25-Year-Old Men Are Adults
The agenda behind telling young women to marry, while telling young men to delay
Several weeks ago, I wrote my most popular piece, “The Men Who Sabotage Women’s Fertility,” about what I call “sunk cost relationships.” In these relationships (not to be confused with partnerships where both parties have agreed not to marry) the man, usually out of complacency or oblivion as opposed to malice, drags things on for years, loosely committing to marriage with no or very little intent to ever propose, ultimately frittering away the key time range of a woman’s fertility. These men are typically not ideologically opposed to marriage, as they often marry the next woman they date on a much shorter timeline. The title was a bit misleading, as I don’t think men are solely to blame. The larger issue is the messaging driving this dynamic, especially the fact that women are told it’s regressive, obnoxious and “high maintenance” to communicate a hard timeline for commitment—we keep the biological clock we’ve always had, but are held to the modern “feminist” standard of the Cool Girl who is blissfully unbothered by it. To some extent women are also responsible for not rejecting these messages.
I got a variety of responses to this article—some accused me of being a childless cat lady who was mad that “Chad didn’t commit to me,” despite the fact that I mentioned I ultimately did marry the boyfriend I was worried would never propose (part of this, of course, is the fact that I did make my timeline clear, Cool Girl trope be damned.) That response was obviously just very stupid because it was easily debunked with a light skim of the free preview. But I got another oft-repeated response, which was stupid for an entirely different reason. This response was that women should marry young (in fact, women who fail to secure a husband before thirty, or even twenty-five, are worthless hags.) However, it’s unreasonable for these women to expect that their young boyfriends propose to them, even if these “boys” are actually slightly older than they are, because a twenty-five-year-old man is a barely sentient fetus. He barely knows himself! He could never commit to a woman for life, that’s such a huge decision to put on such a smol tiny baby!!! Why not let him travel and sow his wild oats, work on himself first? He has no idea who he is or what life has to offer! You, on the other hand, young lady, are getting a bit old for this “dating” thing. You should really be married by now. Just not to him.
If you’re not picking up on the obvious dynamic here, there’s an agenda! The conclusion, of course, even if they don’t say it directly, is that these women should exclusively date men 10+ years older than they are. And of course, the people saying this are older single men. I’m not going to fault them for finding young women attractive—that’s perfectly normal, and I see no problem with consensual age gap relationships. But this sentiment is doing young men a disservice, and it hinges on a lot of faulty assumptions.
I’m about to say something controversial: a twenty-five-year-old man is an adult.
Adolescence has been lengthening for a while. I once had the displeasure of interacting with someone on Twitter who described themselves as a “thirty-year-old teenager.” It is no longer unusual for a woman well into her twenties to adorn her bedroom with pink bows, Hello Kitty and Squishmallows. Millennials in their thirties and forties were moved to tears by a reassuring video made by the actor who played Steve on Blue’s Clues decades ago. Some young people are purportedly bringing their parents to their job interviews. There are adults, many who don’t even have children, who are rabid fans of the show Bluey, which is meant not only for children, but for toddlers. (To avoid angering the Bluey fans, let me say it’s completely fine to enjoy kids’ media as an adult! I just think it’s telling that this is much more common today than it was in decades past, and it’s emblematic of this shift that many kids’ shows are written to appeal to adults too.) Some of this is obviously tongue in cheek, but there’s some truth to it too. My grandparents and parents—college educated and fairly secular—all got married in their early twenties. Nowadays, if I meet a couple of twenty-two-year olds who are married, my first assumption would be that they were Mormon. To some extent, it’s nice to see people enjoying being young for longer (I benefit from this- thirty-five seems way younger today than it did when I was a child.) But at the same time, most people would agree things can go a bit too far. Take, for example, the fact that young fans were appalled by Olivia Rodrigo celebrating her twenty-first birthday by posting an image of a shot glass (it “made them feel unsafe.”) And just this week, a seventeen-year-old who went viral on Twitter by claiming to be “AFRAID of Sabrina Carpenter” because of her sexually suggestive lyrics.
I don’t mean to get all Bill Maher on your asses, but like…everyone needs to grow up a little.
People have no trouble telling young women to grow up. Feminists and misogynists alike will tell young women that they need to grow up—for feminists, by being financially independent, well-traveled and “fully healed” via therapy, or for the misogynists, getting married and having children as soon as possible, preferably by avoiding this pesky obstacle called “college.” (You heard it here folks—you’ll never meet a man in college!)
But nobody is telling young men to grow up, outside of occasionally shaming them for playing video games (which I don’t think is very helpful.) On the contrary, people have simply given up on young men. It’s assumed, even among people who don’t consider themselves regressive or sexist, that men in their twenties aren’t really men, but overgrown little boys who need more time to cook before they can be trusted to do anything. It’s common to declare that young men are being “left behind” without a shred of self awareness about the type of messaging that could be responsible for them feeling this way. Single older men looking to snag a girlfriend twenty years younger are unsurprisingly the biggest offenders here. Their sentiment is clear: young men are hapless losers who don’t “have their shit together,” who have no idea how to please you. You know who you should date instead? Me.
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