Thread by @terrorhousemag

One of the most dangerous ideas ever created by Boomers is the idea that you need to spend your twenties fucking around before you meet the perfect woman (or man). All this does is make it exponentially more likely that you'll end up alone or in a dysfunctional marriage.

Let me tell you my story. Over a decade ago, I fell in love for the first time. I was a late bloomer (lost virginity at 18) and fucked around through a bunch of bad hookups before stumbling into a girl I liked even when I was sober. She was a college freshman, me a junior.

She wasn't the hottest girl, but she was cute and my type. We had the same interests and similarly antisocial personalities. More importantly, she was humble and actually worked hard at the whole "relationship" thing, something I utterly took for granted.

The difference with her is that she had spent most of her childhood overweight, laughed at by mean girls and ignored by boys, and had spent her last years in high school dieting down to thinness. She was skinny but still viewed the world through the eyes of a fat girl.

I was the first man who came along who treated her like a human being, so she imprinted on me like a baby duck and worked hard to impress me. She helped me with classwork, kept my apartment clean, even skipped class once to care for me after I rolled my ankle and couldn't walk.

When I wasn't working or at class, we were sitting around my apartment listening to Camera Obscura or taking weekend trips down to NYC to hang around shitty hipster dives. I tried to push her to develop her art and she my writing.

Obviously, we had problems. She was low self-esteem and clingy and we had fights over her unwillingness to leave me alone when I didn't want to talk to her or anyone. She didn't like my drug use (I used speed a lot to meet college deadlines) or my dislike of pets.

I mentally filed all this away as my excuses for breaking up with her, but the real reason why I dumped her was because I took that Boomer/PUA bullshit about "sowing my wild oats" seriously. Every problem I had with her was either minor or something we could have worked out.

She wanted to get married. She never said it, but she hinted at it, behaved like it, and the relationship was heading down that path far faster than I was prepared for. She was the first woman I ever said "I love you" to and vice versa.

I didn't want to take the relationship seriously in part out of peer pressure. In New York, people don't get married at age 20. It just doesn't happen. You're supposed to spend your twenties living the bugman lifestyle before you settle for scraps and in vitro in your thirties.

I'd also started reading guys like Roissy and Roosh at this time. Roosh is a long-time friend of mine and I don't blame them for choices I made, but I had that idea in the back of my head: "I can do better. I can play the field. It'll get better in my thirties."

When I broke the bad news to her, she started sobbing uncontrollably. It was an enormous mindfuck: she hadn't do anything wrong, aside from the hormonal/moody bullshit that all women do, and various other problems we could have worked through like adults.

It took a day before I realized what I'd done. The fallout from that breakup not only wrecked the two of us, it wiped out half of my friendships, since once all our mutuals learned what an asshole I'd been, they didn't want anything to do with me.

That was over ten years ago. I'm now in my thirties and the closest I've come to recapturing the bliss and perfection of that relationship was when I dated a BPD vampire who sucked me dry for two years and has been stalking me off and on ever since.

That manosphere line about how life for men gets better in your thirties is total and complete bullshit. Maybe it was true for Boomers and GenXers, but not for Millennials or Zoomers. It just gets worse the older you get.

Yes, I have a pile of "experience" from dating women, but it hasn't made me happy. It'll make for hilarious stories when I finally put it all into a book, but in terms of finding a wife, I'm further away now then when I was a stupid college kid.

Fucking around in your twenties embitters both men and women. You end up screwing around with increasingly messed-up people whose baggage combines with yours to form a Voltron of dysfunction. Not a stable base on which to build a family.

"Experience" doesn't make you a better husband, wife, or lover. You don't learn anything from fucking around aside from how mentally ill most people are. Saying you need "experience" before getting married is like saying you need to lick a turd to know that it's a piece of shit.

As for the crock of "sexual experience," sex is supposed to be an act of mutual unity and enjoyment, not a sport where you earn points for getting the other person off in a certain amount of time. The best sex you'll have is with someone you love, not someone who is "skilled."

I've put extra time on my clock by moving abroad to countries where women are more feminine, but the clock is still running down. I've accepted that I might never find someone. I'm not happy about that, but I can live with it. Some people can't and won't.

To the zoomers: please, I beg you, do NOT fall for this Boomer bullshit. If you have a good girl (or guy), hold them tight and don't let go. If you have problems, work through them like an adult. Don't be a coward and fear marriage or a serious relationship.

I'm not saying marry the first person who comes along and winks at you. Be smart. I'm saying don't throw away a perfectly good relationship if you have one because of some asshole telling you you need to "play the field" or something equally insipid.

I'll probably write more about this at Terror House, but I'll leave it at this: large tranches of my generation are living proof of the failure of the Boomer approach to relationships. Don't make the same mistakes.

"For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry."

It's what they taught us. My parents married in their early thirties.

https://twitter.com/antifashcrusade/status/1164727114463158277

Early Boomers maybe, but the later Boomers---the ones who grew up during the hedonism of the 1970's---were just as nihilistic as GenXers. My parents were born in the mid-1950's.

https://twitter.com/ExpatAftermath/status/1164732784352665600