Not so long ago, average mid-twentysomethings, both male and female, had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: high school diploma, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, they hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. The limbo “I’ll be calling it preadulthood” has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated men I’ll be writing about in this book. But it seems about time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: it doesn’t tend to bring out the best in men.

Preadults and Their Brilliant Careers

Preadults are looking for something much bigger than a way of earning a living. They are searching for meaning, for purpose, for a life mission, all of which, for good and not-so-good reasons, they believe should take the shape of a career.

The New Girl Order

Women between the ages of 25 and 34 with a bachelor’s degree or higher outnumber men. This has been the situation since the 1980s, and the trends continue to be in women’s favor. Between 1975 and 2006, the percentage of women with at least a college degree increased from 18.6 to 34.2 percent. Men barely budged: their numbers went from 26.8 percent to 27.9. By 1980, most of the students in cap and a gown at college graduation ceremonies were women. In 2004, the fair sex constituted 57 percent of graduating collegians. Today, it is 58 percent, and predictions are that women will reach 60 percent of the college grads in the near future.

Child-Man in the Promised Land

Not coincidentally, the same decade that brought us the girl-powered preadult and built the foundations for the New Girl Order introduced a contradictory cultural type – the child-man. The child-man is the fun house mirror image of the alpha girl. If she is ambitious, he is a slacker. If she is hyper-organized and self-directed, he tends toward passivity and vagueness. If she is preternaturally mature, he is happily not.

Father of Child-Man

Adult manhood has almost universally been equated with marriage and fatherhood.

In the story of masculinity told across cultures, the same qualities come up over and over: strength, courage, resolve, and sexual potency.

A man had one single and durable purpose, the service of his family. Until the middle of the twentieth century, that is. That is when the male service ethic first came under serious attack.

Love in a Time of Darwinism

Today, of course, there are no parents, ministers, rabbis, priests, or matchmakers telling the young whom not to have sex with or whom to marry or when. Financially and sexually independent, both men and women have escaped dating rituals, rules, and gender roles. They’re free to do whatever they want, and their opportunities for pursuing happiness on their own terms are like none before in human experience.

Manning Up?

There is no question that a large number of people in their thirties and forties, after a decade or more of break-ups and broken hearts, are suffering from relationship PTSD.

Unlucky preadults who start out open to love learn to blockade the doors against the emotional thieves and muggers out there. Is there anyone to trust?

As the single mother becomes a new (almost) normal, the cultural environment becomes increasingly indifferent to a guy in the house. The result? With nobody expecting anything of them, men get worse.

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