If you don’t mind me asking, what is it with you and the age 26? You said the same thing to me once and I never quite figured out why.
Well, that’s my age & where my current perspective is based from—but I remember what it was like at 18/19/20. For me a switch kinda flipped at 24. You start seeing the girls from your past, maybe a couple girls you really, really wanted to be a long term part of your life, and you see them today all you feel is
relief that you didn’t tie your anchor to them and
pity when you see how unfulfilled they are & the kind of resignation or desperation they have in the realization that they no longer hold sway over you. I’m old enough to have watched girls my age, girls a couple years younger than me & even girls 4 or 5 years younger than me diminish in their appeal.
Plus, it’s just like how Christmas is the biggest deal ever when you’re a kid. Or getting embarrassed in middle school is like the worst possible thing you can imagine. But really that’s just an illusion of perspective. Yeah, relatively, if you’ve only had 5 Christmases in your entire life each one has a sense of novelty & importance; and when all your social life is contained by a single school then any misstep that jeopardizes your standing there seems pretty life-altering. At my age, I’ve had enough rejection, failure, success, popularity, loneliness, lust, love, etc. that none of those emotions really move me to the point of distraction. I have enough mental proof that all of those things are temporary & that I’ll be OK regardless.
On top of that, you (hopefully) develop the qualities that girls are looking for—and the game becomes so much easier. So why would I stress about some 26 y/o who broke my heart when I was 19 when I can easily find a better looking 19 y/o who thinks I’m absolutely the greatest person ever? Plus, pretty much every single one of the girls that I thought I wanted at your age
have tried to make a reappearance into my life—sometimes we still have chemistry, a lot of the times we don’t, but the script has flipped & I end up rejecting them eventually. At that point, you realize it was never anything personal about you back in the day, it’s just how a person behaves when they have more options than the person they’re interacting with & it would take a massive amount of hamstering on my end to feel the kind of self pity I felt for myself as a younger man.