\u201cIt isn\u2019t you,\u201d he said. \u201cAll day long, I see patients like you. You\u2019re smart, beautiful, accomplished, nice. It makes no sense. I go home to my wife and I say, \u2018There\u2019s something wrong with the men in this generation. They won\u2019t grow up.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And, indeed, her article is a tale of woe: \u00a0she and her friends, in their 30s, hunting for a man who\u2019s willing to commit to a relationship, to marry and have kids, and ending up in one failed relationship after the next. <\/p>\n
But how did she get there? \u00a0That\u2019s the part of the story where she fails to recognize, well, her own failure: \u00a0she dated a man from age 24 to 32, but then her mother and grandmother died and, when, shortly afterwards, he asked her to marry him, she broke up with him because<\/p>\n
\u00a0I realized in the wake of my mother\u2019s death was that my sense of what the right relationship for me was \u2014 or wasn\u2019t \u2014 lacked the normal range of experience. My sense of who I was lacked the normal range of experience. We broke up, when I was 32, because of what I didn\u2019t know as much as what I did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(Now, the timeline isn\u2019t exactly clear here: \u00a0she says she was in this relationship for 8 years, but then says a year after they started dating, her mother fell ill, then died three years later, and \u201cnot long after\u201d that, he proposed.)<\/p>\n
So this is a sad story, as it certainly seems as if her grief over her mother\u2019s death may have caused her to make the mistake of breaking up with this man that she describes so glowingly. \u00a0Maybe it\u2019s the opposite \u2014 maybe she stayed with this man, whom she calls a \u201clovely person,\u201d because of reasons connected to her mother\u2019s illness, but her professed reason for dumping him (and she doesn\u2019t say this regretfully) is pretty foolish: \u00a0she \u201clacked the normal range of experience\u201d = \u201cI haven\u2019t dated enough men.\u201d<\/p>\n
Time passes. \u00a0Maybe in this world in which we control so much about our world \u2014 even things as simple as being able to go to the store and knowing that exactly the right ingredients will be there for us, to being able to purchase anything we wish online and track its arrival \u2014 people have forgotten that time passes, and that we can\u2019t control it.<\/p>\n
And with respect to her dilemma: \u00a0there simply isn\u2019t enough time, in your 20s, to experience this idealized world of multiple relationships, each teaching you something new about yourself and about the World of Men. \u00a0(And, just to say it, there is nothing wrong with marrying your First Love.)<\/p>\n
And I suppose it\u2019s different for the young\u2019uns, too. \u00a0Raising children, of course, shows you clearly, from day to day, the passage of time. \u00a0The boy who was once an infant is now a teenager. \u00a0But if you\u2019re in your 20s or 30s, and live your life among others without children, perhaps it\u2019s too easy too find yourself feeling as if nothing changes, and you\u2019ll be young forever.<\/p>\n
Or maybe she just needs to move to the Midwest. \u00a0The last wedding I attended was a colleague who was, in fact, in his mid-30s, but was open with everyone that the couple had found each other through eharmony, because they were both looking for marriage rather than just a fling (and he had dumped a prior girlfriend because she, not he, wasn\u2019t ready to settle down).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That\u2019s the key quote from an article in New York Magazine entitled, \u201cThe Real Reason Women Freeze Their Eggs.\u201d \u00a0The reason offered is this, as quoted by the fertility specialist the author, a woman in her late 30s, sees to freeze her eggs: \u201cIt isn\u2019t you,\u201d he said. \u201cAll day long, I see patients like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[53],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-relationships"],"yoast_head":"\n
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