If there’s a manual for how to live a life, mine must have fallen behind the bookcase sometime in the Ford administration. Or maybe I just skipped the chapter everyone else seemed to get—the one about sex, love, and all the normal rites of passage that people move through like stations on a well-lit train line.
Let me say this right away: I’m not hiding in a basement, and I’m not writing manifestos. My life doesn’t look like the cliché you’d expect. I am, by all external measurements, fine. Decent. Maybe even enviable. At 65, I still jog. I hit the gym. I go to meetups, book clubs, political fundraisers, woodworking classes—sometimes all in the same week. I golf badly with friends on weekends and I get my hands dirty at the animal shelter every Saturday, walking dogs who are much more excited to see me than any first date ever has been.
I have asked out more women than I can remember—at parties, through friends, and, eventually, on every dating site with a halfway functional login page. I’m not George Clooney, but I clean up. My hair is mostly still where it belongs, my jokes usually land, and I pay my own bills. I’m not here to brag, just to clarify: the classic portrait of a “never-kissed, never-loved” man as a shuffling, resentful outcast simply isn’t me. I’m the guy you sit next to at a city council meeting or chat up while waiting for your coffee at a local fundraiser. The guy who’s helpful, reliable, and always has a book recommendation. “Amiable,” my friends call me, as if that’s the highest civilian honor a man can achieve after 40.
If you’re reading this and waiting for the tragic childhood story or some grand theory about women or modern society, you’re going to be disappointed. There’s no Greek chorus here. There’s just me—and a quiet, persistent question mark that’s followed me around for half a century.
I grew up in a family that prized normalcy. Not happiness. Not even success. Just a steady, unremarkable normal. My parents were from the generation that believed in duty, in keeping your chin up and your shirt tucked in, in the magic of hard work and silent suffering. They were loving, but not warm. My mother taught me to shake hands firmly. My father taught me to mind my business. Nobody taught me how to talk to girls.
When I was a kid, I assumed love would simply appear—like acne or puberty or a driver’s license. In movies, people just met and things happened. In real life, I waited. In high school, I was shy. In college, I was a little less shy. I went to a few parties. I even kissed a girl at one, once. She left before anything else could happen, and in my head, that one moment became a myth—a proof that, yes, I could be chosen, I could be wanted. It just didn’t happen again.
After college—well, “after college” is generous. My study habits were as undisciplined as my love life, and I bounced out and back in a few times, never finishing. Eventually, I took a job, then another, and by the time I was in my thirties, I was managing a team, making decent money, and filling my days with work, friends, hobbies. The old advice—work on yourself—seemed sage. So I did. I worked. I learned. I read books. I made things with my hands. I took trips. I voted in every election and even helped run a few campaigns. I cultivated the kind of life that every motivational podcast claims will make you “magnetic.”
The magnets must’ve been defective.
I want to be clear: I’m not desperate. I don’t stalk women, I don’t send DMs to twenty-somethings on Instagram, I don’t pine after women who aren’t interested. I’m not angry at women or the world. I’m not even really angry at myself. I’m just… puzzled. Confused by how much I’ve put into the game and how little has come back. All the self-help stuff about “putting yourself out there,” “being the best version of you”—I did it, and I still do it. I’ve swiped right, messaged first, signed up for events, practiced vulnerability, and sat across from people at dinner with the quiet hope that something will finally click.
It hasn’t.
Most people assume someone like me must be religious or repressed. I’m not, really. I lean a little right, but mostly I believe in kindness, in fairness, in pulling your weight and leaving things better than you found them. Sex, to me, was never a scary or forbidden thing. It just never happened. Not out of fear, not out of lack of trying, not because I don’t want it—just because the world, for whatever reason, hasn’t dealt me that card.
If this was a movie, there’d be a twist. A third act revelation. I’d meet someone at the grocery store, or reconnect with a childhood friend at the reunion, or—hell—get caught in a rainstorm with a stranger and share an umbrella and a laugh and, finally, after 65 years, have my “moment.” But life, at least mine, isn’t a movie. It’s just a collection of Thursdays.
I see other men my age who lost wives and found new partners in their seventies. I see friends and neighbors living out the back nine with new love and new possibilities. It’s not impossible, not even rare. But for me, it’s like being the only person at a wedding without a seat at a table. Everyone’s chatting, sharing, laughing, but no one even seems to notice the extra chair. Or maybe there’s just no place card with my name on it.
Here’s the thing: I’m not writing this for pity, or advice, or even for answers. I don’t believe anyone really has them. I’m writing this because sometimes it feels like the world only tells stories about the winners, about the people for whom everything works out. But there’s another story too—the story of the person who played by the rules, who showed up, who tried and tried and tried, and for whom it just didn’t happen. Not because he’s broken or bad, but because sometimes that’s just how life works out. The world is full of unclaimed seats.
I have a good life. I really do. I laugh a lot. I know how to build things with my hands and how to make a mean chicken piccata. I volunteer, I vote, I listen, I care. I have friends. I am not lonely—not most of the time, anyway. But sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet and the world seems to shrink to just my breathing and the ticking of the kitchen clock, I feel the shape of the thing I’ve never had. I wonder what it would have felt like to be chosen. To be wanted. To know, even just once, what everyone else seems to know.
I can’t miss what I’ve never had, not really. But some nights, I feel the empty seat at the table. And I wonder what it’s like to finally sit down.