Men, Why Have You Failed?

Entreating Men to Return to Us Is Not the Answer

Alone on a beach

I am obsessing over the latest “Modern Love” column in The New York Times entitled “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back.” It’s by a midlife woman who claims that men have abandoned intimacy in favor of computerized lethargy. She also suggests that they’re relying on “situationships” and ambiguity.

I’ve been reading posts by midlife and older women about whether to date again, and this article offers one of the best arguments I’ve seen against it. The author states:

[M]any men had quietly withdrawn from intimacy and vulnerability. Not with violence or resistance, but with indifference…They weren’t sitting across from someone on a Saturday night, trying to connect. They were scrolling... Disappearing behind firewalls. And while they disappeared, women continued to gather. To tend. To notice who wasn’t arriving—and to show up anyway.”

But she leaves out the elements of blame or reason. Why is this happening? Is it laziness or disillusionment with women?

I do think that by midlife, many stable people who want to be partnered are already in long-term relationships. So there’s this pool of older singles on dating apps who will never be relationship material.

Midlife dating is like the bar exam.

When I took the California Bar exam many years ago, I was warned that the pass rate was under 50 percent. However, the pass rate for first time takers was actually around 70 percent. Add in having attended a good law school and getting decent grades, and the rate climbed to over 80 percent. The pass rate was being dragged down by repeat test takers who kept failing. The first time test takers did much better.

By analogy, dating at midlife gets degraded by people who are incapable of forming real relationships and who keep recycling themselves on dating apps. The ones who have the capacity to love are already in long-term relationships or they find someone and leave the dating pool.

I was with my late husband George for 32 years, and we would have stayed together had he not had the poor taste to die of cancer at age 53. My dad was widowed at 42 and found a second life partner he’s been with for 40 years.

Why would we want to take on a ghosting, paper clipping, bread crumbing middle aged adolescent like the manipulative schmucks described in the article? These guys are avoiding connection in real life in favor of shallow online interactions and perhaps easy physical gratification if available.

Gently entreating them to come back to the relationship fold is not going to work. They aren’t, and may be incapable of, offering anything worth having. Rather, they’re living as they choose and it would probably take a cataclysmic life event—or a lot of therapy—to change them.

Which is not to say that all older, single men are like this.

My partner Randal and I on a hike earlier this year

After five years of intermittent searching, I met my second love online. He planned dates, took me out to dinner on Saturday nights, and actually listened to me when I spoke. I didn’t have to entreat him to emerge from his cave or spend hours trying to reprogram him. But it took many years if bad dates and wading through guys like those in the article who wanted to text ad nauseam or hook up and “see what happens.”

But I’ve met happy couples who’ve met at midlife and it does happen.

A recent mantra from yoga class: I trust my inner wisdom.

This means that we should follow and trust our own gut instincts. My first thought: I really wish I’d done this when I started dating after my loss. It would have definitely help me to avoid the kind of guys described in the “Modern Love” article.

So why didn’t I?

Objectively, I was super inexperienced. When I started dating after my loss at age 50, I’d never really dated before. George and I had been together since I was a high school senior, so I had no other boyfriends or experiences to fall back on.

But that’s not all of it.

I was so insecure, a new widow launching myself into online dating. I felt like I was back in high school…would they like me? Would my inner nerdom doom me to failure?

I should have been far more concerned about whether I liked them. Because honestly, I didn’t feel good about many of the men who asked me out. I just stifled my responses thinking I needed to give them more time or I was hopelessly old-fashioned or attraction would come in time.

But it doesn’t.

Most of us older singles are pretty intransigent. I called my book Available As Is because we’re sort of like older homes, some of us have great lines and well-worn patinas but others are ill-maintained with termites in the basement. And requests for improvements aren’t going to happen.

Here’s a professional photo from my early dating days online. I was about as clueless as I looked.

I think we doom ourselves by our failure to change.

When I lost my George, I realized I had to change or wind up leading a pretty miserable life. I’d been pretty anti-social and I was definitely a big complainer, neither of which served me as I tried to create a life on my own. So I worked to be different.

But what surprised me was that the men I met had no interest in dealing with their own faults. The first guy I dated turned our dates into therapy sessions for grieving his exes. When I explained why I didn’t want o see him anymore, he just said, “I’ve heard that before” while getting angry that I wouldn’t read his writing. Which was about the ex-girlfriend he never got over.

The second guy was extremely successful but singularly unpleasant, going on about everything he resented in his life and telling me up front that it was unlikely he would ever find a partner. After his second burst of uncontrolled anger, I could see why. The third man was so disorganized and chaotic he had no time for anyone else, he just expected a woman who was on call for him. And it went on from there.

A more experienced dater would have been finished with these men much sooner. And after spending years searching for a relationship, or so they said, the guys would have fixed these obvious fed flags that they already knew about had they truly wanted a girlfriend and not just someone who’d bend to their will.

It isn’t our duty to entice men into being better.

First of all, even if we wanted to, we probably can’t. If some guy over 50 spends his time texting lots of different women in the hopes of an easy booty call, I’m not going to be able to convince he should be offering well-balanced dinners and vulnerability. This is not a gentle lost soul to be redeemed.

Second, it does us a huge disservice to suggest that women take on more emotional labor around the same time many of us have finally decided to stop doing the heavy lifting in our romantic relationships.

That said, I do have hope for love later in life and I do think there are good men. I just think we’re more likely to find them living in real life.

In other news, I recently did a fun YouTube interview with Empart on starting over and reinvention after widowhood. You can listen here. Finally , I’m putting together a grief writing class about widowhood with another widow writer who’s also a certified grief educator. Message me if you’re interested or want more details.

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