“In order to be intimate with another, one must first be willing to be intimate with oneself, and any addiction, regardless of what it is, is an avoidance of intimacy with the self.” – Anne Wilson Schaef, Escape From Intimacy. Strangely, romantic relationships can function as an addiction no less powerful than drugs or alcohol. Doubly strange is that many of the people who hold up intimate relationships as the ultimate value in life are…
I’m 62, been retired for 5 years and a committed bachelor for 15. In my view, retirement holds a special appeal for the single man, and it also entails several challenges. I want to describe those and offer some suggestions. I won’t cover the financial aspects of retirement. Plenty of people are doing that already. I want to look at the more psychological, social, and philosophical aspects. To lay it out briefly, I think that…
[edit: Some of the women didn’t like this one. I gave a trigger warning, but they still got triggered. Part of that was my fault – I should’ve known better than to post this on female-dominated forums. It went over like a turd in a punchbowl. But let me issue the trigger warning up front: if you get offended when a man discusses his standards for LTRs and assigns low probabilities to the women in…
If you’re single, you will “die alone.” You’ve probably heard that message, either directly or through the media. Maybe you’ve conjured up the image yourself: dying alone in a sterile hospital room, lonely and unloved, or dying alone in your apartment, days passing before anyone discovers your body. Oh, the shame, the post-mortem shame. Years ago, I was on an online forum. I said that I wasn’t interested in getting married or having kids. Knowing…
Everyone knows the importance of believing in your ability to achieve goals and persisting despite adversity. Let’s take that for granted. I want to talk about the flip side — about the times when it is best to give up. Sometimes, the wisest course is to drop a goal, walk away, and invest your energy elsewhere. Specifically, let’s talk about the times when it might be best to give up on relationships — and when…
Have you ever wondered, “Does an LTR (a long-term romantic relationship) support my core values? Does it support what matters most to me in life, or does it undermine it?” It’s a good question to ask. You want, I assume, to pursue things that are consistent with your deepest values and avoid the things that aren’t. I’d like to share with you a simple process for determining whether an LTR serves your core values or…
If you’ve been living the bachelor life for as long as I have, it’s easy to take the freedom for granted. I thought it might help to remind us all of those freedoms. Doing so might enable us to better appreciate those freedoms and maybe even utilize them better. I’ll divide the discussion into “freedoms from” and “freedoms to.” Freedoms From Bachelors enjoy freedom from a long list of constraints, stresses, and problems that weigh…
Most people want to be in a good, healthy, long-term romantic relationship (LTR). I get it. I see the appeal. I’ve been in relationships like that, and I’ve enjoyed them — for a time. But a decade ago, I decided that I didn’t want to be a part of them anymore – not because I was “hurt,” not because something terrible happened, but because it didn’t seem worth the tradeoff. In the abstract, I want…
In this piece, I will cover three additional principles for building self-esteem. If you missed earlier segments in this series, check the menu under “foundations.” The three remaining principles are: Find Meaning Understand Uproot the Negative 1. Find Meaning Bachelors have to find their own meaning, because the sources of meaning that traditional men use are not available to us (e.g., marriage, children, work to support that). We must find meaning off the beaten path. …
We don’t get self-esteem by blowing ourselves kisses in the mirror. I tried; it doesn’t work. Building self-esteem (or “self-respect,” if you prefer) requires work, and it requires a certain kind of work, specific practices. I will describe two of those practices in this piece and three in the next. These practices emerge not from my posterior but from decades of reading and experience, personal and professional. I will focus on the part we…