It seems like everywhere I look these days I see dating advice articles.
When I was married I never saw them, but now that I am a newly single man contemplating entry into the modern dating world I see them all the time. And on top of that, friends send me even more dating articles, so I’ve read quite a few of them by now.
The advice in these articles is almost always directed at women. I’m not sure if that’s because women are especially deficient in dating skills (seems unlikely) or because men don’t care or are beyond help (bingo), but I nevertheless find these articles very useful. Apart from giving me a better idea of what is concerning the women I’m going to meet, the best of these articles help explain the intricacies of a highly complex world of which I know nothing.
Many articles are predicated on what I call the “dying alone theme”: “if you don’t want to die alone, you’ll need to do X and/or stop doing Y.” Dying alone figures so prominently in these articles that I must assume women have an especially acute fear of it.
By “dying alone” they can’t mean “dying without a partner” because women live, on average, much longer than men, so even those women who do X or stop doing Y and find a male partner will see their partner die before them. Dating advice isn’t going to change the odds much here.
This dying alone theme might refer to children who, presumably, would be expected to sit around the dying woman’s deathbed, particularly as her partner probably predeceased her, but then in my age range (mid-40s) I would imagine very few childless women still harbor hopes of having children, so for them dying alone seems to be pretty much guaranteed whether or not they do X and/or stop doing Y.
Is that so bad? What’s doubly puzzling, to me, is why anyone would even want to die with company. As your body fails, often in embarrassingly fluid-leaking ways, and your mind is shot or, at best, drugged up beyond comprehension, I highly doubt you’ll want an audience or would even be aware of it. Cultures in which old people went to mountain tops or into the desert to die seem to have had a better grasp on the realities of the situation (not to mention having devised a much more cost-effective way to go).
So the prospect of dying alone will not motivate me to do X or stop doing Y. What does motivate me is avoiding the prospect of living alone.
The advice in these articles is almost always directed at women. I’m not sure if that’s because women are especially deficient in dating skills (seems unlikely) or because men don’t care or are beyond help (bingo), but I nevertheless find these articles very useful. Apart from giving me a better idea of what is concerning the women I’m going to meet, the best of these articles help explain the intricacies of a highly complex world of which I know nothing.
Many articles are predicated on what I call the “dying alone theme”: “if you don’t want to die alone, you’ll need to do X and/or stop doing Y.” Dying alone figures so prominently in these articles that I must assume women have an especially acute fear of it.
By “dying alone” they can’t mean “dying without a partner” because women live, on average, much longer than men, so even those women who do X or stop doing Y and find a male partner will see their partner die before them. Dating advice isn’t going to change the odds much here.
This dying alone theme might refer to children who, presumably, would be expected to sit around the dying woman’s deathbed, particularly as her partner probably predeceased her, but then in my age range (mid-40s) I would imagine very few childless women still harbor hopes of having children, so for them dying alone seems to be pretty much guaranteed whether or not they do X and/or stop doing Y.
Is that so bad? What’s doubly puzzling, to me, is why anyone would even want to die with company. As your body fails, often in embarrassingly fluid-leaking ways, and your mind is shot or, at best, drugged up beyond comprehension, I highly doubt you’ll want an audience or would even be aware of it. Cultures in which old people went to mountain tops or into the desert to die seem to have had a better grasp on the realities of the situation (not to mention having devised a much more cost-effective way to go).
So the prospect of dying alone will not motivate me to do X or stop doing Y. What does motivate me is avoiding the prospect of living alone.
Yes, exactly.
Posted by: George Collins | July 13, 2012 at 12:51 PM