Single Men Can’t Avoid 5-To-9 Grind

The age of 50 seems to represent a sort of tollgate beyond which, having chosen the route and the traveling companions, one expects to be on the same road for a long, long time. Thus people who find themselves approaching 50 unattached - either divorced or never married - are particularly prone to playing out a perpetual middlescence.

Even if they are certain they don’t want to be tied down to marriage, there is at least some ambivalence about traveling alone through the unmarked second half of life. This is particularly true of men, I find.

Every Friday night a group of unattached Seattle men between 40 and 50 gets together at a waterfront fish house (the location and identities of the men have been disguised, but all of their substantive comments are verbatim).

These are businessmen who wolf down The Wall Street Journal with jelly doughnuts for breakfast. By day they compare the latest gear they bought for skiing or kayaking. They boast about the vacations they take and about the women they make, or lie about those they don’t. But at 5 p.m., or 6 or 7 if they work late, they are painfully reminded of the one thing they don’t have: a real home to go home to.

“Even though one of us sits behind a judge’s robe, and another one is powerful enough to take the middle of the day off to fly down to L.A. and date a movie star, we share a secret,” said Simon, a 48-year-old magazine publisher. “Each one of us knows that the others are a little screwed up, too.”

These men are on their own. Their former wives are catching up on careers; their children are scattered. After-work hours are the cruelest. The weeknight hours between 5 and 9, once reserved for the wife and children within a traditional marriage and family, are now an intimacy void. To nullify the emptiness, these men spend several nights a week at the health club. Still, that leaves Friday night …

The biggest risk for these unattached men at this stage in their lives is that a woman will reject them and that the whole aura of success and cocksure confidence they’ve built up might crumble. Their careers no longer pose any real risk. When they were younger, the thrill was in the game, the pride and purpose of bringing home the bacon for their families. Now there’s no one home to cook it. Going out to restaurants, even with a good-looking date, isn’t the same thing.

“It’s like a lion in the jungle,” Simon theorizes. “If you bring the food to him, he’s not a lion anymore.”

The men study their menus and give their orders. Soon the conversation drifts back to the same obsession: Is anyone even close to finding a decent woman to marry?

“They’re all a little goofy, these women today,” one of the men says. “Goofy” is the group’s all-purpose word for the things they can’t stand about contemporary women: They’re aggressive, they like control, they make their own money, and they’re just as likely to be sexual predators as a man.

“I took out this gorgeous chick the other night,” says a businessman. “But something turned me off - she was wearing aftershave.”

“Who are we kidding?” Simon blurts. “We need them, but they scare the hell out of us. Finding fault with every one of them is just a way to find an excuse not to make a commitment.”

The one attached man in the group blots his lips after a big meal. “Well, hell, I’m on my third marriage, and you know what? It’s a goddamn relief.” This man appears disgustingly happy. The others all look upon him with naked envy.

MEMO: Excerpted from “New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time” by Gail Sheehy (Random House).

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate