Women Don’t Let Go Of Good Men
The Dating Pool In Your Forties Is Just A Puddle With Intentions
Here is something nobody tells you about dating in your forties. You’ll go in with standards, a functioning frontal lobe, and a quiet confidence that comes from having survived enough nonsense to know exactly what you don’t want. Then you’ll open an app, swipe for twenty minutes, and feel every single one of those standards quietly packing a bag and leaving through the back door.
It isn’t that the men are terrible. Well. Some of them are terrible. But mostly they’re just wildly unprepared for a woman who’s done her own work, knows what she wants, and cannot be impressed by the bare minimum. We spent our thirties figuring ourselves out. We did therapy, or something that functioned like therapy. We read books with words like attachment and regulation on the back cover. We had the hard conversations with ourselves. And now we’re single, out here, ready, and the options include a man who spent half of dinner bagging out his ex-wife like she personally bankrupted the nation.
That is not how fifty fifty is meant to work, babe. Fifty fifty means we both bring things to the table. Not that I bring my good energy and you bring seventeen unresolved grievances about a woman I’ve never met.
The Ex-Wife Monologue Is A First Date Disqualifier
Now, the moment I want every woman in her forties to learn to recognise. The ex-wife monologue. It can arrive anywhere between the drinks order and the dessert menu, and once it starts, it doesn’t really stop. He’ll tell you she was difficult. He’ll tell you she changed. He’ll tell you the marriage drifted, which is the word men use when they want to describe something that absolutely did not drift, it was steered, by them, into a wall.
Here is what I need you to understand. The ex-wife monologue is not vulnerability. It is not honesty. It is not him bravely opening up to you on a first date. It’s an audition where he’s asking you to cast yourself as the reasonable one in a story he’s still writing. You are not available for that role, babe. You have your own stories. Some of them are quite good actually. You are not going to spend ninety minutes nodding sympathetically while he relitigates custody arrangements with a woman whose name you’re now going to associate with your salad.
The rule of thumb, and I want you to commit to this, is that the first date is not the place to hear the divorce. A passing mention is fine. A clean sentence like, I was married, we have two kids, we co-parent, is fine. A twenty minute character assassination of a woman you’ve never met is information, and the information is that he’s not ready. He’s still living inside the last relationship. He cannot be present with you because half of him is still arguing with her. Pay the bill. Go home. Don’t audition. The right man will tell you about his life, not prosecute someone else’s.
Dad Of The Year Is Not A Participation Ribbon
Here is the rule I want you to write down somewhere, because it’s saved me a lot of time. Watch how a man talks about the mother of his children. Not whether he says nice things. Whether he speaks about her like a full adult human being whose life has continued after he left it, or whether he speaks about her like a problem he solved by leaving.
Because parenting isn’t a part time hobby you get to feel proud of. A man can absolutely be a lovely dad at weekends and have completely abandoned the woman who’s doing the invisible, relentless, daily work of keeping small humans alive and functional. If she has primary custody, if she does the school runs and the sick days and the mental load and the emotional labour, if he gets the fun bits and a Father’s Day card, that isn’t co-parenting. That is subcontracting. And he is going to sit across from you on a first date and call himself a family man like the word means something just because he said it.
The advice I’d give my younger self, and that I’ll give you too, is this. Ask the boring questions early. Who does the school pickups. Who books the dentist. Who texts her when the kid is sick. Not in an interrogation way, just genuine curiosity. A man who is actually involved will answer in specifics and without performance. A man who isn’t will give you a sweeping statement about how amazing his kids are and pivot. Specifics are love. Vague is a red flag wearing a wedding ring he forgot to mention. Listen for the specifics.
Not Every Single Man Is Single For A Bad Reason
Now, in fairness, and because I refuse to write something that turns into a sweeping indictment of every divorced man with a Hinge profile, let’s talk about the other side. Not every man who is single in his forties is single because he’s terrible. Some of them are single because they were brave. Some of them walked away from something genuinely awful and are quietly rebuilding a life. Some of them were the ones being mistreated, and the world doesn’t really have a script for that, so they’ve been carrying it on their own. Discernment cuts both ways, babe.
There are men out there who left abusive marriages and don’t talk about it because they’re not sure how to without sounding like they’re playing victim. There are men whose ex-partners struggled with addiction, or mental illness that wasn’t being managed, or hostility that made the household unliveable, and they stayed longer than they should have because of the kids. There are men who got married at twenty three in Vegas after three espresso martinis and a misplaced sense of romance, realised within a year that this was a mistake of cosmic proportions, and have spent the decade since quietly putting themselves back together. None of those stories make him a red flag. Some of those stories make him a person who’s actually done some work.
The skill you want to build is the difference between a man who’s processing and a man who’s grieving on top of you. Listen for whether he speaks about his ex with bitterness or with a kind of settled sadness. Listen for whether he takes any responsibility for his part, even small. Listen for whether he can hold the complexity, that two things were happening at once, that she had her reasons too, that nobody comes out of a marriage ending without contributing something to the ending. A man who can say, it wasn’t right, we both knew, I’m sad about it but I’m clearer now, is a completely different animal to a man who’s still casting villains. Don’t write off every single man because you’ve met a few bad ones. Just be discerning. The work is in the listening.
A Good Man Is Out There, And You Are Allowed To Wait For Him
I do actually believe this. Not in a desperate, please universe deliver him kind of way. More in the way I know good things exist because I’ve encountered them, and I refuse to let a dinner’s worth of ex-wife content convince me otherwise. The sample size isn’t the whole population. It just feels that way on a Wednesday night when you’re home by nine thirty and Lulu is sitting on your chest looking at you like he’s deeply concerned.
What you’re allowed to want, at forty something, is embarrassingly simple. Someone who is curious. Someone who laughs easily and means it. Someone who asks questions and actually listens to the answers, not the glazed over nodding while scanning the room for something more interesting, but real, present, there. Someone who has looked at his own life honestly and done at least some of the work, or is at least trying. You’re allowed to hold out for that. You are not being picky. You are being accurate.
And when he shows up, the title is true. Women don’t let go of good men. Not because we need them. Because we know what it cost us to get here. She knows the bad dates and the low bars and the ex-wife monologues. She knows exactly how rare it is to sit across someone and feel absolutely nothing suspicious. So she holds on, calmly, with zero drama, because she’s forty, she’s done the work, and she has finally, finally earned the quiet.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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