One foot in the grave, the other in a cradle; maturity's new face

An ex-girlfriend of mine got married this weekend. We’re almost exactly the same age. As soon as I found out it was her wedding weekend, I broke out in a cold sweat. “Married?” I gasped. “At 22? That’s madness!”. Then I remembered a lot of people get married in their early 20s, and almost everyone did a few generations ago. So why was the prospect so daunting and alien to me?

The answer is simple; I am one of a new breed of adult male, a breed that’s rapidly increasing numbers are, or at least should be, a cause for concern. I am a manchild, and I’m scared of marriage because girls are icky.

Ok, so manchildren aren’t that bad. We’re like normal men in almost every way except for our aversion to a sense of maturity, reposnsibility and grownupiness (and as a manchild, I’m neither embarrassed nor concerned about using the word “grownupiness“). We’re the kind of blokes that think a quiet night in is getting wasted with friends and playing video games; the kind that thinks high-brow comedy is boring because there’s no farting; the kind that can’t cope with a serious relationship because they’re for ‘old people’.

I think Dylan Moran explained it best in one of his stand-up DVDs. Having explained the theatrical turbulence girls go through as they reach maturity and beyond, he sums up that a man is just “a tall child holding a beer”. He is exactly right; having looked back on my last ten years in terms of social activities and favourite hobbies, my life is exactly as it was when I was 12, aside from the inclusion of sex and beer (and, to be honest, they’re almost non-existent parts of my life at the moment).

This is obviously the fault of a technologically wondrous quality of life. As a kid, I was obsessed with technology. All the fancy features and weird devices, and the games. Oh my days, those wonderful, wonderful games! The problem was that new gadgets just kept coming, and the lovely games got bigger and better and longer. A hundred years ago children pushed a hoop with a stick. When they got older, they never carried on playing with them. The hoops didn’t become remote controlled, the sticks didn’t start playing mp3s. It was just the same old boring hoop-stick bollocks they’d put up with their entire childhood. When it was time to grow up, they must have done it gladly.

Nowadays, however, the stuff we played with as kids just keeps getting better. How could we possibly say goodbye to something that keeps getting even more awesome by the day? We can’t, so instead of striding into adulthood, we limp there, pulled down by the weight of the adolescence we’re trying to carry with us.

What we’re left with is this bizarre adult-kid hybrid of a man that looks like he’d pull off a formal suit at a gala dinner, but would rather dress up as a power ranger and go to a house party. And sadly this immaturity extends further than our interests; it affects our relationships too.

When it comes to our parents, we’re far too dependent on them. The adult in us enjoys to freedom and responsibility of being our own person, but the child in us is saying “mummy, please can I have some money to play out?” And as far as love is concerned, we act like virgin teenagers; always looking for a brief, week-long whirlwind romance where we can have fun, sleep around and then shirk all responsibility, saying “this is just a fling, I’ve got my whole life left to try and settle down”.

And so we live our lives like morons trapped in a bore’s body. We scupper our chances at emotional connections with long-term partners in favour of internet connections with co-op Halo partners. And as for my ex? Well, I feel sorry for her husband; he must have one awful case of cooties.