Finally…
Someone has managed to explain in a way that’s easy to grasp why it gets harder for women to meet someone as they get older.
It all revolves around the simple household lamp.
According to TikToker Allie Voss — not the originator of the analogy btw, she’s only retelling what she heard from British journalist Louise Perry — finding a good partner is like finding a good lamp.
When you are young and furnishing your first apartment, you tend to pick whatever lamp you come across as long as it looks good and it provides light. Your standards at this stage are relatively low. You are still at a point in life where you haven’t quite found your groove yet.
Now imagine it’s ten years into the future; you are much older. With each passing year, you have been curating your apartment to fit a particular aesthetic that fits you to a tee, and now you have to go and find a new lamp. How hard do you think that venture is going to be?
If you are like most people, you will find it a bit of a challenge. All because you have arranged your home in such a way that any old lamp won’t do. It would clash with the furniture, the curtains, and the color palette, at least not without some considerable work rearranging or moving stuff around.
This, my friends, is what dating is like when you get older, especially if you are a successful woman.
Meeting someone after 30, even 40, and beyond is far from easy because by then, you have built a life for yourself, and a new person with their emotional, mental, and physical baggage risks plunging your life into turmoil.
And, I believe women are keenly aware of this, even though they may not always openly express it quite this way.
At the same time, they are also aware that the number of suitable lamps out there is limited.
Which is why women like Iggy Azalea are perfectly okay going 50/50:
Love her or hate her, Iggy represents what many older, accomplished women feel. A woman making 100k is not going around chasing men making 250k and above, contrary to what you might hear from the likes of the Red Pill community.
A line of thinking that is in and of itself a contradiction. If the same women are already established, why would they need to ride the coattails of a man? Wouldn’t that defeat the concept of working their way up to that position in the first place?
No. Successful women are a lot more pragmatic than that when it comes to relationships.
They know their value and the type of man they can get, weighing factors like how well is this man going to mesh into my life, is he emotionally mature, are we able to connect emotionally just as well as we do physically, is he respectful and trustworthy, and, above all, will this man bring me peace?
At the end of the day, that’s what it comes down to: can a man bring her peace? If yes, he is probably already doing better than most. The type of man women happily forego hypergamy for.
The only problem is that this specific type of lamp is in short supply.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Yash Goyal On Unsplash
