Male midlife crisis

A few days ago, I uttered the line again:

"He might be a nice person, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's good at relationships."

At that moment, I realized the sentence had become a mantra of sorts in recent years -- not only as I consoled female friends post-breakup, but also as I examined my own romantic pairings.

And the strange thing is, in a majority of cases, it wasn't a cliche. In my (admittedly biased) mind, the line seemed like the truth.

Which is why I surprisingly can't be too critical of this buzzed-about Marie Claire article, headlined "The new male midlife crisis."

It contends today's male 20- and 30-somethings are reluctant to settle down and are "turned off by the sweaty maneuvering of the type A girl, the Tracy Flickishness in how she knows what she wants and goes after it without apology."

Try this description on for size:

These guys are part of a cause-less generation. They didn't grow up burning their draft cards or fighting the Nazis. They weren't part of the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement, or any other movement. They were spoiled as kids and now they want to spoil themselves as adults. The old cliché was that a man would wake up one morning and realize that he wanted his youth back. The new version is that he never reached adulthood in the first place.

Not everyone buys it.

Where do you stand?