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Mumsnet has not checked the qualifications of anyone posting here. If you need help urgently or expert advice, please see our domestic violence webguide and/or relationships webguide. Many Mumsnetters experiencing domestic abuse have found this thread helpful: Listen up, everybody

So fed up and think I give up on men

382 replies

Missillusioned78 · 29/10/2022 23:10

I am 44. I would really like a fulfilling equal relationship.

The only man I have met who interests me treats me as someone to ring on the way home when pissed.

I have a full life of work, friends, hobbies and my wonderful children. I am not rich but getting by with my home. We are happy.

I am SO disappointed with men. Don’t know whether to just give up

OP posts:
Ohsugarhoneyicetea · 01/11/2022 21:59

OP of course there are good people out there if that is what you want, but you have to be ruthless with your time and your boundaries. Drunk calling man should have been kicked to the curb the second you recognised the pattern.

When I was online dating I had firm rules (developed after a few experiences), and every woman I know who has found someone decent had them too. Mine were no sex talk, no drinking culture, no ex talk, no every day sexism (definitely no mra/red pill idiots, one sniff of that and block). Yes to cultural interests, share interests, yes to book readers, yes to male feminists, yes to meeting half way and being reciprocal if not generous.

I was completely open to height, education and financial status. Although retrospectively I should have been more honest with myself on that, as people with an obviously poor education or in financial trouble were not attractive to me.

I was a 44yr old single parent when I met my gorgeous 48yr old 6.2ft company director (never married no kids), and who 5 yrs later still absolutely adores me and my children. He does say he wishes we could have met earlier so we could have had a baby together. The path hasn't always been smooth, but it's out there if you want it.

Lpc3 · 02/11/2022 01:38

Some excellent, well articulated posts by @SittingCat

OP I'd encourage you to try and meet men in the real world - far more likely to meet someone genuine who is a good fit for you.

Anon778833 · 02/11/2022 01:48

supercali77 · 01/11/2022 20:02

@SittingCat You are insane if you think the only reason men are recorded as far more likely to commit acts of rape is purely because its defined as penetrative sex. There isn't a dirge of women going round raping people with non-penis based objects. Stop trying to gaslight the entire thread.

Yes, this ^

Twistiewistie · 02/11/2022 03:33

This reply has been withdrawn

This message has been withdrawn at the poster's request

Goatbilly · 02/11/2022 04:56

Lpc3 · 02/11/2022 01:38

Some excellent, well articulated posts by @SittingCat

OP I'd encourage you to try and meet men in the real world - far more likely to meet someone genuine who is a good fit for you.

@Lpc3
Not necessarily any more likely to meet someone more suitable in the real world based on what?

Talon01 · 02/11/2022 06:33

Twistiewistie · 01/11/2022 20:21

Which ‘evidence’ are you referring to ? Eviidence of what ????

and more importantly … WHY does it matter?

Giving this question a swerve are we.

Why does it matter? Because it underlies many of the circular arguments we see on threads like this.

Twistiewistie · 02/11/2022 06:38

Talon01 · 02/11/2022 06:33

Giving this question a swerve are we.

Why does it matter? Because it underlies many of the circular arguments we see on threads like this.

Are you going to answer the question ? Evidence of what Talon ?

Twistiewistie · 02/11/2022 06:39

The only circular arguments we are seeing in this threads are the ones coming from the red pillers

Twistiewistie · 02/11/2022 06:40

You make me laugh actually .. you answers my question by avoiding my question by saying I’m avoiding a question

now THATS circular !

Outtasteamandluck · 02/11/2022 06:50

Stop answering the phone to the one that calls on his way home drunk.

You're worth more than that!!

Luckydip1 · 02/11/2022 08:09

Sometimes you just have to take the red pill.

DeeCeeCherry · 02/11/2022 08:47

Im reading this thread (& laughing at parts tbh) thinking of ExH who is in his 50s, and has 2 children (ages 2 & 4) with his partner who is aged 33.

In 10 years she'll be 43 and he'll be 63. He is a handsome fit man but he's admitted to me he's knackered due to demands of family life with young children at his age, and mismatched relationship expectations. Our DCs are grown up. Whilst his latest 2 arent even at primary school yet. He's now starting to look very much older than his partner too.

Younger woman + older man = high likelihood of becoming his carer, whilst you're still full of life yet he's cantankerously hurtling towards his 80s. Its a bad bargain. Unless he's very rich I suppose.

SittingCat · 02/11/2022 09:15

@Twistiewistie

I think that’s rubbish But even IF it were true it really means nothing

im disengaging with you

Pathetic. When presented with reason and facts contradicting your opinion, you can't just say 'Well, I disagree.' An unsupported opinion is no better than blind faith.

@CheekyHobson

The actual problem here is that you insist on taking a general statement (Know your own value and hold your own beliefs) and twisting it into a much more specific statement (only accept a man with a university degree) that you can then hold up as a straw man to shoot down.

