08 Mar 2009, Posted by jay rusovich , 0 Comments
“Many recently-divorced older men think I’m hallucinating when I use military metaphors in the context of dating. What they see is a beautiful young woman sitting next to them who is two years older than their youngest daughter, claims to have a Masters Degree in Biochemistry from Colgate, and can’t stop talking about how much she loves Ritz Carlton properties — if only she could afford them.”
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Back in the days before the Great Divide, a time when the population of affluent middle-age single men flooded the streets of urban America with unprecedented expectations of personal sacrifice [in the form of sex and commitment] from the very generation it spawned, I wrote a book that would answer some of the period’s most fundamental questions.
Not that it did much good.
Because the same demographic that ushered in the era of Woodstock, Flower Power, Volkswagon buses – and eventually – stock brokers, was also responsible for skyrocketing sales of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, Erectile Dysfunctions formulas and pharmaceutical grade heroin, to name a few.
Anyway, one of the book’s pivotal arguments was that men simply stopped accepting the fact that they were aging, and instead, focused on youth, beauty and relevance as though they themselves were perpetually young, but with certain improvements. This mindset gave rise to virulent new strain of female opportunist obsessed with fine dining, first class travel and 5-star hotels, and the result was the creation of a new food chain.
As most of you know by now I’m referring to “soft targets” and the women who prey upon them.
Let’s review the basics.
“Soft targets” are older men who appear to be in a perpetual state of delusion when it comes to women. They assume that because their first wives loved them, and because they were successful in their careers, that they understand the most ruthless predator the world has ever known, including the Taliban.
This is why the most critical weapon in the endless war of urban survival is self-awareness…and why they need to lay off the heroin.
Self-awareness has nothing to do with the goddamned office, or how many times you got away with cheating on your doting wife. I’m talking about knowing yourself well enough to navigate behavior that has no discernable boundaries.
In other words, imagine yourself not coming home to your wife at all. Or just telling her you picked up a hooker and decided to spend the weekend at a Motel 6…and by the way, where’s dinner?
Am I getting through?
You must understand the game no matter how much you want to excuse your new girlfriend’s weird behavior for the sake of sex and the porous relevance it delivers.
You’re not necessarily going to die tomorrow just because you’re no longer twenty-five, so stop acting like it. The sad truth is that you probably won’t, which means you’ll have to figure out how to kill yourself before you end up under a bridge, which is an arguable scenario for a man who can’t distinguish perception from truth.
All you guys see is a beautiful young woman sitting next to you, who for some reason, is two years older than their youngest daughter and swears she has a Masters Degree in Biochemistry from Colgate.
That’s the first salvo, a maneuver otherwise known as the set-up.
She tells you something she knows you want to hear, but even more importantly, want to believe.
This is the real hook: what you want to believe. It’ll soften your fat ass up for the ultimate slaughter by allowing her access to your deepest recesses, which aren’t particularly deep as it turns out.
Some people refer to it as a suspension of disbelief; something one experiences when watching a movie. You go along with it. You get drawn in. And then it ends. Conversely, when applying this mindset to a certain ilk of living human female, you go along with it. You get drawn in. And then you’re fucked. That’s the difference between a movie and reality; something lost on men who blur the lines.
Never mind that she has no traceable past whatsoever, or that she is in possession of two driver’s licenses with two different names – but the same picture, or has an aggravated battery conviction and post office box, only, in spite of the fact that she purportedly has an apartment somewhere.
Once the concrete hardens [belief becomes fact] it forms the foundation of a merciless assault.
There is no reasoning with these individuals. They crave the attention, the relevance…and the sex. The rest they deal with down the road. Many of these men are simply sex addicts with time on their hands to immerse their lives in the addiction. They’re so strung out on the endorphins they often come across as incoherent in the face of what is obvious to everyone around them.
Most of these women are just looking for a temporary respite from the storm. They know that men their own age won’t tolerate their insatiable appetite for self-gratification, so they take advantage of affluent older men who will. Women are also fortunate in that they have the ability to overlook physical flaws, or outward signs of aging, which makes them uniquely adapted to this form of strategery.
What men in these relationships don’t see is that while they’re intoxicated with the drug of youth, beauty and the fantasy of relevance, they are in the midst of implosion.
It happens in a similar way to sex addiction where the addict disappears for hours on end while his kids are at little league looking for their dad. Suddenly his family life suffers, as the splitting of lives hardens. One morning they get a phone call from the family attorney that hubby’s been arrested for soliciting prostitutes. In many cases it’s Merrill Lynch calling to say that they have to close his account because there’s nothing in it.
This is why most junkies die prematurely.
Unfortunately for those who don’t, they must go on long after the madness has taken permanent residence, and the woman who gave them their blessed gifts is now living with his stock broker.
Disclaimer: Not all young women are deceitful and opportunistic. Some actually enjoy the company of older men for obvious reasons. And many end up marrying and bearing children with them. It is also true that not all young men these days are jaded, self-absorbed, narcissistic, untrustworthy, disrespectful and overtly opportunistic when it comes to harvesting the spoils of generational feminism. But handsome and driven exceptions are hard to find, and for women who waited until their middle 30’s to marry, these men are virtually non-existent, hence, the older man.
