Baggage, or Lack Thereof
- Tuesday, January 25 2011 @ 09:14 am
- Contributed by: Jet
- Views: 1,317
I know of a man who has a bit of an unusual prejudice when it comes to dating. It has to do with what he calls “baggage.” You see, he’s not that far from age forty, and he’s well aware that women his age might very well have been married before, or had children. And he’s okay with that; in fact, if a woman does not have “baggage,” he assumes there’s something wrong with her.
I could dismiss this as simply one man’s strange quirk, but the more I thought about it, I realized that it could stem partially from a societal double standard. Though we logically understand that adult women can have lives that don’t include marriage or children, many people still assume that it’s the primary goal for women aged eighteen and up. It’s sort of funny and unusual that this guy considers women without “baggage” damaged, but a woman thinking the same thing about a man might be looked at even more strangely, because it’s more acceptable for men to stay unmarried for a longer time and focus on their careers.
However, this also brings up another point about adults and the dating world that I’d like to address. When you’re dating and in your twenties, one might consider the whole process more simple - you haven’t lived much beyond college or the first few years of working. Now consider someone double that age, in their forties. They’ve literally lived an entire extra life, one spent entirely as an adult. Maybe they’ve achieved the dreams of their twenty-something self. Maybe life circumstances forced them in another direction. Maybe they’re just now realizing what they truly want in life.
The point is, you can’t always look at “baggage” (or a lack thereof) as any real sort of indicator about where a person is in life and what they want. Maybe they don’t want the same things they used to. Maybe their path was chosen for them. At any rate, are you exactly the same person you were twenty years ago?
As you look at online dating profiles, remember to try to look outside your box, whatever it may be. We never know what strange prejudices could keep us from missing out on a truly great match.
I could dismiss this as simply one man’s strange quirk, but the more I thought about it, I realized that it could stem partially from a societal double standard. Though we logically understand that adult women can have lives that don’t include marriage or children, many people still assume that it’s the primary goal for women aged eighteen and up. It’s sort of funny and unusual that this guy considers women without “baggage” damaged, but a woman thinking the same thing about a man might be looked at even more strangely, because it’s more acceptable for men to stay unmarried for a longer time and focus on their careers.
However, this also brings up another point about adults and the dating world that I’d like to address. When you’re dating and in your twenties, one might consider the whole process more simple - you haven’t lived much beyond college or the first few years of working. Now consider someone double that age, in their forties. They’ve literally lived an entire extra life, one spent entirely as an adult. Maybe they’ve achieved the dreams of their twenty-something self. Maybe life circumstances forced them in another direction. Maybe they’re just now realizing what they truly want in life.
The point is, you can’t always look at “baggage” (or a lack thereof) as any real sort of indicator about where a person is in life and what they want. Maybe they don’t want the same things they used to. Maybe their path was chosen for them. At any rate, are you exactly the same person you were twenty years ago?
As you look at online dating profiles, remember to try to look outside your box, whatever it may be. We never know what strange prejudices could keep us from missing out on a truly great match.
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