The first statement has to be made more specific in order to evaluate it because we can't measure the first statement. We can evaluate a statement like 'Women only date at their own educational level or higher.' My contention is not that 100% of them do, despite a lot of people in this thread providing anecdotes as if they are some sort of evidence against a trend, but a substantial majority will and even in those open to dating men from lower educational backgrounds it will compound with other factors ie. A 6ft athlete with no degree is date-able, but our 5ft 7 guy with no degree is a hard no. The link between educational level and mate preference is very well established.

You are a lone voice on this thread insisting that all women looking for a “decent man” are only considering high-earning, university-educated, 6 foot plus-ers with no kids, as this is wildly outside the reality of what women in their 40s are actually open to.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2057150X20957422#bibr1-2057150X20957422

"Research on educational assortative mating has shown that people tend to marry someone of the same educational level (Blossfeld, 2009; Kalmijn, 1998; Schwartz, 2013)"

"Traditional meeting venues, such as workplaces and neighborhoods, where individuals are often sorted by education, can also lead to educationally homogamous partnerships (England, 2004; McClendon et al., 2014)."

"In addition, changes in mate selection do not correspond to structural changes in men’s and women’s educational attainment such that women still tend to marry someone who is more educated than themselves (Qian and Qian, 2014)."

I could go on. And this is the very first link I clicked on google scholar - I'm sure there are more quantitative studies around (the study linked is qualitative). More importantly, at no point do the authors of this study even hint that these assertions are somehow contested or controversial - these are well researched and established characteristics of the dating market. The link between height and attractiveness is also very well established in research.

I am not suggesting that all mid forties women are only targetting those characteristics. Ironically, that's a strawman argument of your own. My argument has always been that women, on average, have an inaccurate / distorted / inflated (depending on how nice you want to phrase it) view of what they are matched or entitled to in the dating market. Some posts back I used the example of a 6ft, 50k/yr+ earning man with no kids as a match for a woman who had just hit 30 and decided she wanted to settle down. The mid 40s woman knows she can't demand this man from the market, but still has proportionally distorted views from there. Lets not conflate my arguments please.

@supercali77

You are insane if you think the only reason men are recorded as far more likely to commit acts of rape is purely because its defined as penetrative sex. There isn't a dirge of women going round raping people with non-penis based objects. Stop trying to gaslight the entire thread.

I literally just told you that there was a crime written such that only men can be charged with it and your response was to brush it off and not acknowledge the obvious inequality present in that wording. Who is trying to gaslight who?

Its not 'penetrative sex' by the way, its 'penetration with a penis.' Thus the only way a woman can be charged with rape is by joint enterprise, so 98% of rapes are men. Again, given how the crime is worded, if you are trying to use this as evidence against men its backwards reasoning and just really really bad statistics.

@EarthSight

The more I read your posts @SittingCat , the more I'm convinced you have listened to Jordan Peterson podcasts and videos so many times that you have memorised the information very well and can parrot it. I'm not knocking Peterson, but you might want to take a break from him for a while and go explore other other thinkers.

I have listened to Peterson, but if you think I am parroting his views you are very much mistaken. I am capable of thinking from first principles and dismissing everything that an academic from UoT, not some tin pot institution, has put out there regarding studies on psychology (kinda his field) because you don't like some of his comments on other subjects or heard an incel cite him is just poor reasoning. He's an academic; when he says something is 'well established,' its because there are at least tens of studies confirming the findings.

There are plenty of female psychologists working in this area, more than men actually. Can you cite any studies that disprove my assertions? Where are the hundreds of studies showing that height and educational attainment have no statistically significant correlation to mate preference? If this were actually true you could make a big name for yourself by going out and showing it and reproducing it. That's how academia works; Einstein was a nobody until he published his papers in 1905 and everyone realised he was right.

Kevin Samuels was a d**k and mainly just being mean to women. He took a well reasoned argument and used it to knock women down in public for click bait.

Twistiewistie · 02/11/2022 09:29

This thread has been an absolutely wonderful demonstration of how women rise above the red pill rubbish
life’s good ….. OP there are wonderful men out there, many of us are lucky enough to have them in our lives and know they exist. You will meet the right one just like many of the women here have said 🌻

SittingCat · 02/11/2022 09:39

Just like in Plato's allegory of the cave when the prisoners insist on remaining shackled in their chains and continuing to stare at the shadows...

Sosillysilly · 02/11/2022 09:49

Men are the ones with a distorted and inflated view of who the should be attracting

Men with little to bring to the table expecting bikini models.
Just watch a group of average guys out and about hitting on the ‘ hottest girl ‘

Old men hitting on young women who are repulsed by them.

Sosillysilly · 02/11/2022 09:53

I’m confused by what you say sitting cat . Why shouldn’t height and educational attainment have any correlation to dating preferences
I havnt seen anyone say they didn’t . Only that they don’t care if they do.
After all men choose women based on youth and beauty so why can’t women have preferences too ?

dersalways1 · 02/11/2022 10:33

Sosillysilly · 02/11/2022 09:53

I’m confused by what you say sitting cat . Why shouldn’t height and educational attainment have any correlation to dating preferences
I havnt seen anyone say they didn’t . Only that they don’t care if they do.
After all men choose women based on youth and beauty so why can’t women have preferences too ?

