences with what I’ll label “abnormal” men. These are men who fall so far outside the average that they pervert normal understanding. In modern research language, these “abnormal” men would be considered “outliers,” examples so far off the normative scale
If you’ve had a plentiful dating life up to now, chances are you’ve dated more than a few men that could be described as “average,” according to the norms mentioned above. Unless you’ve been outrageously “unlucky,” you also have a pretty fair idea of what most men are like, at least the single ones. Despite occasional attempts to consign mystery to my gender, most guys don’t require a CIA inquiry in order to determine their values, their motivations, or their character.
Consider the results of the 2009 report by Rutgers University National Marriage Project [xxii] , an annual study of men’s attitudes about dating, sex, love, and marriage. Single men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-three from all across the country were surveyed, and the results showed strikingly similar responses from men across the spectrum of age and location. Here is what the study discovered about modern single men:
They’re resistant to commitment. (This will likely be a revelation to no more than six of you readers.)
The social pressures to marry that once existed are now largely gone. In the past sixty years, the average male marriage age has risen from about twenty-three (in 1947) to about twenty-eight in 2010. It has gone up almost two years in just the last two decades. To put this striking recent cultural shift in perspective, the average age actually decreased slightly from 1947 to 1967.
Single men believe they can have sex more easily and more often when single. They also believe that the single life is something to be enjoyed as long as possible before getting married. (Marriage kind of sounds like conscripted military service, doesn’t it?)
Single men believe that marriage entails too many changes in their current lifestyles, as well as too many compromises. They also want to delay having children, which most associate as a natural inevitability of marriage. Most even believe that buying a house precedes (and often supersedes) marriage as a life goal.
The greatest cause of hesitation among single men is fear of the financial cost of divorce. For this reason, single men are far more willing to live with a mate than marry her. Fear of financial strain (and changes in lifestyle) also makes single men reluctant to date women who already have children.
Finally, single men believe in the idea of a “soul mate,” just like single women do. However, single men commonly express a need to find the “perfect” soul mate. This attitude, along with easing social pressure to marry, makes it easy to understand why men get married later now than at any point in US history.
Take a look at these conclusions about single men. They aren’t my observations or “guesstimates” about them; they’re the dominant beliefs of a range of single men of varying ages and locations. What these beliefs all have in common is that they’re likely to inspire the following reaction:
Well, no shit. Of course, that’s what men think!
This is one of the rare areas where “common knowledge” actually has the ring of truth. If we did a poll of single women asking them to summarize their male counterparts’ attitudes in this area, their answers would likely be identical to those borne out by research. Ladies: men aren’t complicated, and here is the proof. You understand them implicitly, whether you realize it or not.
Nevertheless, many women profess to have problems “reading” the men in their lives. I think the problem lies not in women being willfully blind to all the available evidence about men. I think their natural understanding becomes perverted by those few experiences with what I’ll label “abnormal” men. These are men who fall so far outside the average that they pervert normal understanding. In modern research language, these “abnormal” men would be considered “outliers,” examples so far off the normative scale
Similar Books
