What Is It With Men and Younger Women? Pt. 3

For Part 1 of this post go here, and for Part 2 go here. I swear this will be the last one. Um… I think.

What does it mean to be a good father? A lot of people, when pondering a question like this, will go straight to the extreme: I’d throw myself in front of a train for my children! I’d throw myself on a grenade! I’d lay down my life in any way required, if it would spare them! These are laudable sentiments, but if you think a bit further about it a further question comes up: OK there superman, you’d throw yourself in front of a train for your children, but would you give up a night at the bar to stay home and hang out with them? You’d throw yourself on a grenade for them, but would you leave the office early to go to a recital? (What would I do without cliches? This blog would be bereft of content, and have only pornographic photos to entertain my readers – in other words, I’d be on Tumblr.)

If some men are so reluctant to do these basic, simple things on behalf of their children, why do they make claims about the extremes they’d go in order to save their kids’ lives? I think there are two reasons:

First of all it’s easy to make claims about things you know will never happen. Would you throw yourself in front of a train to save your kids? Of course you would if it ever came up, but it’s not going to come up. There aren’t situations in real life where fathers need to jump in front of trains in order to save their kids. There are situations in life where fathers need to go to recitals for their kids. Those little fuckers seem to have recitals and plays and shit all the damned time. I’m not saying men don’t mean it when they say things like “I’d die for my kids,” but it’s a bit too easy to make claims that you’ll never have to live up to. If I ever win the lottery I promise to buy each and every female reader a plane ticket to come visit me and have a complimentary orgasm – even the ugly ones! However, since I don’t even play the lottery, don’t go packing your bags ladies.

Secondly, although it would be an extreme situation, suppose it did happen: You need to throw yourself in front of a train, and it’ll [somehow] save your kids’ lives. With that one act you would cement yourself in history as a great father. All of the shitty parenting you’d ever done up to that point would be wiped out. 7 years of neglectful fatherhood, one fatal incident involving a train in which you save your kids’ lives, and boom, you’re going down in history as the perfect father. Your kids would feel like assholes if they ever questioned all of the lousy parenting you’d done up to that point; it would be a form of blasphemy. On the other hand, all of those other things you have to do as a father – going to recitals, and helping them make a stupid Mother’s Day breakfast for their mother, and staying home from the bar from time to time so that  you can be in their lives – that shit never ends. Each of those little things, individually, might be easier than throwing yourself in front of a train, but they’re all, each and every one of them, a potential inconvenience to you. (Holy shit, what kind of assholes am I assuming I’m writing to? AmIright, ladies?) And when all is said and done, your kids are human: you could do all kinds of things for them, on a daily basis, and the little jerks could still grow up thinking you’re a shitty father. Bring on the train!

I should get to the point.

In the last post I mentioned a younger girlfriend I’d once had. She was not only young but she was single, it was a long distance relationship, and we fell in love. So many things in that one sentence that violated my own personal rules, so how did I let it happen? Well, as mentioned, I never gave it any thought at the time, things just kind of progressed naturally, and then next thing I knew I was in love with a hot single chick. (The fact that she was hot isn’t strictly relevant to this thought, but I felt the need to buck up my spirits because every time I think about this I fall into thinking I’m an idiot. Which, let’s face it, I kind of am – I prove that with each blog post I write.)

And so I resolved myself: I need to be on my guard. When I start up a new friendship with a woman, especially one who’s younger, especially especially if she’s single, I can’t let myself get into certain topics. Flirting is fine – how could I not? My natural language is flirting – but if things get too serious I need to back off. I need to keep it light, and I need to stop the friendship from getting too deep.

So how do you do that? Oh, but here’s where my human frailty gets to me: when the rubber meets the road all of my ideas for how to keep things light involved extreme situations that would never happen. Suppose she were to suggest that we have sex – well then I’d tell her, gently but firmly, “I’m sorry my dear but I don’t fuck single girls. I’m sure you’ll understand.” Suppose she were to tell me that she’s starting to develop feelings for me – well then I’d have to suggest that we take some time apart, disentangle ourselves from each other, and have a cooling off period.

Except… knowing all that I know about women, a shockingly small amount I admit it, but even with my meagre knowledge of the fairer sex, I know that neither of those things is ever going to happen. No woman is going to make such ideas explicit. If a girl were to start bringing such ideas to me I’d be able to deal with it, but the whole problem I had with my previous single girlfriend was that things had grown slowly and organically; there was never a noticeable decision to fall in love, there were a thousand small, individually insignificant decisions that collectively led in one direction.

There’s also the fact that it could be one-sided, and I could develop feelings she wasn’t developing. Then how would I deal with it, since I’d have nothing from her to react against?

