Men are like eggs. They must hatch or go bad. I came to this conclusion after seeing in the new year with a gang of university friends and hearing one of them, a single guy of 35 called Jamie, declare with complete sincerity that his resolution for 2008 was not to get a girlfriend.

I groaned. His vow struck me as odd, not just because Jamie is a remarkably warm, kind and entertaining individual rather than some ropey Lothario, but because I knew him ten years ago when he was mustard keen to marry his then girlfriend. And when I thought harder about it, I realised that over the past decade Jamie has effectively been degenerating from the man he was at 25 years old to the boy he is today.

The person who fell in love and believed that when you found a great girl you counted your blessings and married her has morphed into someone in search of nothing more than a bit of fun, who views any relationship that he can’t get out of at the ping of a text message with genuine unease.

Where have all the men gone? Instead, we have an overload of man-boys – which leaves a generation of single, thirtysomething women who are their natural mates bewildered. I am one of those women.

I am often told that our problem boils down to bad timing. In our early twenties (the age at which our parents tended to meet and marry), we, arguably the first generation of properly educated and professionally ambitious women, were not ready to settle down and start having babies.

By our late twenties many of us did end up reconnecting with our first loves, or met men of a similar age who were still young enough to want to match and hatch. But for those who didn’t, life is increasingly complicated – and infuriating.

The assumption seems to be that it is our fault that we can’t find “him”. I have lost count of the number of articles by female columnists that I’ve read, urging “career women” like me to get pregnant before it is too late. I want to point out that I work to eat, and that earning a salary funds the social life needed to meet new people.

What do they think we are doing? Take India Knight’s attack, in The Sunday Times, on what she called “the sweetly retro notion of mooching around pining for Mr Right as the (biological) clock ticks away”. “My advice to all my girlfriends is, just do it,” she announces. “Get pregnant. Don’t wait. Mr Right can turn into Mr Wrong overnight: there are no certainties.”

And we wonder why men are afraid to commit, when women like me are depicted as hormonally charged sperm-bandits interested in nothing beyond the urge to have a child.

Does society really want usto settle for Mr Only OK rather than the real deal? Marriage strikes me as hard enough work without saddling yourself with someone for whom you don’t quite feel all that’s necessary. And giving birth with your mother at your bedside because your child’s father isn’t that into you, or the baby, strikes me as far sadder than never getting pregnant at all.

Having lived in New York for five years, and compared notes with friends in other cities (Hong Kong, Paris and Singapore among them), I can assert that the attack on thirtysomething singletons seems to be a particularly English trait. In other cities we are left alone at worst, celebrated at best, and most people find someone at some stage, even if it is at the age of 40. In my view, London is quintessentially chauvinist, a state of affairs exacerbated by the City, the all-male drinking clubs, the pub and football culture, and the strong, albeit small, group of women who seem to treat marriage as their sole raison d’être.

But what of these Brit boys who fail to hatch by their mid-thirties? Do they really turn bad? They don’t necessarily become bad company – as long as the relationship is kept platonic. Many of my best friends are utterly charming bachelors, but they are also the first to admit that they are rubbish boyfriends. Interestingly, they also agree that this wasn’t always the case.

“Looking back, I can see a couple of girls I was ready to marry ten years ago. But I seem to have drifted farther and farther away from being ready since then,” one of them confided as his 40th birthday approached. “I felt a level of certainty about people then that I don’t feel now.”

Personally, I think an odd thing happens to man-boy brains at about the age of 30. Some neural pathway, hitherto well oiled through a diet of normal relationships and an awareness of such terms as “compromise” and “I’m sorry”, tunes in to a specific area of the brain labelled “navel gazing”. If it miraculously misses that zone, it veers into another equally exclusive area: “near-total romantic/emotional shutdown beyond the next 24/48-hour period”.

My last few years of dating reads like either a therapist’s dream or a dictionary of neuroses. On the neurotic front, one man-boy aged 32 had a panic attack at dinner, which he thought was a heart attack until we got to A&E and he was assured otherwise. Another wore a watch that monitored his sleep patterns.

More common, however, are those who insist on persuading you that they are the one you have been waiting for, only to run away the second you show signs of agreeing. One man rang me every two hours for a week to persuade me that what we had going was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, until I started to think that he might be right – at which point he told me that he was too messed up for a relationship.

Another invited me to Spain after one date, only to say at the end of it that it was “all too full-on”. Another couldn’t stop sending soppy texts, until I sent one back. All were thirtysomething, bright, successful bachelors. They had all had therapy. They all talked ad infinitum about their “ishoos”. But not one of them asked about mine. I listened, and either left, or they did.

Nobody expects these guys to settle for Ms Only OK, either, but it’s fair to say that most of them are not looking to settle for anyone – and, in fact, dating a series of Ms Only OKs fills the gap nicely.

