What is it with 30-something women anyway?

Not that I've ever pretended to understand women, but I'm certainly wiser to their ways today than I was, say, yesterday or the day before that or the day before that...you get the idea. But what is it about women - once they hit the ripe age of 30 - obsessing about their age? I have several friends in this age group that can't go five minutes before spinning the conversation into some self-deprecating comment about their age.

In listening to one of these women you would think she had gone to prom with Sir Galahad of Camelot and slow-danced to the melodies of a bard on lute. That her corsage was made of flowers now extinct. That the Prom Committee had to hire extra security to repel a potential Visigoth invasion (one of the other students' dads had seen some unsavories mulling about whilst he worked the fields of the fiefdom). Please!

My girlfriend's best friend, for instance, is in her early thirties and often asks me for advice on the male thought process: how we think, what it means when we don't call within 6 minutes of arriving home from a date, why we sometimes employ the Dutch oven moments after a sexual interlude and find it funnier than Dave Chappelle doing Rick James, why the only time we can talk to another guy beyond ten minutes is when we're communicating purely within the script of the Big Lebowski or Caddyshack. I always oblige and answer these and other questions to the best of my ability. Inevitably, there's always a problem with my advice because, well, "that may be true, but I don't think it's that way for someone my age."

Of course, let's give credit where credit's due, and acknowledge considerable progress. I met this woman about 6 months ago and think she's wonderful. She's attractive, witty, intelligent and frankly, I would've never guessed she was older than me...had it not come out 3 minutes into the first conversation we ever had. At that time, she had stated very clearly what her ideal type was. After many years in the dating pool with successes and failures, she had narrowed her search down to two oh-so-important criteria: 1) he can be no younger than 32, and 2) he must be tall.

I couldn't resist cracking a trademark sarcastic remark: "well, it's a good thing you've taken your dating wisdom and really applied it in coming up with such important man-characteristics." Mind you, once the woman began dating a 27 year-old (hooray, evolving ideals!) who appears to be a pretty damn decent guy, she considered calling it all off because he wore Tevas with socks. Granted, Tevas with socks is punishable by death in some Pacific Island countries, but it's not a decision-making criteria in assessing a relationship.

Perhaps we're not dealing with an age issue at all. Perhaps we're looking at an issue of self-targeting torpedo-ism. I'm not a psychologist and I won't pretend to be, but either way, there is an issue and that's one thing I do know about: we men have a lot fewer of them than women...typically because we deal less in the realm of feelings and more in the realm of football and farting. And women don't seem to ever understand this. Nor do we understand their angles. Their frames of reference center on their own worldviews (of course), which happen to be rife with emotional sensors and complexities that we men will never possess or even begin to comprehend.

As they say, "women are from Venus and men are from Mars." Though I must say, there is definitely more cosmic symmetry to the planetary system than the relationship between men and women. At least planets are predictable.