Gender Inequality

I can’t tell you how many single girls my age have talked to me in the last month about their deep and urgent fears of ending up alone for the rest of their lives. There have been a lot of them.

It’s very difficult when everyone around you is voicing those fears, to not embody those fears yourself. And then you feel like you’re walking around checking every single man’s hand for a ring and wondering desperately what’s wrong with all of you.

Interestingly (I mean, it’s really not that interesting, but sure, that seems like I nice segue), dudes don’t seem to feel the same way. They seem not to have a care in the world about finding their match and settling down. They don’t notice the tick-tick-tick of the clocks that seem to be piling up in the heads of women all around them. Unfortunately, this creates this really awkward inequality between the sexes – with men casually looking around for whatever they can get, and women desperately wanting to snag a man by whatever means possible.

Is it biological? Are we so programmed by nature to make babies that we can’t resist this crazed desire to find a partner and get to work? Is it societal? Has everyone been sending us secret messages over the years telling us that by age 30 we’d better have caught our man and started our families or else something is terribly wrong with us? I’m not sure. Probably both. And throw some other factors in there too, I’m sure. Culture, history, peer pressure, etc.

Or do women just have a stronger desire to pair off and find stability than men?

I think of the single men I know, and I can’t help but notice that they all seem much more keen on playing the field than anything else. I recently had a guy flat out ask me if we’d ever sleep together (come to think of it, there have been two that have asked me that just in the last month), even though everyone knows this guy has been flirting with one of my good friends for months. WTF?! What is wrong with you men? What gives you the audacity and the nerve to think that you can just run around flirting with girls and trying to randomly sleep with us?

More importantly, why on earth do dudes WANT to live that way? Don’t you want to find a partner to go through life with? Someone you can lean on and count on, someone who can help you through the hard times and help you make tough decisions, someone who will raptly listen to you talk about the most mundane and ordinary things in your life... Why don’t men  want that? What is wrong with dudes these days???