From Ed: The Male Species

Let me introduce myself. I'm the "Guest-Blogger," pen-name "Ed." I was asked, by the owner of this blog, to contribute a post this week and run with some thoughts. The prevailing thought? Men of course. The infuriating, fascinating, mysteriously uncomplicated (or so it only seems?) male gender.

Lately, I've been dating older men. It's just sort of happened that way. Not too much older, mostly in the age box of 29-36, OK that's two age boxes. So sue me. I've been told many times that if you don't want to deal with silly relationship and dating issues you should look to older men, those who are obviously more mature and adept at dealing with their and your, issues. I was told they were mature, I believed they would be mature.

But alas. It's really never that simple, is it? Case and point. The older guy who picked a fight with me (over nothing) while he was drunk, walked out on me at 1am, failed to return a phone call, an email saying "OK, whatever, let's at least be friends" and also erased me (ERASED!) from his myspace profile. It takes a bit of effort to do this, I have people I don't talk on there but I don't make it a point to go erase them, effectively saying "I am ending all communication with you and this is the big gesture." And why does should this guy, at 29 years old, be erasing people from a myspace profile? Not the definition of maturity.

But I'm a young, intelligent, reasonably attractive mid-20 something girl, and I do what we would all do, cry into the ice cream for awhile and then hit the bars with some friends to meet someone new. Which I did.

This one seemed promising. A no games, straight shooter; if I like you, I like you kind of guy. Called immediately, called when he said he would, did all the normal prerequisites, inviting me out, walking me to the car, an excellent kisser, etc. But on the third date (granted two of these so called dates had technically been "group outings") I made a rookie mistake. I let him stay over. In my defense, the dude's
a bartender, he gets off at 3am, and if you want to hang out with him at night you're either sucking down G&T's and later trying to remember if you drove, rode your bike or walked to this bar in Oakland, or hanging out in your bed...with him...because that is the natural place to be at 3am.

So of course, he stops calling after that. Typical right? But he's 30. And seeing as we had been out a few times before, I wasn't thinking of it as a one night stand kind of thing. Naive? Could he not at least call to say, thanks but no thanks? He's 30!

OK, so maybe I'm whining now. I apologize. Another example however; The 30-something Dude who took me line dancing. Yes. Line dancing. I thought this was a joke, and I was happy to be in on it, except that it turned out to be deadly serious. At the end of the night I asked how old he was. Here's a hint, it's always a bad sign when they answer that question with "how old are you?" What do you say to that? You could just tell them, but why are they avoiding a simple question?

He never told me how old he was. I heard from someone who knew him that he was 36. OK then. Being 25, I don't see that dating someone who is 36 is out of the realm of possibility. I do however have certain qualms about dating a man who won't tell you his age and has some kind of cagey reply to that question.

Maturity. A hard thing to come by in the male gender. Are they actually getting younger as they get older? Are the good one's just being weeded out?