“In theory I’d like a family,” says one. “But it doesn’t feel urgent and in the meantime I have a great life with plenty of sex – all on my own terms. Love has sort of disappeared from the menu. And yes, now I’ve learnt that I can, I mess women around in ways I’d never have done in my twenties.”

Horror stories from friends abound, too. “I spent most of last year with a guy who used to weigh me every day and refused to sleep with me if I got too heavy,” admits a colleague. “How bonkers was that? But the awful thing is that once you pass 36, you find it’s single men rather than single women who are the prize commodity.”

I don’t know of any woman my age (35) who hasn’t spent several years in love with a boyfriend, only to have to give up on the relationship after realising that children and commitment were not going to happen for ages, if at all.

Many of these guys would be living happily as husbands and fathers if they had taken the plunge. But they haven’t. So what’s the answer? Become more hard-boiled and accept that, in return for children, we will have to make do with someone Only OK? Go after men ten years younger than us? Or try bruised divorcés ten years older?

There is another option, of course. And that is that the whole generation of single man-boys start behaving like men. Meanwhile, everyone else could stop asking us why we’re not married yet, and wrongly assuming that it’s because we are so work-obsessed that we don’t want to be.

Believe us, we are not single through want of trying.

It’s a statistics thing

For every 100 females, 108 males are born in the UK. But owing to the higher mortality rates of young males, by the mid-teens the numbers have evened out. This remains the case until old age, when a surplus of women arises again.

In some big cities, including London, there are more women than men. There is debate about the reasons for this, but it is nothing new. The thirtysomething single status is new, however – mainly because women now leave it later to marry. In their mid-thirties they find themselves in a predicament, whether they outnumber men of their age or not.

A study I carried out on lonely hearts ads indicated that, while single females typically advertise for men three to five years older than them, men advertise for women of a certain age irrespective of their own. Their preferred age is 24 to 25. So the men that the women want are looking for women, but younger ones.

So should a woman in her mid-thirties be looking for a man in his forties instead? Perhaps – but only in his late forties. I was involved in research that looked at how the sexes perceive their market value – ie, what they think their “package” is worth to the opposite sex. The results suggested that males in their early and mid-forties overestimated their standing the most. They are getting richer at this age, and become self-deluded about what they can get in return. They also want to attract a twentysomething, but are less likely to succeed than younger men. Only in their mid to late forties, when their risk of death increases (they may be rich, but they may also die), do they become more realistic.

In short, women seem to hang on to the ideal, and many get lucky. But when they start wanting to settle down, they opt for what biologists call the Hobson’s Choice Strategy. In layman’s terms, they opt for something over nothing.

— PROFESSOR ROBIN DUNBAR
Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford

The man’s view: try this instead

Most single men want love. But they are also terrified of failure, poverty and being trapped. They are scared of turning into their dads, or, if divorced, repeating their old mistakes. They are scared that their women will make them throw out their comics, their motorbikes and their dreams of writing novels.

It doesn’t really matter which type of man you go for – younger, older, divorced. What matters is that you go for him.

Personally, I think the divorced man is more realistic. He’s not like a young man who can’t commit because he yearns for a fairytale goddess whose heart he may one day capture. The older man just wants someone who won’t shout at him. If it takes her two minutes to get into the car, she’s ideal. If she’s giving, and laughs at his jokes, he’ll love her for ever. Give those bruised men a try. Stop expecting to find The One. Find someone, and give him love recklessly.

Or you can snare one of the single man-boys, but you must be cunning. You must wait for him to call but, when he does, you must be devoted and give him glorious sex in flattering lighting.

There is only one time when a man knows, for certain, that he loves his woman and will stay with her for ever: when she has just chucked him. The rest of the time he’s not sure. I remember the first time my wife said: “Let’s have children!” I knew that this was an historic moment. I must respond like a man. So I ignored her. Men’s heads are filled with confusion, fear and football statistics. And whenever they are made an offer, they always feel the negatives first – and if they can’t express them, they clam up like oysters.

In which case, trapping them may involve trickery. After five months – preferably during a three-day trip to Paris, so he can’t get away – you must say, lightly and just before sex: “I love every part of your life. I want to see you richly succeed. But you must marry me.” Then you must change tack and become very soft. You have touched on his deepest fears. Listen. Tell him to write that novel. Tell him that you love ELO. After a two-day sulk, which will be immensely wounding for you, he will begin to express his horrid, selfish fears, and thus you will be stumbling towards your perfectly imperfect life.

Try not to worry about what happens. Remember, there are also loads of men like me: the ones who hatched, and still went bad. We wish you luck. We wish you love. We’ll see you by the swings in five years.

— ANDREW CLOVER
Andrew Clover’s Dad Rules is published by Penguin in May

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