Ari is a 34-year-old woman living in New York. She likes quality men but quality men do not like her, not lately anyway. I’m having one of those days where I feel I lost everything I wanted before I even mounted a battle for them. I’m not going to be a young mother. I’m not going to marry my college sweetheart. I’m not going to be a teen sensation. The whole thing reads like a list of exits that already passed her by. By the time she noticed the train was gone, she was still on the platform.

Today, I feel like I’m too old to do anything I wanted or hoped to do. I can’t find a job I like. I can’t find a boy to kiss. I never thought I’d be 34, unmarried, unemployed and childless. I never thought, I never considered that I’d still have to be looking. When you spend years assuming things will fall into place, reality starts to feel rude. Then one day you look up and the options are thinner than your patience.

Women feel sorry for themselves in order to get sympathy and validation from other women who know what it’s like to feel sorry for themselves. Their goal is to get a superficial injection of happy feelings that stops the tears long enough to leave the house and purchase brand-name clothing products. In college there were others, I never lacked for a date, but now the attention is gone. The sadness is real, but so is the audience.

Of course she’s still dating, since it has worked so well for her in the past. Because even at her age she deserves no less than a quality man who is over six feet tall, charming, a good listener, witty, in excellent shape, fashionable but not too metrosexual, not a game player, well-mannered, chivalrous, making six figures, funny but not a clown, a passionate lover, emotionally secure, drug-free, ambitious, nice but not too nice, not self-absorbed, athletic to defenseless little animals.