So I found myself being as dumb as the neglectful fathers. “I’d throw myself on a hand grenade to save my children, but I’ll be damned if I’m giving up my boys night out to stay home with them” – “I’d never fall in love with a single girl, but I’m happy to spend an afternoon instant messaging her with personal details about our lives.”

So I recently started hanging out with a younger girl. Not in her early 20’s, more in her mid-to-late 20’s, but I think she was an only child so she’s a bit spoiled, which makes her young for her age.

I’m oversimplifying about a hundred things in that one sentence, but fuck it, bloggers oversimplify. This is already a long post without getting into deep issues of psychological pathology that are outside my area of expertise. Which is, you will recall, porn. Why aren’t I talking about porn in this post?!?

I mentioned this girl in a couple of other posts; this is a completely platonic friendship, so many of the things mentioned about why men like younger girls don’t apply. For example, however nubile her body may or may not be it’s of no concern to me because I’m not going to touch it or consume it or even see it scantily clothed.

Do you like that phrase, “consume” her body? It’s either terrible or brilliant, I’m not sure which. The comments are open.

In no way is she validating my immaturity or selfishness. If anything I’m helping her see this in other guys, since she has a history of choosing losers, though not in a cock blocking kind of way. Despite my comment about her being young for her age she is a big girl, and smart, so she can make her own decisions with my blessing. (Which is good. Can any of my readers imagine getting dating advice from me? She’d either end up in an insane asylum or as a porn actress.) I’m kind of like an older brother to her, though we’ve only known each other a couple of months. I definitely don’t go around thinking that she “makes me feel young again,” or anything foolish like that.

It’s possible that people who know us think this is one of those older guy/younger girl situations, but it doesn’t matter what they think. As long as I don’t fuck her (or try to), everything’s good.

In fact one of the things which facilitated the relationship is that she’s not into casual sex, which means that she’s “safe” for me to develop a more intimate friendship with. Does that sound odd? The thing is she’s hot, so if she was into casual sex then there would have been a danger or temptation to start coming on to her and trying to get into her pants, which means that for my own protection I wouldn’t have gotten in too deep with her to begin with, but since that danger wasn’t there I could feel free to develop a good friendship with her without worrying that I’d get tempted to fuck her. (If we fucked it would be damaging to both of us, but more to her than to me.)

So the points above about why men like younger women don’t apply, and this is a purely platonic friendship. As I mention, it’s more brotherly/sisterly than anything else.

Right?

And then recently there was a situation in which she did something which annoyed me. It involved her flirting with a guy, though that wasn’t the problem, the thing she did was genuinely annoying to me – but as I thought about it after I found it difficult to pull apart the piece where “that thing she did was annoying” and the piece where “she was flirting with a guy.”

“Oh shit,” I thought, it’s happening again. Despite all my “best efforts” to prevent the single girlfriend thing from ever recurring, here I was staring the same situation in the face again.

Luckily this story has a happy ending. (Not that kind of happy ending, perverts.) (Sorry, I shouldn't call you perverts. On a blog like this that kind of “happy ending” would be a lot more appropriate than all this introspective navel gazing.) As soon as I recognized what was happening I was able to deal with it. Even just recognizing it at all, bringing it to light instead of letting if build up slowly in the back of my mind, helped me to deal with it. I started spending a bit less time with her, spent some more time flirting with more worthy candidates, and soon everything was right as rain. (Another cliche.) This wasn’t anything close to love, if anything it was a minor crush. I’m not even 100% there was a “situation” at all, the guy she was flirting with was very bad for her so maybe it wasn’t jealousy it was just aggravation that she keeps choosing bad men – but the fact that the question even came up was enough to act on it.

I am very fond of her, I do consider her to be like a sister, those types of feelings are OK, but I just want to be friends.

I started writing this post as soon as “the incident” happened and my eyes were opened. And then it turned into three posts, and by the time I got to this point I knew I was going to be OK, the circumstances weren’t dire. Everything’s good, folks. I even talked to her the day I wrote this, and nothing “weird” came up.

Addendum: I wrote this post about a week before it posted, and in that week I reassured myself that everything really is fine, I don’t have a crush on this girl, I’m not in any danger. In fact we’re thinking about starting something related to one of my hobbies, and I’m way more excited about that than I am about the idea of sleeping with her; quite the contrary, the idea of fucking her would worry me, for fear of messing up that other thing. (And our friendship.)

Does that mean I wouldn’t fuck her, if the opportunity came up? Let’s not be hasty now. She’s hot, and I have little willpower – I might very well give in to temptation. But I’d really rather not, and frankly the type of scenario where I’d need to “resist temptation” probably wouldn’t come up anyway. There are other hot girls out there I can fuck. (The comments are open if you’d like to volunteer.)