A friend of mine recently sent me a message in which he described a sexual encounter with a woman in her early 30s. It fizzled out because he did not want to commit. While he got what he wanted, she did not. One sentence stuck in my head and I have been reflecting on it for a while. He wrote,

She was urgently looking for a man to start a family with.

It is implied that he was not the right man for that plan. This is, yet again, an example of the tragic life of many women. In this particular case, a woman in her 30s, apparently still attractive, is panicking because she is still single and her biological clock is ticking. Thus, any guy who bangs her for a couple of weeks or perhaps just once turns into a potential husband for her. It is laughable.

Women who plan ahead a bit better realize that they should settle down in their early 20s, when their sexual market value is high. Even if she takes a couple of years more than other, similarly ambitious women, it is not that much of a problem in the end. After all, today’s women normally have only one or two kids anyway, so if she wants to assess a few more guys, it is not a big issue for her. It is only a problem if she bangs random guys while waiting for Mr. Right who never comes and believes that she will not get older. When a really good option shows up, women should take it and not wait for some guy they have not met yet or who may not even exist or, if he exists, may never meet. Even if they meet him, that guy would just go for a woman who is not 29 but 22.

Young women have the luxury of being able to be more discerning. They should not waste these precious few years of peak sexual market value, of course. In contrast, a woman in her 30s does not have this luxury at all anymore. If these women were honest, they would tell you that they have really messed up their life and now they need to catch up. While ten years earlier they dismissed guys for the most frivolous of reasons, in their 30s they look past even egregious personality flaws once her feelings of despair really kick in.

Single women in their 30s are quite alike. They are all freaking out because there is no guy in their life. There are cracks in the facade. Her clothes no longer look that good on her, even though she spends much more money on clothes than she used to, and the last time she saw a dick in real life may have been over a year ago. This is not a great position to be in. Thus, they need to take radical measures.

I am also thinking of a rather odd personal-finance issue my late ex-wife had. She could not handle money well, arguably because she grew up in an environment of abundance in which money was always plentiful. If she ran out of money towards the end of the month, she sometimes did not eat for days (this was when she was living alone), skipped paying bills, or tried to borrow money. It could also happen that she saw something she really needed to buy, such as a new dress, which she may not even wear afterwards. She would just buy such items, and then get surprised if a recurring invoice came in. It was as if she thought that companies may just forget to send her invoices. It was not that rare that she has a few pretty stressful days a month, just because of money. She is dead now, and thinking of this, I wonder if the self-inflicted stress of poor money management contributed to it.

The last paragraph may be a bit dark, but I did not write about this just arbitrarily. After all, women also often develop serious substance abuse problems in their late 20s and early 30s, due to stress. Record numbers of them are on anti-depressants. This is an attempt of dealing with the mess they got themselves into. You can bet that after the third, fourth, or fifth one-night stand your typical single woman in her thirties wanted to turn into her husband but failed, that bottle of wine will look awfully tempting and the moment one of her friends tells her about SSRIs she will likely get a prescription for herself as well.