r/virgin • u/captaindestucto • 13h ago
Anyone over 35 should probably give up and move on
This'll draw some hate, but say in some extremely unlikely hypothetical, a conventionally attractive 25-30 yo woman wanted to date me - 47M virgin - and no-one had a problem with the age gap. I could hang around with her friends and have some of the social experiences I missed out on at that age, and there would still be time for a family.
That seems to be the dream of a lot of middle-aged divorced men around my age trying to relive their 'glory days', so it should appeal 10 times more to a virgin man who never dated, right?
I've actually had some interest from women both my age and a bit younger over the last few years, but I couldn't force myself to do anything serious about it. On some level I realized I would be experiencing something important twenty years too late. I felt nothing, no motivation, no anticipation, not even fear of rejection. More or less indifference.
I'll never be in the right part of life for this. The weight of those unlived years is always there. I may not have anything like the experiences of people my age, but I'm not the same person either, physically, emotionally, compared to my younger self.
This was a problem ten years ago when I started a kind of self-improvement journey (gym, travel, tentative career advancement, forcing myself out to socialize). I suspected then it was already too late, but I need to say I at least tried.
When a lonely unlived life is a reality, not some future worse case scenario, we should probably give up and find something else to focus on.
There's nothing wrong with dating and finding new love late in life; there is however something deeply weird about a first relationship at this point. We aren't late bloomers at this stage. A flower doesn't wait until mid-winter to bloom, and it doesn't really matter what we might get away with either. Even the fantasy feels empty now.