I am a 41 year old man and I can relate to this big time. More often than not I get the feeling that along with many good, decent people I’m under siege, and that many of the fundamental assumptions upon which I’ve tried to build my life in good faith have proven to be utterly false. I think it can be broken down helpfully into various areas: relationships, work/career, and wider culture.
I had two long term relationships before I met my wife three years ago. One was in my mid twenties and everything was going fine until I came home one day to a “Dear John” letter, an empty bank account, and a pile of bills including a mortgage that my single salary barely covered. I only just managed to keep the roof over my head. It was the first notice I was given that the relationship was anything other than full of joy – we’d never had so much as raised voices between us.
Second relationship was in late twenties and we managed to get engaged, although she wouldn’t tell her parents and even hid the fact of the relationship from our colleagues. We did have the occasional argument, usually because she gave every indication of being ashamed of me and because her parents never thought I was good enough, but her not turning up to the registry office was the give-away that we were in trouble.
Throughout my early thirties I tried online dating. I genuinely don’t think women have the slightest clue how brutal this can be for men, even decent, normal, articulate ones. I am, I was regularly told, good looking: athletic, tall, own teeth/hair/hips etc. My OLD profiles had lots of detail about interests, hobbies and so on – some very mainstream, others less so. All of my pictures showed me fully clothed, none showed my car. Whenever I messaged someone I thought might be suitable I used proper sentences and respectful language, and tried to build a conversation around a mutual shared interest or some such catalyst. And yet whenever I initiated contact I almost never got a reply. I reckoned on perhaps one reply for every 50 first messages, and as many of those were polite rejections or were from women who appeared to have no interest in actually meeting I would probably have to contact a couple of hundred women to get a date. In all seriousness, it is astonishingly easy to spend five years trying to get a date, and failing.
I’ve posted before about my career and the damage my experiences have done to my self-esteem. Long story short: good public sector career path ended virtually overnight because of changing policy. Instead of digging my fingers into the doorframe and being shoehorned into a completely unsuitable non-job I went back to school to do an MBA at phenomenal cost (over US$80k in course fees alone, never mind not working for two years and funding living costs etc) and now struggle to find work of ANY description, let alone something at the level I’m capable of working or even just fulfilling.
My recent career experience has been a litany of constant rejection and frustration, and disbelief at the way people are capable of treating each other with what comes across as such utter contempt. In one memorable instance last year I applied for a job. A couple of months later I was approached by an agency about that very role. The job had gone to someone who couldn’t take it up for a while and they needed interim cover. End result – I get nearly six months worth of interim work at over £500 per day on the basis of a ten minute phone call, covering a job where they couldn’t even be bothered to reply to my application for the permanent position. How exactly was I supposed to feel about this, if not a crisis of confidence?
Then there’s wider cultural attitudes towards men. The pages of MN are filled with stories about how useless men are. The news is filled with stories about how dangerous men are. I get that throughout history men have, as a gross generalisation, held and abused power, discriminated, and generally not been very nice towards people they have regarded as weaker and stacked the decks against. I get that, I really do.
However, I grew up in a world that was rather more enlightened and I have spent virtually all of my (fragmented, disjointed) working life in female-dominated industries. I’m a stay-at-home househusband for fuck’s sake. And yet, as often as not, it sometimes seems that maleness is under attack. There is a substantial proportion of divorce settlements which are grossly unfair. Most people still, deep down, expect men to be the main breadwinner. I learned a long time ago never to try and help a child in public. A few years ago I stepped in to help out a very close friend who was struggling with her children (hence my username), and was rewarded with almost everyone I knew making jokes about me grooming them. I gave up coaching youth cricket because far too many people questioned my motives as a single, childless man. I sit at home all day rather than relax on a park bench and be accused of ogling kids. I gave up being involved in politics because of women-only shortlists.
I really don’t like the word ‘feminazi’ but it does seem quite apt for some of the things I come across, and I cannot help the feeling sometimes that because I have a penis I am being punished - in the mainstream - for the misogyny of the past in a way that 21st century Germans don’t get punished for the Third Reich, or white people don’t get punished for slavery.
I met my wife in 2013 and our relationship brings happiness and stability that I could only dream about, and had frankly given up on, at the time. She has been wonderfully supportive of my career position and struggles, and extremely grateful for the contribution I do make – for example all the cooking, cleaning, shopping, fleet management, looking after her parents, household administration – but while she is probably the difference between looking ahead and trying starting a family on the one hand, and taking my own life on the other, it is still very difficult not to feel judged as a useless failure by almost everyone else. Worse, I can’t see an end in sight.
I also wonder if it’s something about my age too. I made my peace many years ago with the idea that I was never going to be a professional sportsman, but how many men hitting 40-ish also wonder if they’ve missed the boat in other life-long dreams: having a family, a career, matching their parents’ standards of living, owning their own homes?