He's desperately trying to convince women that we don't deserve to have any preferences or standards, that's why!

He hasn't got any of the attributes that he has been brainwashed into thinking that women want or solely seek. Therefore, he is bitterly envious of the men that have what he wants, but he is also jealous of women who dare to have the temerity and self confidence to not look twice at him!

He wants us to raise our daughters to have low self esteem, accept anything and have zero standard. Have confidence never validate theses losers.

They value and want the bikini models but can't get them and they big mad 🤣!

SittingCat · 02/11/2022 11:06

@Sosillysilly

After all men choose women based on youth and beauty so why can’t women have preferences too ?

I'm not arguing that they can't have preferences. The argument is that these preferences are divorced from statistical reality.

Men are the ones with a distorted and inflated view of who they should be attracting. Men with little to bring to the table expecting bikini models.

Data doesn't bear this out I'm afraid.

(1) 60 women graduate for every 40 men
(2) As we both seem to agree, women prefer men with an equal or higher education to them.

See the problem? And this ratio is widening, not narrowing.

This is why I keep coming back to the educational aspect, because its patently unachievable due to the sheer ratio of graduates despite being a well established preference for a woman to mate with a partner who has an equivalent or better education to them. The other data is fuzzy; it has a lot of covariance and distribution issues but this one is unarguable.

What should happen is that dating preferences change; the scarcer you are, the more bargaining power you have in a market. That is happening to some extent, the rarer men are committing less because they don't have to. Sex ratios on college campuses affect dating strategies - when there are less men, the women are more likely to be sexually active and not in a committed relationship (and probably complaining about the men too). They 'give up' sex freely because they 'have to' by market dynamics. Whilst in campuses with more men than women, women can be more selective, hence less hook up culture and more committed relationships.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130599/

www.researchgate.net/publication/275256939_Student_Bodies_Does_the_Sex_Ratio_Matter_for_Hooking_Up_and_Having_Sex_at_College

But with the number of childless women aged 30 in the UK now over 50% I think we can say that, overall, women seem to have settled for a 'aim high and then moan about it when he treats you like sh*t' strategy. Not sure that's good for most women or most men in the long run.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/27/women-child-free-30-ons

And no, this doesn't mean we should force women to sleep with substandard men. But imagine the response if someone suggested an affirmative action program designed to encourage more men, and only men, in to higher education? 50 years ago we did that when the ratio was reversed for women, but feminists now will tell you that men are evil and need to pay for the patriachy that existed before they were born.

SittingCat · 02/11/2022 11:10

dersalways1 · 02/11/2022 10:33

He's desperately trying to convince women that we don't deserve to have any preferences or standards, that's why!

He hasn't got any of the attributes that he has been brainwashed into thinking that women want or solely seek. Therefore, he is bitterly envious of the men that have what he wants, but he is also jealous of women who dare to have the temerity and self confidence to not look twice at him!

He wants us to raise our daughters to have low self esteem, accept anything and have zero standard. Have confidence never validate theses losers.

They value and want the bikini models but can't get them and they big mad 🤣!

Instead of making incorrect baseless emotional assumptions about me, how about you attempt to rebutt the arguments and studies presented?

Assertions without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Sosillysilly · 02/11/2022 11:12

@SittingCat
’Men are the ones with a distorted and inflated view of who they should be attracting. Men with little to bring to the table expecting bikini models.

Data doesn't bear this out I'm afraid.

(1) 60 women graduate for every 40 men
(2) As we both seem to agree, women prefer men with an equal or higher education to

what had any of that got to do with the fact that men often choose women based on youth and beauty

you are just ranting about stuff that is meaningless
do you know much or anything about violence against women perpetrated by men ?
that would be interesting to hear your views on ad it’s a Far more important subject than dating sites

Sosillysilly · 02/11/2022 11:13

SittingCat · 02/11/2022 11:10

Instead of making incorrect baseless emotional assumptions about me, how about you attempt to rebutt the arguments and studies presented?

Assertions without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Sitting catchy does it matter who women date . How does it affect you and why are you on mumsnet so invested in telling women what they are doing wrong in your opinion

Sosillysilly · 02/11/2022 11:14

That should have read ‘sitting at why does it matter who women date and why ‘

Sosillysilly · 02/11/2022 11:19

‘But with the number of childless women aged 30 in the UK now over 50% I think we can say that, overall, women seem to have settled for a 'aim high and then moan about it when he treats you like sh*t' strategy. Not sure that's good for most women or most men in the long run.’

If this were true what’s it to do with you how other people live . Had it occurred to you many women enjoy single motherhood and for those who don’t. Your not obliged or even asked to engage with them

leave others to live their lives how they like .

how old are you btw ?

dersalways1 · 02/11/2022 11:32

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