SPECIAL FROM VICE MAGAZINE –
We all have that friend: the beautiful, intelligent, driven woman who—like Katherine Heigl in every rom-com—can’t find a decent date. Every guy she goes out with is an asshole; she consistently dates “below” her league, and she’s on the verge of giving up on a committed relationship altogether.
Not long after he turned 30, the writer Jon Birger realized he and his wife knew a lot of women like that. The couple didn’t have a lot of single male friends left, but the many single women they knew all seemed to be buyers stuck in a seller’s market. One of those friends, Birger told me, “had been dating a guy for a couple years. It certainly seemed like they were well on their way to getting married. She was in her late 30s, he was in his mid 40s. She really wants to have kids, get married, the whole [thing].
And she’s amazing in every way.” One day at lunch, Birger casually asked her about her boyfriend. “Her whole expression changed,” Birger recalled. They had just broken up. “They’d been dating for over two years and he said he ‘just wasn’t ready to settle down.'”…MORE HERE
